EP 104: Confidently Presenting with Meredith Grundei

https://www.yourcyberpath.com/104/

In this episode, our awesome host Jason Dion is back again with another episode of the Your Cyber Path podcast. This time, he’s accompanied by an amazing guest, Meridith Grundei. Meridith is a renowned public speaking coach and owner of Grundei Coaching who specializes in public speaking and presentation skills.

Meridith explains that understanding your client and doing your due diligence of research and studying will help you immensely in your attempts to simplify any complex concept to any level of audience. You need to figure out your objective, point out all the key takeaways, and choose the ones that support your argument.

It is crucial for you to find out what sets you apart as a presenter and understanding that will help you be more engaging during your presentations.

Starting with a story or an open-ended question usually tends to make people lean in and give more attention, and finding an emotional connection with your audience will get them to invest more cognitive attention to your talk.

It’s also important to not try to be different for the sake of being different, but to try to innovate to be better. One example of being different is trying to adapt your stories to different audiences.

Make sure you always try to make the audience feel like they’re the hero, because most of the time, the audience doesn't care about the speaker but about themselves, and so shifting the focus towards the audience really helps keep them engaged and invested in your presentation.

Meridith also emphasizes that if you are going to practice only two things, these should be your introduction and call to action, as your introduction will give you a good boost into your presentation and the call to action makes sure your talk is well concluded.

Moving to a different point, recognizing that anxiety and fear is a natural reaction can help you significantly. Doing things like breathing exercises and turning the anxiety into excitement in any way can drastically ease out any anxiety and fear you might have.

Finally, you need to realize that with more practice, you are going to understand yourself better, and understand how you can improvise with different situations that can happen during your presentations.

What You’ll Learn

●   How do you communicate complex concepts in a simple way

●   How to give engaging and interactive presentations

●   How to keep your audience invested?

●   How can you deal with fear and anxiety of presentations?

Relevant Websites For This Episode

●  Grundei Coaching LLC

Other Relevant Episodes

●  Episode 72 - DISC Profiles

●  Episode 64 - Can You Demonstrate Too Much Passion for Cybersecurity?

●  Episode 47 - How to Use Your Transferable Skills