Powerful Presenting For Leaders

David appeared on the TV show, The Weakest Link, many years ago. He got through to the final three but astonishingly, one of the other two contestants didn't realise that the strategy that would WIN her the money in the final would not be the one that had got her TO the final.

In this episode, David recounts the amazing experience and how leaders need to understand that the style of speaking they do when they are on their way TO the top is not the type of presenting they need to do when they GET to the top.

In business, everyone brags about the key elements that make them stand out.

In David's case, he is forever going on about appearing on Oprah, having a #1 bestselling book and breaking a Guinness record.

But sadly, when leaders speak, their humility means they pass over these crucial points too quickly in their talks.

In this episode, David explains how to make your credibility work for you and most importantly, when to tell the audience.

David heard the title to this podcast in a newsletter and thought it very apt for his progress through his speaking career.

In this episode, he explains why presentation skills progress only happens when we truly push ourselves out of our comfort zone, as cliched as that sounds.

David also talks about the difference between who we are and who we are becoming through the concept of the Hegelian dialectic and most importantly, how this applies to leaders when they present.

In this episode, David goes through the top 10 lessons he has learned about presenting in 2021.

This is from the perspective of his own speaking having presented in person and remotely in over 50 countries.

And from his perspective as a presentation skills coach having prepared many CEOs for big talks.

As a presentation skills coach for leaders, David gets to work on specific talks with real material and over the years, he has worked on every kind of talk imaginable. He is not easily shocked or surprised.

But recently, he got a call from a CEO doing a simple long service awards ceremony and wanted some advice. There was an unusual and devastating twist to the presentation.

In this episode, David explains how it is possible to reframe the most difficult of talks but that it is also essential to always address the elephant in the room.

Last week, David did two very different talks. Both had a really positive outcome but both also had polar opposite starts.

The first talk started with a lot of love for David in the room. Welcoming, engaging and fun.

The second talk, two days later, started at sub zero. The audience was ice cold.

The only difference between the two was the pre-frame.

In this episode, David explains how to get your audience off to a flying start with a cracking pre-frame.

PLEASE NOTE: This episode talks very briefly about the abuse that David received at the hands of his mother and bizarrely, how it got him a major book deal resulting in a #1 bestselling book.

David has just received a batch of his new books from the printers and while he could use them, there is just enough wrong with the printing for him to not be able to do so.

In this episode, David explains how you don't have to mis-match your message to the audience by much for it to get totally lost.

David recently coached a guy going for a major job interview. The company made various stipulations.

David told his client to ignore them and do something different.

In this episode, he explains how, in a competitive environment, it is critical to do something different to what everyone else is doing.

You'd think that after 25 years of speaking, David would be drilled in the art of everything speaking, including the pre-presentation preparation, maybe the most important thing of all.

In this episode, David explains how he was thought he was being the guest of honour at a ceremony only to be introduced as the speaker and have to produce a 20 min presentation 5 seconds later.

If only he had prepared better!

Marginal gains has been around for many a year now and is de rigeur in sport.

But the same can definitely be applied in presentation skills.

In this episode, David explains how applying marginal gains to get a different pillow made a massive difference to his speaking.

JK Rowling used to grab spare minutes while her baby was asleep to write Harry Potter when she was a single Mum.

Jeffrey Archer writes from his home in Mallorca from a purpose-built writing room overlooking the Bay of Palma with no distractions.

Which is best? Both.

In this episode, David explains how to manage the process of writing a presentation whether it is all in one go or piecemeal. 

Managing interruptions is where every leader earns their presentation stripes.

Being able to handle hecklers (rare but happens), disruptors (less rare), objectors (relatively common) and people interrupting with questions (very common) is difficult.

Yet, it is one of the areas that leaders almost never prepare for.

In this episode, David shares how he got some weird and wonderful interruptions from students in a recent schools tour.

When leaders present, they fret over a ton of stuff like their voice projection, whether their slides are formatted properly and the engagement level of the audience.

Question is - should they be fretting over this stuff?

Answer - yes!

But the challenge I have seen with leaders is that in focussing solely on all these elements, they lose sight of the REAL reason they are presenting at all.

In this episode, David explains how this was brought home to him recently in a school he was speaking at when a student asked the question that is the title of this podcast.

And he also shares what he said in reply.

Information is cheap as chips. It is a commodity that we value little because of how easy it is to come by.

Delivering information makes you look cheap as chips.

What is valuable is INTERPRETING information.

In this episode, David explains how, as a leader, you should let others deliver information about sales, products, acquisitions, etc. Your job is to float over the top scooping that information up, interpreting it and showing what it MEANS. 

When your words are always the same, they have an equal value and that value is zero.

But the question is this - how far are you prepared to go to make your words valuable?

David did a talk recently where he pushed the attendees so hard that he 'lost' two of them. 

In this episode, David goes through why he did it and whether the price he paid was worth it.

David is launching an online business and best practice is to launch fast, fail fast and adapt. But not David. Nope, he has been spending too much time making all his material perfect.

In this episode, David explains how and why the best way to quickly improve your speaking is to drop perfect.

Get it done, get it delivered, get the feedback and feed that back into v2.0 of your speech.

David did a LinkedIn post on his bodybuilding recently and got ten times the usual number of views. Ten times!

A quick flick back through his feed shows that this is the usual response.

On the one hand, it is annoying that all the great business content he posts does not receive the same views but at the same time, he now knows what people are interested in.

In this episode, he explains how to use what people want to get and maintain their attention when you present.

David loves watching other people who have to stand up and deliver to a live audience for a living.

Last week, he saw Jimmy Carr, a stand up comedian in the UK, do 2 hours of material and he was sensational.

David loved the entertainment but he also popped on his speaker and presentation skills coach hat to learn from what he saw.

In this episode, he shares the lessons he learned about delivery, platform mechanics and even the use of technology.

Mark Cowgill is a remarkable guy. He is a Director and Co-Founder of Exa Networks in Bradford and he booked David to do presentation skills coaching for him and his team in 2019/20.

David asked Mark to give him a video testimonial once the lockdown dust had lifted. What transpired was a 90 minute chat between two business colleagues who have a shared passion for and understanding of the astonishing power of a presentation.

In this extended podcast episode, Mark and David talk about everything presenting in relation to being a leader.

- how every time he speaks, it is a presentation

- how he and his team have made more money by improving their presentation skills

- how it has 'fundamentally changed his life'

- and much, much more

In 2009, a client booked David to go to Aspen to teach his kids memory and exam techniques. While there, he got the chance to speak to a teacher in the local school. He was utterly shocked at their process to help underperforming students. Problem is, David sees leaders who are underperforming with their presentation skills doing exactly the same thing.

In this episode, David shares what he learned on that amazing trip and how you can avoid doing the same on your way to becoming a presentation rockstar.