Presentation Skills for Lawyers – Webinar Event
We would like to give a huge thank you to Max Beaumont from Potato Chip Communications for adjusting his presentation “Presentation Skills for Lawyers” to fit an online medium. Although we were not able to participate in some of the interactive exercises that were originally planned before COVID-19 arrived and online meetings became the norm, Max still made the session fun, interactive and memorable.
Everyone has experienced the nervousness that comes with giving public presentations, perhaps reminding us of that first middle school presentation that felt like a flop! Max understands this nervousness and outlines six major things to focus on to improve our presentation skills: mindset, body language, audience interaction, conversational delivery, and simple messages.
The biggest takeaway was mindset and audience interaction.
Our natural bent when explaining our presentation before our peers or others is to focus on ourselves: not messing up, slowing down our speech, getting sales, how we’re coming across. Bottom line? We’re thinking about ‘me’. Max challenged us to change our mindset, shifting it from the mechanics we’re engaging in to get our message across, to instead think about our audience, to listen to ourselves as if we were sitting in their shoes. In addition, he let us in on the ‘secret sauce,’ the key ingredient to channeling our nervousness into a presentation that achieves a conversational style and engages our audience in an accessible way. By the end, we all left the meeting with something to think about.
This is one of the benefits of being a member of Wolf Law Chambers, that from time to time we come together as a community of professionals to participate in ongoing educational seminars that are also open to friends of Wolf Law Chambers. And of course, the credits gained by attending count towards a legal practitioners’ annual requirement for continuing education.
We invite you to join us for our next seminar. Who knows? Maybe Max will be back.