I was recently speaking to the Malaysian Association of Professional Speakers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on the topic of ‘Professionalism’; practice these techniques and soon you will be speaking like a professional.

Footnote: Experienced NLP practitioners will recognise the embedded frames and state inductions in this video.

It is a bit like if you were in a boat and have set your course, but the boat springs a leak and you spend your whole time bailing water and have no time to steer.

William Bridges created a model of change and transition that is highly relevant in today’s financial readjustment. When the collapse of Lehman Brothers started the domino effect of the global crisis, many of us would have experienced first shock, then denial, anger and fear. If you lost money or a job you might then experience grief, frustration, confusion, stress and loss of control.

As an executive coach and leadership consultant I have often witnessed this spiraling down into paralysis that Bridges calls the ‘neutral zone’. Symptoms of the neutral zone include ambiguity, anxiety and the absence of motivation. The cure for this paralysis is a new vision of what is possible.

Einstein said that, “A problem cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created the problem.” When in the neutral zone, we are in a dark place and our ability to think optimistically and see possibilities is severely limited. What is required is a little magic, the magic of imagination. All of human achievement started with imagination, from running a mile in under 4 minutes, to imagining what it would be like on the top of Mount Everest to imagining walking on the surface of the moon.

A vision will inspire, motivate and engender creativity and it starts with using imagination to travel to the future when things will be better. The Executive who asks him/herself, “What is possible?” “What will we be doing when things are better?” To do achieve this we must take time to stop bailing the water in the boat and look to the shore. Most executives find this extremely difficult as they leave themselves little or no time to stop, step back and think strategically.

With a new vision of where you are going, you and your people will become more optimistic, think creatively and start planning actions that will move you towards success.

It was no surprise that Barack Obama beat John McCain; Dr Martin Seligman in his book ‘Learned Optimism’ talks about his analysis of US elections based on the number of positive or optimistic comments made by the candidates. Obama clearly offered a more optimistic view of the future and thus captured the popular vote.

Obama is being called a transformational leader because he:

1. Created a vision that inspired the American voters (and the world) to believe that there were new possibilities.

2. Stimulates people to think, to re-examine their ideas and find creative alternatives. Such an environment breeds imagination and innovation.

3. Treats people as individuals making people feel valued and encouraging them to contribute. He recognizes that people have unique talents, strengths and weakness and allowing for these differences without judgment.

The transformational leader must have what I like to call ‘realistic optimism’ which is a practical and pragmatic approach that is ideally suited to the current climate. Realistic optimism is the mindset that we can make the best of any circumstance; it is the acceptance that bad things do happen but with a healthy self-esteem and the confidence in our abilities we can overcome adversity, learn from the situation and be even better for the experience.

Optimism without right actions and following sound principles will not be enough. Lehman Brothers failed because of over-optimism and the senior management not being in alignment with their own company’s vision and values.

In the current climate it is tempting to focus on immediate need and make tactical rather than strategic decisions; I urge you to step back for a moment, get in touch with your personal or company vision and ask yourself, “Is this decision the right one for the long term?”

Andrew Bryant is the Director of Self Leadership International and is based in Singapore but travels extensively as an executive coach and leadership consultant.

A lack of effective presentation skills (public speaking) will seriously harm your career prospects. Whether you are starting out in a company or are the CEO, you will be judged on your ability to present ideas in way that engage the audience.

But fear not! The ability to present or speak well is within everyone’s grasp. I have coached the most boring of CEO’s and the most timid of junior staff to speak and present with impact.

Firstly, realize that we live in a multi-sensory interactive world and your audience will respond warmly if you remember this. So an effective presentation in the 21st century is NOT just talking AT your audience, nor is it ‘DEATH by POWERPOINT’.

My first rule of effective presentations is “NO Engagement NO Interest.”

This is plainly intuitive, if you have sat through a boring presentation, your interest will first wain then wander. So the question is, “how to get engagement?”

The easiest way to create engagement is to create involvement. Your audience is not a passive receptor of your message; they are a dynamic part of it. Right at the beginning of your presentation, pose a question or use a quick activity that causes the audience to think about and feel the importance of your message.

The question or activity, must ‘pace’ the audiences current reality. If I am presenting to a group that has been told, “You HAVE to be there” I might ask “What would you rather be doing rather than be at this presentation?” Or I might ask the audience to show their partner, using body language, how they feel about an issue related to my presentation topic.

Having created some engagement through involvement we can link this to the subject of the presentation like this, “Realising you think or feel ‘X’ about ‘Y’ let’s talk about ….”

My second rule of presentation skills is, “Confidence + Competence.”

I have seen competent people lack confidence in presenting and confident people lack competence (nothing is as dangerous as a confident fool!).

When coaching people to feel confident to present well, I use the NLP technique of finding a trigger of something you are already confident doing such as boiling an egg, riding a bike etc. and amplifying this feeling of confidence so that you can access this feeling in your mind and body before presenting. With some rehearsal it is possible to feel confident and apply this confidence to the act of presenting. For those with an actual fear of presenting click here. It is a catch 22 that we must feel some confidence to attempt to present well and only when we do this will we gain the competence; and with competence comes confidence!

