Practical pieces on voice, delivery and nerves — written by Clarke, the coach who teaches this every week, not by a content team.
"I don't know, I'll find out and come back to you by Thursday" is a complete answer. It only sounds weak to the person saying it.
Robert Herjavec has watched roughly eighteen years of pitches. His four observations are all correct, and none of them tell you how. Here is the mechanical version.
The structure works because of the part everyone edits out. Skip what the change cost you and you are not telling a story, you are reading a CV aloud.
You speak for four minutes, we watch it back, and I tell you the truth. Here is exactly what I am listening for, in what order, and what would make me send you somewhere else.
The delay is what damages you, not the news. Say it in the first sentence, before the context, before the caveats, and certainly before the apology.
A board has read your paper or it has not, and either way it does not want you to read it to them. It wants to know what you need and whether you have thought it through.
Junior people stay quiet because they are unsure they are allowed. Senior people stay quiet because anything they say becomes a decision. Those need opposite fixes.
Nobody is short of things to say. They are short of a shape to put them in. Five structures, what each one is for, and the twenty seconds it takes to pick.
They have already read your CV. The presentation exists to find out how you think in front of people, which is why the Q&A matters more than the slides.
Every speaker rushes to the solution, because the solution is the part they are proud of. Offered too early, it sounds like a product looking for a use.
Introverts are not worse at this. They are worse at improvising, which is a different complaint with a different fix, and the fix happens to suit them.
By this point the talk is what it is. There are four things still worth doing and about six that most people do instead, and the difference shows in the first sentence.
A coach reviewing a video about why you need a coach. So let me be more useful than agreeing with it: here is the mechanism, how to judge one, and when you do not need one at all.
The structure is the skeleton. What anyone actually repeats afterwards is an anecdote, and anecdotes have shapes of their own, four of them worth rehearsing.
The format is not a style of speaking. It is a constraint: one idea, defended for the whole talk. Almost everyone who copies it brings three.
Four hundred executives, twenty-odd countries, and a hard disk full of first recordings. Most of what I believed at the start turned out to be wrong in an interesting way.
A London elocution coach who does not teach in rooms, including for clients in Soho or Mayfair. The reasoning, and when to ignore it.
Monotone is not a personality trait. It is four adjustable variables left in the same position for twenty minutes, and all four can be moved on purpose.
Silence is the cheapest tool in speaking and the one people are most frightened of. There are three distinct jobs it does, and most speakers only ever do the first.
Nearly everyone I record runs quicker than they believe. But the useful variable is change of pace, not average pace.
Range is what holds attention, not depth. Pushing your voice down to sound senior costs you the top of your range and usually the authority with it.
The people who cannot be heard at the back are rarely speaking too quietly. They are speaking on the wrong air, and shouting makes it worse.
Eloquent means expressing yourself clearly and persuasively. In a modern meeting that is mostly a matter of subtraction, not of better words.
The practice of speaking clearly enough to be understood the first time. What elocution covers, what it is not, and why the Victorian version of it is dead.
A straight answer to a question people are slightly embarrassed to ask — what elocution covers, what it doesn't, and how to tell whether it's what you need.
Two terms for roughly the same service, with a meaningful difference in what they promise — and one of them promises something no coach should sell.
The mind going blank on stage has a physical cause, and it responds to physical training far better than it responds to being told to relax.
"Presence" is the vaguest word in corporate feedback. Broken into its audible components, it turns out to be four specific and teachable habits.
The work that determines how a media interview goes is almost entirely done beforehand — and most organisations do it during, which is why it goes badly.