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Presentation Skills Training: What Separates The Best From The Rest?

Even experienced presenters who have attended a presentation skills training taught by well-known speakers' clubs and associations tend to be awful presenters.

Why is this?

Simply because they "circle the wagons" and then look to each other for advice and instruction which creates a kind of inbreeding effect.

Those presentation skills trainings simply breed mediocrity at best.

Sure, they are able to deliver an acceptable speech and according to their arbitrary rules of "what makes a great speaker" they do all the right things: they pause dramatically, use the stage in prescribed (and predictable) ways, and their gestures are predictable as well.

Bo-ring!

Worse, those presentations skills trainings preach an outdated mode of speaking: be a great speaker, and you'll command great speaking fees.

Baloney!

This is a fantasy at best and delusional at worst. I feel sorry for anyone taking a presentation skills training with the hope of being a "highly paid fee-based speaker".

What presentation skills training should really do for you, is not make you "a great speaker" - rather, they should help you to reach your goal, which is likely knowing how to promote your business, sell from the stage, generate leads and convert those leads into customers, and other measurable results.

Okay, I'll admit that a presentation skills training surely should teach you how to be a good presenter, or even a great speaker, but that is not enough by itself.

And the sooner you realize that, the better off you will be.

I really hate to see you out there barking up all the wrong trees and not getting anywhere with your speaking.

The best reason to take a presentation skills training, in my not so humble opinion, is to:

• Further your career

• Advance in your profession

• Generate leads and prospects

• Convert leads and prospects into paying customers

• Build credibility

• Make sales

• Promote your business, product, service, cause or issue.

Taking a presentation skills training in order to be a great speaker and get standing ovations is a complete waste of your time and money!

Standing ovations may make you feel all warm and fuzzy, but they do not pay the bills.