Phase One: Getting the Attention of an Audience

The starting point of the programme is Understanding Status. In the first 20 minutes, speakers learn how to Raise their Status. This helps a speaker to:

• Get the full attention of an audience,
• Develop greater presence and put across ideas with authority.
• Keep control of the agenda and situation.

However, mere Authority is not enough. In this first phase, speakers learn how to:

• Modulate their status so they come across as both
• Strong and Warm,
• Authoritative and Approachable.

Phase Two: Keeping the attention of an Audience

The key to this phase is to develop the way each speaker contacts the audience. They are helped to develop a delivery style that varies the contact, helping to make a whole audience feel included. It also results in the speaker articulating arguments with greater clarity. In addition, this Phase shows speakers:

• How to make more effective use of PowerPoint so that the Visual Images genuinely serve the Speaker.
• How to work as part of a Team giving a presentation

Phase Three: Vocal Training

The voice is the most subtle and sophisticated of speaking skills – and the most underused. Speakers learn how to:

• Increase their vocal energy,
• Influence an audience by subtle vocal changes,
• Discover more varied ways of presenting material
• Develop a professional microphone technique.

Phase Four: Managing and Influencing an Audience

This is the most advanced phase. It helps speakers to deal with the most challenging aspects of Presentation:

• How to run Q & A sessions; this includes dealing with disruptive questioners.
• How to deal with audiences that are critical, difficult, inattentive, distracted or even hostile.
• How to make most effective use of a difficult Auditorium.

Presentation Skills & Public Speaking: how you learn

The Training is 90% practical. You learn it by doing it. The theories about the Audience-Speaker relationship that underpin the training are taught through games and role-play not lectures.

Speakers are asked to bring and deliver an excerpt from a prepared presentation. The rest of the group plays the specific audience being addressed. John Abulafia works closely with both the individual speaker and the audience examining the changing relationship between them and reworking the presentation. Each speaker learns from the feedback: the rest of the group learn about the psychology of audiences by being one. Everyone gets a chance to be both speaker and audience.

Notes and exercises are distributed during the course of the training day.
At the end of the course everyone is given a practical, punchy Guide to Addressing an Audience.

CRAFT OF COMMUNICATION offers a wide range of courses in Presentation Skills and Public Speaking:

• For those who are inexperienced in delivering presentations. Speakers are given confidence, a strong skill set and a long term plan to help them carry on developing after the course.
• For experienced speakers who wish to enhance and refine existing skills. They are helped through personal coaching to develop a personal but also highly professional presentation style.
• There are specific workshops designed for women executives who want to strengthen the impact and influence they have on clients, audiences, colleagues and those in senior positions.
• There are specially designed courses for those who do not have English as their first language.
• Most of these are one-day workshops. However a two-day workshop is available in which speakers are helped with the content and style of their presentation. The second day comprises a rehearsal of the whole presentation including slides.