Good presentation skills and public speaking require multitude of skills; creativity, storytelling, creative slide design, engaging attitude, emotional content and so on. Apart from good slide design, it is also important for presenters to focus on delivery skills to properly showcase what they show in the slides.

The modern practice of delivering presentations strongly encourages the use of images in slides. Hence, a presenter must be capable of showing an image and then deliver a key related message while the image is shown.

This exercise helps delegates to focus on this specific area and practice the skill.

In our competitive world, we need to present ourselves as best as we can to stand out from the crowd. Suppose someone asks you what you do? What would you say? Suppose you have about 30 seconds to say something or to present a pitch? What would your pitch contain? Which areas would you pay attention to most? How long should be your pitch in number of words used?

This exercise is designed to helps delegates to come up with a pitch and refine it several times to make it near perfect.

This is quick acting exercise usually used to get delegates to familiarise with space and movement. You can also use it as a fun energizer.

The ability to act allows you to adopt different roles as you see fit. To be good at emotional intelligence, it is very important to understand emotions and be able to express appropriate emotions when needed, perhaps to sympathise with others or establish rapport.

We always recognise actors as those who are capable in presenting a range of emotions in their roles from sadness to happiness to anger. They seem to be able to switch from one emotion to the next at ease, while their facial expression shows every tiny detail for that emotion. How do they do it?

This exercise is based on classic acting exercises used in acting schools to increase students’ sensory awareness. Rather than asking students to cry, or to show some strong emotion, they are encouraged to think of all the sensory information present in any typical everyday activity. By becoming more aware of these sensory data, they can learn to improvise and imitate down to the tiniest detail.

For best results, you may need to give a pre-course assignment to delegates so they can prepare and rehearse for their acting which takes place during the course.

This is a useful exercise in acting. Use this exercise to help people adopt certain roles or learn how to imitate target behaviours. Acting and understanding how an ideal role feels like can help delegates to get to those targets. For example, being able to act like a manager can significantly help people to eventually become a manager. Not only acting like a manager helps the person to see what it takes to be a manager, others will start to respond appropriately and will be more receptive when that person is elevated to the managerial level.

This exercise helps with various useful roles provided as mission cards. You can use the exercise as a template for other useful roles or choose based on the content of your course.

This fun exercise generates a lot of laugh and is very effective in putting participants in a good mood especially after a long training session. Although designed as a communication exercise, it can easily be used as a team building exercise or energiser.

This fun activity encourages participants to get to know each other better and interact more with their team mates especially those they don’t usually work or socialise with. This exercise is most suitable in the beginning of the training session or after lunch.

When conducting meetings and interacting with other people, your body language can become a critical part of your communication and may even come to define your success or failure.

There are a number of simple yet powerful strategies which can make your encounters more productive and effective. If you are an office worker, you can use these strategies to have an edge over your colleague, client or even your boss. If you are a trainer you can use them to make your training more effective and memorable. These body language strategies are as follows...

Instructional methods can be divided into one-way and two-way methods. In the one-way method, the direction of the information is from the instructor to the audience. In the two-way method, information is exchanged in both ways. These methods are also known as content-centred or learner-centred activity. In practice, lectures are generally one-way and training courses are two-way.

The methods in each style are quite different but they both have their uses. Lectures are suitable for a large audience, where interaction is not possible or time consuming. Even though lectures are very useful as a teaching method, delivering a training course in the form of a lecture is not recommended as the training session could become boring and unproductive. This article explores the one-way instructional method and suggests solutions to make the experience more interactive or memorable without losing the benefits of a lecturing activity.

This is another Interactive Pause exercise used during a lecture or talk to help the participants to quickly go over the content they have just been thought and record the key points. These kinds of exercises encourage participation in learning environments where you are forced to use a one-way instructional method such as lecturing.

This activity is useful as an add-on to lectures, talks or presentations to make them more interactive and memorable. An interactive pause used during or after a lecture stops the current flow of content and allows the audience to do something about what they have just been told. This helps them to go over the content quickly and somewhat participate before the speaker can move on. This exercise is an example of such interactive pause delivered at the end of a lecture or a talk.

Just about everybody is involved in either teaching or learning or both. If you are a trainer, your job is highly biased towards the teaching side which means you need to understand how to train your delegates in the shortest amount of time and get maximum results. This requires a deep understanding of how learning and memory works in humans. Otherwise you could easily be wasting your time as your knowledge will not ‘sink’ into the minds of your delegates.

In this article you will be introduced to a set of core features of our short and long term memory and understand its direct impact on training which you can take advantage of to increase retention and learning.

For many people public speaking doesn’t come naturally and they may develop a fear largely because of the way the society puts pressure on people who are in the spotlight. However, public speaking is a skill and like any other skill it can be learned.

If you are afraid of something, the best way to get rid of it is to face it. If you face it in a controlled environment where there will be no damage to you or your reputation, you can experiment and learn quickly.

This excellent exercise helps the delegates to face one of the greatest fears a public speaker may have and overcome it.

This is an easy and effective exercise which helps delegates to recognise how often they use quirks, slangs or incorrect sentences in their everyday communications.