Performing with presence
Standing before an audience and talking makes many of us feel self-conscious, inadequate or sometimes downright sick.
Which is why Maynard Leigh designed Performing With Presence (PWP), its two-day learning event that helps everyone, not just performers or extroverts, give more confident, persuasive, and authentic presentations.
Constantly refined over seventeen years PWP uses a combination of engrossing exercises, skilled, supportive leaders and a lot of practice and feedback. It is almost certainly one the UK’s best and longest running courses of its kind.
Apart from the fact that it obviously works, an important reason for its longevity is its ability to launch people into a new way of looking at presenting.
Equally important, it also empowers them to take what they’ve learned back into their business lives.
Over the years, the transforming powers of Performing With Presence have worked for many different people and organisations.
Sanofi-Aventis
The clinical departments at pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis frequently present information about drug products to doctors with far more knowledge in that therapeutic area than they have.
According to the company’s training manager the staff often become nervous and wooden and ‘just stand there and read from the slides’.
So an important use of the workshop by this company has therefore been to help people to become more assertive and have more faith in what that they already know.
'The feedback has been fantastic', says the training manager who now regularly hears of presentations being more colourful, confident and memorable.
Carphone Warehouse
CPW came to Maynard Leigh seeking a way to help its sales managers make a larger, more memorable impact when presenting at the bigger sales conferences.
Already able and good communicators, their presenters needed Performing With Presence for its ability to stretch people to the next level.
'It was fantastic,' says retail sales director Ed Bembridge, who attended the course over a year ago. 'It has made me much more confident and the content of my presentations has improved. The interactive approach, the watching yourself, the constant practice is perfect.'
Since the workshop Ed has presented confidently in front of a thousand people. Seeing the effect, his boss now sends more people on Performing With Presence events to find out what happens to them too!
Government Agency
The social research department of this government agency chose Maynard Leigh for its key ability to help people communicate more authentically and personally.
Everyday the department must explain complicated information to non-specialists. It uses PWP to support the department’s staff in presenting this information in the most accessible and engaging way possible.
The agency comments: 'All three of the courses we’ve run received very good feedback’ ‘People are trying out more creative and innovative ways of presenting and they’re getting more of a sense of their own analytic voices'.
For this client, Performing With Presence supports people from an academic, intellectual background bridge the difficult communication divide between specialists and the non-specialists who need their help.
And more
Clients who regularly use the workshop to transform their presentation cultures include the games giant, Electronic Arts, the holding company Aviva, who own Norwich Union, and the global satellite firm, SES Astra.
Michael Maynard, a director and co-creator of PWP explains its extraordinary longevity stems from the lack of rules.
'Instead there are only a memorable set of principles around which the learning occurs. So no course is ever the same because each exercise is informed, not simply by what the leader says, but by what the individuals on that course bring through their responses and personal concerns.'
This great flexibility allows this long running hit to stay as fresh and as relevant to the concerns of participants as when it was first invented.
So what exactly happens on this flagship programme? If you attend, expect to get up many times during the two days to practise all kinds of different styles and approaches.
There are multiple forms of feedback from: the leader, a DVD recording of your performance on your own private disk, and fellow participants.
Attending the course you will probably hear more about how you come across than at any other time in your life. This provides a reality check, giving you priceless information about yourself.
