“Potential Energy”
If you type “Presentation Skills” into a search engine, you will find links to millions of pages. Begin to explore these pages, and you will find a wealth of excellent advice that can help make presentations better. Many will cite aspects such as a comfortable speaking pace, making good eye contact, using appropriate gestures and adopting open body language. Undoubtedly this is all good advice, but whilst most websites (and indeed, many workshops) are very good at telling you what to do, they mostly fail to address how to actually do it.
This is where Potential Energy is different. Available as a two‐day course for eight participants, or a three-hour interactive workshop for as many attendees as can be accommodated. Potential Energy focuses on how presenters build relationships with their audiences and use their internal and external resources to create impact. Requiring some safe group participation, it strips away many of the myths that surround public speaking. By exploring and exposing what we do intellectually, emotionally and physically when we communicate effectively, the course brings to life the fundamental principles of live communication, illustrates in a practical way how we naturally and consistently fulfill them, and leaves attendees with memorable concepts and practical exercises with which to approach presentations in the future; be they the next day, month or year.
The seminar is designed as an energizing and accessible session often delivered in conjunction with its companion courses about presentation preparation (In the Wings), confidence (An Impostor Calls) or vocal control (Specific Heat Capacity). Whilst the two-day course provides a more detailed exploration of the landscape of presenting as well as evidence based feedback through use of video recordings. Any further content will be in direct response to concerns articulated or feedback received by attendees during the course. It should be noted that the course and workshop discuss the behaviours and decisions required of an outstanding performance, as I firmly believe that presenting is not a skill to be developed, rather a series of choices to be made.
Potential Energy in any of its forms is an event to be experienced and individualised rather than a collection of structured data to be absorbed and reproduced. I believe the former offers a setting in which attendees can choose to identify their own route to greater impact. The latter, regardless of its effectiveness, is more readily, cheaply and instantly available on the Internet.
It should be noted that Potential Energy focuses solely on the mechanisms by which people communicate ideas to audiences of two or more people and does not distinguish between employment sectors or levels of experience.
