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We’re Blushing |
Pat recently received a note from Ron Lewis, an ESI graduate who has made it across the pond and back again! We’ll let Ron take it from here.
"I was promoted to Vice President and Chief Procurement Officer of Coca-Cola Enterprises as well as another company, Coca-Cola Bottlers' Sales and Services, in July of 2005 and spent the next 5 months commuting from London while the rest of the family got moved over.
Just 2 months ago, I was made President and CEO of Coca-Cola Bottlers' Sales & Services (in the US)...I have my first CCB Board meeting as President this week and am preparing for CCE's Board meeting next month. Fun, fun! Great chances to hone my skills I learned at the ESI!!! So claim away, my friend. Yours is the best training course (and much more than a training course) I've ever attended and I keep telling people that."
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What’s Your Nightmare? |
Our first article this month is about presentation nightmares. What’s your nightmare? What do you fear the most about presentations? Do you have an experience to share? Send us a note and we’ll share with the class!
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About Us |
Ty Boyd Executive Learning Systems changes lives by helping lifelong learners hone their natural communication tools.
We work primarily with people at Fortune 1000 companies in the areas of public speaking, presentations skills, personal improvement and leadership development.
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Hello, [firstname]. Most executives I know at one time or another have had presentation nightmares. We’ll talk about that
this time. And we have an excellent article from Tim Connor, plus a note from another friend to pass along, as well.
Do you like the Zipline? If so, help us grow by forwarding this issue using the following link [forwardimage].
Thanks, now let’s get started.
Ty Boyd
ty@tyboyd.com
Presentation Nightmares
Many speakers – including me - have trouble sleeping the night before a big speech. We’re worried about what might go wrong. Those little “fear of failure” demons will try to get the upper hand.
But virtually every true speaking nightmare I’ve ever heard about was due to lack of preparation in some phase of speech planning. Here are a couple of examples I found that help make my point.
One speaker from the UK wanted to surprise a Belgian IT group by presenting in French. He worked on delivering in French for weeks and thought he was knocking it out of the park until they took a break. The manager of the group asked if he would switch back to English. The speaker wanted to know if his French was really that bad. Said the manager, “no, but we’re from the Dutch speaking region of Belgium and we don’t know if you are insulting us or trying too hard.”
In the late 1990s, a speaker was to deliver a PowerPoint presentation to a government agency. The speaker asked if the agency could provide a projector and PowerPoint so it wouldn’t have to be lugged in the airplane. Armed with a floppy disk of the presentation, the speaker turned up only to find a 35mm slide projector. The organizer irritably pointed to an electrical outlet in the corner and said “there is the power point. We do have electricity – we’re not that backward.”
The speakers above are probably still losing sleep over those disasters.
The more preparation and practice I have put in, the better I sleep. Preparation includes knowing as much as possible about the client and the people, being as current as the very day of the presentation. Among other resources, the internet makes this relatively simple.
Second, even though I know the topic, I am not well prepared until I practice (out loud) my presentation several times. You would not want to bet on a football team that hadn’t practiced the plays over and over before the game.
And third, I like to scope out the hall or location of the event. Getting comfortable in the place of presentation is what we call "owning the territory." The more we make that place familiar to us, the more at ease we will be.
Finally, when I am rising to speak, I say to myself, “self, you have done all you can to make this a really good presentation. There’s nothing else you can do now, but do your very best. If this works, that’s great. But, if this audience doesn’t happen to recognize my hard work, “So What??” And then I go out and swing for the fences with all my passion. The best outcome usually follows.
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Maintaining Psychological Debt Is Your Key To Continuous Sales Success.
– By Tim Connor, CSP
If you had a technique for ensuring that people would buy from you again and again or your boss would promote you on your terms not theirs or your competitors would sit around their conference table at midnight, night after night agonizing over how to successfully compete with you when you easily take business away from them it makes it impossible for them to take business away from you – would you be interested? Read on, what I am about to share with you can guarantee your continued success and when you finish reading you will say to yourself, it can’t be that easy? But, I am here to tell you that after using this technique for my entire career that it is.
Would you like people to do business with you because they like you, trust you, owe you, and believe in you or some other very important reason? Each of these has varying degrees of importance and value when trying to secure and retain business in today’s competitive world. The idea I am about to share with you makes all of these inconsequential. So let me get to it.
The most valuable lesson I learned in my early career happened over forty years ago. I was failing in the insurance business - I didn’t sell anything in six months – I’m surprised it took my manager that long to terminate me. But, I’m getting ahead of myself so let me make a very long story short to illustrate the essence of this tremendous career idea.
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