When people participate in Turpin workshops, individual members and teams enjoy a host of secondary benefits beyond greater comfort with their own communication skills. Managers and leaders are often pleasantly surprised by how team meetings become more efficient, leadership skills start to emerge, relationships blossom, and so on. We often hear that teams “Turpinize” their...
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Question: What do you do when delivering a presentation in an entirely inappropriate room for your needs? Recently, I received a couple of questions about this topic. The issues involved are common enough (and at times frustrating enough) to warrant attention. “I’m going to be delivering a presentation in a room twice as wide as it...
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In addition to being a trainer for Turpin, I’ve spent many years teaching communication to undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals. In the course of teaching everything from Composition 101 to complex ideas, I finally hit on one simple goal that can act as a guiding light for everything from emails to keynotes: Make It Easy....
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When people participate in Turpin workshops, individual members and teams enjoy a host of secondary benefits beyond greater comfort with their own communication skills. Managers and leaders are often pleasantly surprised by how team meetings become more efficient, leadership skills start to emerge, relationships blossom, and so on. We often hear that teams “Turpinize” their...
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A wise learner once said, “Sometimes you just have to shift gears.” This advice came from a leader participating in a presentation skills workshop with members of his team. The client was in the financial services industry. Their presentations to clients included a LOT of highly complex, technical information. They faced two challenges. First,...
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We learn a lot from the people we work with. Recently, on the last day of a workshop, one of our learners said that the most important thing he took from the class was that “Anyone can be more effective with time.” When he made this comment, he was talking about pausing long enough to...
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The Turpin tagline—Find your focus. Be yourself. Only better.—is really simple, and we’ve been using it for years. But we keep finding new resonance in it. In this post, I’m going to talk about the “be yourself” part. Recently, we were comparing notes and discovered that we’ve each had a few learners who put on...
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For some business presenters, nervousness is a temporary condition. When they’ve moved past the first few minutes, their nerves seem to float away. For other presenters, nervousness is long-lasting and debilitating. It never goes away, even when the presentation is going well. We’ve heard this described as having an out-of-body experience or experiencing an eleven...
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I recently delivered a workshop for eight very nervous presenters. They were a great group and talked very frankly about their worries and concerns about presenting. Their nervousness stemmed from different things. For example, One of the presenters hated being the center of attention, so speaking to groups increased her anxiety. One was a non-native...
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Not long ago, we were working with a group of highly technical professionals who had recently moved into a sales role. While these folks are excellent in their technical work, their ability to be persuasive when talking with clients was lacking. One of the topics we discussed was the need to lead with benefits. That...
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