Leaders often ask me what other leaders struggle with most in public speaking. Over the years, I’ve learned this: It’s not nerves. It’s not slides or stage presence. It’s keeping your audience fully engaged from start to finish. Even highly experienced speakers often want to make the leap from good to captivating. They want their audiences to leave inspired […]

“Can I get everyone’s attention?” The JetBlue pilot stands in the aisle, on a plane packed with passengers. We all sit scrolling through our phones or gazing out at the Boston tarmac. The cabin feels hot and we’re all just ready for the four-hour flight to start. The pilot continues over the intercom, “Eyes on

“Height and weight,” the nurse says. We’re in a tight alcove, between a bathroom and a desk. I step onto a scale wedged beside a woman in an office chair.  My arm brushes her back. A doctor squeezes past us. A lab-coated technician turns sideways to slip by in the opposite direction. It’s a hallway

Last weekend, I accompanied my 88-year-old dad to his 70th (gasp) high school reunion in Concord, New Hampshire. After parking the car, we started off across the school grounds to the auditorium. That’s when the rain started coming down, first in syncopated drops, then cascading out of the sky. Yikes, we still had a long

As a public speaker, there are few things worse than watching your audience lean back in their seats, drift away, and lose interest. How can you wake them up and hold their full attention? Ask a question. Why? Because questions — especially the rhetorical ones — invite listeners into a dialogue. They may even activate a part

I rowed this past fall at the Head of the Charles, the world’s largest three-day racing event. It’s a sport I got hooked on during college, rowing on the Connecticut River. There were 8 of us rowers, two former teammates and six other alumnae from various years who I met for the first time that

Have you ever had to explain your work in a way that makes sense to everyone, not just experts? Leaders often struggle with this — trying to share their ideas without confusing people. When you’re really good at what you do, talking about it in a way that everyone understands can be tricky. Luckily, there’s

We’ve all been there. You’re giving a big presentation and as you look out at the sea of faces, you can feel the energy shift from anticipation to disengagement within the first minute. How do you capture their imagination right out of the gate? As Euripides said, “A bad beginning makes a bad ending.” The

Why wait for your audience to ask the first question? When you’ve got the microphone, try posing a rhetorical question or two as you go. What’s the value of rhetorical questions for your presentations? They create an interactive dialogue in your audience’s mind. You can draw your audience into your ideas and build a sense