My Blogposts — Mel Sherwood

Helping business leaders and teams to communicate with confidence for over 10 years!

presenting

25 Questions You Must Ask Before Creating Your Next Presentation

25 Questions You Must Ask Before Creating Your Next Presentation

Often when people are asked to deliver a speech or a presentation, they will start their preparation with the question “What do I want to say?” But this is the completely wrong place to begin. Here's what to do instead...

11 Ways to Kill Your Credibility as a Presenter

11 Ways to Kill Your Credibility as a Presenter

During a three day conference in London I had the opportunity to watch and listen to some incredibly charismatic and engaging presenters. Amongst them all, however, there was one presenter that stood out for all the wrong reasons and she has inspired this post. Find out what this speaker did to kill her credibility and caused me to walk out of her presentation...

9 Public Speaking Lessons from the Theatre

9 Public Speaking Lessons from the Theatre

If you’ve been reading my posts for a while you might have gathered that I love the theatre and in particular the lessons we can learn from the theatre to enhance our public speaking. Whether you like it or not, each time you speak in public it is a performance. Here are some of the areas of performance that presenters sometimes overlook...

Secrets of a Public Speaking World Champion

Secrets of a Public Speaking World Champion

This week I had the opportunity to attend a workshop with the Toastmasters International 2014 World Champion of Public Speaking, Dananjaya Hettiarachchi (‘Dan’ for short). He shared various tips on preparation, content and delivery and a few secrets about how he beat 33,000 other speakers from 120 countries to win the world title. Here is an overview...

How to Take Your Presentations From Good to Great

How to Take Your Presentations From Good to Great

During a recent Professional Speaking Association event Patricia Fripp, award-winning keynote speaker, business presentation expert, sales presentation skills trainer and in-demand speech coach, put presentations under the microscope and offered advice for how to make a good presentation great. Here is an overview of her top tips...

What to Wear When Presenting

What to Wear When Presenting

Whether we like it or not, people are making judgements about us from the moment they first see us. As the saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a great first impression. Therefore, when we are speaking in public it is crucial to think about the image we are presenting as this can have an effect on how the audience perceives us and receives our message...

Dos and Don’ts for Pitching Competitions (and other important presentations)

Dos and Don’ts for Pitching Competitions  (and other important presentations)

Pitching competitions are a great opportunity for companies to raise funding and support to grow their business, but in order to win you need to be able to stand out from the competition. Based on what I observed at a Scottish EDGE fund final, here is a list of dos and don’ts to help your next presentation or pitch stand out...

9 Attention Grabbing Ways to Open a Presentation

9 Attention Grabbing Ways to Open a Presentation

During the first 30-60 seconds of your presentation, your audience will decide whether they like you and are interested in listening to what you have to say. It’s a very short time to draw people in and it’s important to ensure that you don’t waste those first few precious moments to effectively engage them so here are 9 attention grabbing ways to open your presentation...

5 Ways to Energise Your Presentation

5 Ways to Energise Your Presentation

If you think about speakers who really connect and truly engage an audience, there’s a good chance it will be those who bring an authentic energy, enthusiasm and excitement to their presentations. These qualities are infectious and they enable speakers to bring their audience on a journey with them. But how do you inject energy into your presentation? Here are five ways to infuse your talk with a liveliness that will have your audience captivated...

7 Lessons Public Speakers Can Learn From Pantomime Actors

7 Lessons Public Speakers Can Learn From Pantomime Actors

Despite pantomime being a completely different form of communication to public speaking, as speakers we can learn a lot of lessons from this style of entertainment. Incorporate these seven lessons when preparing and delivering your next speech to fully engage your audience...

Tips for Presenting to Large Audiences

Tips for Presenting to Large Audiences

Speaking to a large audience is a privilege and an honour but it has additional challenges that you need to be aware of in order to deliver your message. In this post I share what to do (and not to do) when presenting to large numbers of people...

The Moment Before...

The Moment Before...

Just like an athlete warms up before a sporting event, so should you warm up before any presentation or public speaking engagement. In this post I share a variety of techniques to prepare your mind, voice, body and more so that you can manage your nerves and deliver the best possible speech or presentation...

5 Ways to Develop Stage Presence

5 Ways to Develop Stage Presence

This week I have had the pleasure of staying at a holiday resort where the employees put on a show for guests most evenings. A few of them had incredible stage presence and it got me thinking about what makes someone stand out from the crowd when in front of an audience and how we can use this to engage our audience and enhance our message when public speaking...