Presenting with charisma and confidence in the virtual realm is a critical new success factor, and it’s not going away. This course will help your team win the new game, advance their goals, and strengthen their virtual impact.
Many executives, sales teams and other professionals have spent decades learning to be charismatic and effective in front of an audience—in person, that is. But when circumstances force them to present important material through the tiny, intimidating lens of a webcam, many find their skills sorely lacking and confidence evaporating. There’s no feedback, no faces to watch and no way to see how it’s going in order to course-correct. The truth is creating vitality, connection, and content flow in a virtual presentation is harder than it looks.
Lesson 1 introduces us to the overall course content as well as to your presenter, WhiteSpace CEO Juliet Funt, a globally beloved veteran of the keynote stage and a frequent virtual presenter to audiences of thousands. In this lesson we encounter the two key levers upon which presentations are amplified, Production and Performance. Covered also is the profound level of intentionality needed to pull ahead of the pack as a virtual presenter.
Lesson 1 introduces us to the overall course content as well as to your presenter, WhiteSpace CEO Juliet Funt, a globally beloved veteran of the keynote stage and a frequent virtual presenter to audiences of thousands. In this lesson we encounter the two key levers upon which presentations are amplified, Production and Performance. Covered also is the profound level of intentionality needed to pull ahead of the pack as a virtual presenter.
Though some proactive team members may have Googled their way to a cursory understanding of production fundamentals, usually the learning stops short of the standards most executives wish their teams would adopt. In this lesson we cover the instruction needed to achieve uniform, standardized levels of production excellence across an intact team.
As we pivot to discuss performance, we quickly realize that the individual skills that comprise a tool kit of distinction are overwhelmingly numerous, so we focus here simply on the first minute. Teams will learn how to own the “stage,” perfect the critical first three paragraphs, and avoid the one common mistake that kills relationship building.
Here we address the number one fear, concern, and distraction in the world of virtual: the painful lack of feedback. Even experienced presenters find it intimidating to move through a deck or sales conversation without the cues that have allowed them to “read the room” for their entire careers. The solution will be found in the WhiteSpace framework of “raising the real while lowering the ideal.”
With the constraints of a small screen and a seated position, it’s truly difficult to come across as energetic and charming virtually, but there is a way to combat this challenge—and it’s an inside job. This segment helps us understand how caring more deeply about our work and caring more deeply about the needs of each specific audience can, in parallel, make us far more interesting to watch.
Attention spans are seriously limited in virtual, so getting to the point becomes a survival skill from the first paragraph. But great writing skills haven’t been needed for presenters used to casually improving through an in-person chat. Virtual demands more—more prep, more clarity, and more brevity. All of which we will cover in this module.
Mistakes around proper preparation vary from having too little to having too much, creating a stilted and robotic read. Many teams, executives, and pros don’t have a system for preparation at all, but not for long. Juliet is here to the rescue. In this session we discuss the methods the very best live and virtual keynoters use to get ready and how to adapt them for the screen.
Dozens of vocal attributes can make or break a successful presentation. A few that this module covers are the musicality of the voice, pace, how to avoid or alter monotone, the full use of range to create emphasis, and lifting and lowering intonation to build or sabotage authority.
The right minimalist slide decks can lift up a presentation, but the majority are weighty and instead drag us down. In our concluding session, we focus on the support of slides and how to create artful use of just the right number of them. We then wrap the course with instructions on next steps for individual and team education.
Juliet Funt our instructor, is the CEO of WhiteSpace at Work, is a globally beloved veteran of the keynote stage and a frequent virtual presenter to audiences of thousands.
She’s been featured in Forbes and Fast Company, was one of the top-rated speakers at the Global Leadership Summit, (the largest leadership event in the world) and has been coaching presenters for decades
