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Presentation skills training Edinburgh: building your confidence

Presentation skills training can unlock the key to your potential.

A new job you’ve always craved.

The promotion you fully deserve.

Winning your colleagues onside with a new initiative.

Beating your competitors to a new customer on the market.

The problem

Here’s the thing: who ever taught us how to make a presentation?

We pick up speech from our parents.

How to write English from our school teachers.

How to play guitar from YouTube.

But communication? We simply pick up bad habits from those around us.

Best then to invest in a presentation skills training course in Edinburgh that gives you the confidence to say what you mean and mean what you say.

How to influence others

I ran a session in Leith, Edinburgh, at the end of last year.

At the start, as always, I asked what everyone wanted to learn from the course.

“How to speak with authority”
“How to sound like you know what you’re talking about”
“Learn how to speak without stumbling”
“How to answer questions confidently”

It struck me that everyone seemed to care a lot about what their audience thought of them.

Finally, we heard:

“How to influence others through my presentations and communication”

And that’s exactly how we’d ask you to consider your presentation style.

Few people in your audience will care how comfortable you look, or whether you stumble.

They care what’s in it for them.

So start by communicating your audience’s motivation, and use every other moment to listen, influence or persuade.

Then what?

So you’ve communicated the audience benefit early.

Now make sure you’ve prioritised the rest of the points.

If you’re there to talk about a project timeline, cost and outcomes, which is most important?

Start there.

Then move on to the other points, making the presentation less relevant as you go.

Eventually, you’ll realise the next section is irrelevant, which is where you stop.

Make sure you finish with a clear Call to Action: what you’d like your audience to do next:

“Come and see me afterwards – my name’s Andy.”
“Follow us on Instagram.”
“We’re meeting 0900 Saturday on Portobello Beach – be sure to join us.”

Tackle false modesty

Another thing we’ll discuss on a presentation skills course in Edinburgh is the need to remove weak language.

Words like ‘try’, ‘hope’, ‘maybe’ and ‘sort of’.

That means the following upgrades:

“I’ll try and get that to you by the end of the week”

That becomes:

“I’ll get that to you by Monday.”

How about:

“Hopefully you enjoyed that”

We turn that into:

“I trust you enjoyed that.”

Keep being ‘Scottish’ in that you work hard, have a good sense of humour and look out for others.

But let’s drop the false modesty and be happy to talk about our success.