An effective presenter is also competent in the subject matter of their presentation. Sometimes this just means you are competent to share your perspective on a limited piece of information. My daughter started a playschool drama class when she was just 18 months old. One of the first things they were taught was to confidently and competently respond to the question, “what’s your name?” She is now 3 years old and is competent to speak on a number of topics including, Barbie and the movie ‘Mama Mia’.

If you must present, learn everything you can about the subject and Prepare, Prepare, Prepare. You may only speak about 2% of what you know but your competence will show when you can make the complex simple.

This brings me to my third rule, “Make it Sticky”

People will only remember one or two or three points from your presentation, so plan your presentation so that those 2-3 points will stick with them. Techniques for making a point stick include:

• Repetition – remember kinder garden and repeating your ABC’s over and over.

• Gestures or Actions – get the knowledge from the mind into the body with a powerful physical trigger.

• Visuals or Video – we live in a multimedia world so use powerful graphic or short videos to create a visual link to your sticky points.

• Humor – if you can make them laugh you light up their brain with feel good chemicals (endorphins) and increase retention.

• KISS – keep it super simple is an acronym and acronyms can be great memory triggers.

• Summarise – tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you told them.

So in Summary, here are my 3 Rules for Effective Presentation Skills

1. No engagement = No interest
2. Confidence + Competence
3. Make it ‘Sticky’

And for those of you who want to know more I am available for coaching and training in how to create powerful and persuasive presentations in Singapore and Australasia and we have specialist trainers on how to handle the media.

Fear is a part of our every day lives and to achieve Self Leadership we must understand and work with our fears so that they do not prevent us achieving our objectives.

Or as the bard,  William Shakespeare, put it, “Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we might win, by fearing to attempt”.

Fear takes many forms and can vary in intensity from a mild discomfort to a paralysing phobia. You may be surprised to realise that most people have some type of fear that is preventing them reaching their full potential in life or business.

Fear of… flying, public speaking, meeting people, commitment, success, failure, cold calling, criticism, ill health, death, closed places, confrontation, snakes, spiders…etc. etc.

Fear can a survival mechanism with the purpose of prevent us from engaging in dangerous activities, but overdone it can be extremely limiting.

With the Self Leadership we can ‘step back’ from our fears and question whether our fears are real and valid or blown up out of proportion; and if our fears fall in the latter category – to overcome them.

It is worth considering that FEAR is an acronym for…
False Evidence Appearing Real.

NLP and Neuro Semantics teach us that we react not to reality itself but to our mental representation of reality. Our fear is a reaction to the movies we play in our mind about past and future events.

I was once  giving a training on presentation skills when one, otherwise successful bank vice president told me she had cold sweats for three days before each presentation. I asked her what mental movies she created when she thought about a training – “Well first I see all the people staring at me without blinking and I see their faces getting bigger and closer to me and I hear a voice inside my head saying – you are going to freeze, you are going to stuff up”. That certainly sounded like a horror movie to me, no wonder she is afraid to present.

In this case the fear was out of proportion to the risk. Presentations aren’t life threatening. They can be career threatening if you don’t prepare and speak with confidence and in this case our bank VP was robbing herself of confidence.

If you change your mental movies you change your reactions. To do this you need to be able to step back from the movie and realise it isn’t real.

There is a Moorish proverb that says, “He who is afraid of a thing gives it power over him.”

Have you ever hired a video or DVD and then realised that it was a really bad film? Would you hire it and play it again? Of course not! Why is it then that when we have a bad experience we play that mental movie over and over and over again?

With this current financial crisis are you playing horror movies of how bad things are? Or are you playing mental movies of how to best position yourself and your company for future success?

To de-power an unresourceful mental movie you need to step back from it and create distance so that you realise it’s only a movie. In addition if you change you movie to black and white you will find it has less power over you. You did know that you could change the quality of your internal movies – didn’t you? Editing our internal movies gives us power over our states of mind (self leadership).

If you would like to erase a movie that has been playing over and over, follow these steps.

1. Start with a black and white, still frame that just precedes the start of your ‘fear’ movie.

2. With the movie in black and white and you distanced from it (as if you are in the projection booth), run the movie to the end, and keep on running it until you reach a pleasant scene (this might be quite some time after the original movie).

3. Step into the pleaseant scene, fully experience it.

4. Now run the movie backwards to the first still frame. It helps if you can make the whirring sound of a video recorder being fast rewound.

5. Step back into the pleasant scene and rewind the movie 5 or 6 more times.

This process has the effect of scrambling your neural association to this movie and frees you to make new meanings in your mind for what is empowering for you.

This is an abbreviated description of the fast phobia cure that is taught in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and Neuro-Semantic (NS) practitioner trainings. If you know a coach who is trained in NLP or NeuroSemantics you can also ask them to run this pattern with you.

“Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.”

Realising that there is a way to release you fears, large or small, is now the time to let them go?

’’Come to the edge,’’ He said.
They said, ’’We are afraid.’’
’’Come to the edge,’’ He said.
They came. He pushed them… and they flew.

- Guillaume Apollinaire