How to be engaging when meeting clients online—the basics of 1:1 on a virtual platform

Register for this free event online: 23 March 11:00 Is this you? #workingfromhome for a week now. Comms sorted. Platform installed (Zoom Video Communications, Microsoft Teams etc). Ready to continue communicating professionally with your clients. Or are you? Yes, you’ve viewed the tech tutorial, but how do you appear on screen? How do you want […]

Breath Leadership 3: breathing on your audience…

So, what effect does taking a good breath have on you? Perhaps more importantly, what effect does it have on your audience? For you as the speaker, this is what happens when you start with a good breath: When you breathe deeply, you are making fuller use of your diaphragm, which is a dome-shaped muscle […]

Breath Leadership 2: exercise is good for you!

How do you breathe? Or rather, how do you breathe when you are under pressure? How do you breathe when you arrive at the point in the room where you have to stand, have to face the audience, have to speak? If at any point in your past you have been involved in amateur singing, […]

Breath Leadership 1 – look out for that sabre tooth tiger…

You’ve been there; you know the feeling. You are in your meeting, at your event. You’re about to speak. Not just speak, but stand up and speak, in public. Public speaking. Tension rising, temperature rising, pace of breathing rising. Now breathing short and shallow. Heading towards a sense of panic… Why does this happen? What […]

“It’s not you, it’s me” – Why business presentations can fail…

To put it bluntly, your audience is not remotely interested in you. In what you can do for them, yes, but not in you. Abandon the oft excruciating ‘darling’ suffix from “It’s not you, it’s me” and we’ve segued from classic failed relationship to classic failed business presentation, a topic that has cropped up several […]

Wine for the weekend?

One of the joys of living where there was once an orchard is inheriting a vine, about which I know very little other than it now occupies a considerable amount of the fence ‘twixt us and our neighbours. The late sunshine this Autumn seems to have produced a bumper crop of grapes! Left to their […]

The power of breathing!

How can something as simple as breathing have such a dramatic effect on the initial impression you make on your audience? Let’s take a look, and use some practical, day-to-day examples. Have you ever had to stand up to speak at an ‘occasion’? Perhaps you needed to speak a few words at a party, or […]