“Good morning. How are you feeling? Are you ready for this? Whatever ‘this’ is, by the way. What are we actually doing today? Presenting Magically is what we are doing. And it sounds from talking to a number of you outside … Oh, by the way, for those of you who haven’t met me before, let me tell you my name. I am ______________. It is great to meet you all. We have a very good, exciting three days planned, and you will be seeing quite a lot of me, and our assistants. We will be watching you as you are presenting, over these days. So it’s looking good. Let me give you the big picture of what Presenting Magically is about, just in case you don’t know, so that you can decide whether you do really want to be here.”

Now this introduction may seem a little strange, rather contrived, but there are reasons for this, which we’ll go over later, but only after we have covered many other things.

When you make the techniques and skills in this book your own, you will be able to connect with every single person in an audience of any size so that they all feel a very strong connection with you. Then you will have their full attention for the whole period of time. And this means that you will be able to communicate so effectively to a group that everyone in the group gets your message and derives the highest possible level of learning from your presentation or training.

The key phrase is being comfortable, being yourself. Because as we were preparing this training, we were amazed at how many professional presenters and trainers said:

“I can’t be me in front of an audience. First I have to put on my ‘presentation suit’. And I adopt a special presentation personality for use in these situations.”

So we asked:

Whatever state people arrive in, you need to make sure that, if it is less than ideal for learning, you can move them into a state that is more useful for getting what you are offering. A good way of doing that is to have them focus on their reasons for being there.

Ask them to direct their attention away from their immediate past experience, out into the future, toward what they want, or hope to gain personally. You may say something like:

Take a moment to review your reasons for reading this book. And whatever your reasons are, that’s fine. They are your reasons. And you can change them, or add to them whenever you wish.

Even well-known people that we might assume would be totally OK in front of an audience, such as actors and performers who do it for a living, may still have this fear before they go on stage. For example, the actor Jimmy Durante, who was famous in the 40s and 50s, and whose last film was, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) had terrible stage fright. Even though Jimmy ‘Schnozzola’ Durante spent his life on the stage, in the movies, and making public appearances, one thing that is not well known is that he was so afraid of being in front of an audience, that he physically threw up before each time he went on stage or did a public presentation. He was physically sick because he was so nervous about performing. So if you are feeling in any way less than totally cool, calm and relaxed about ‘presentations!’ – like “Eerrgh!” or “Help!” – then know you are in good company.

One of the things that we can guarantee the people who come on the live trainings is that by the end of the first day, all of their performance anxiety around presentation will have totally disappeared. For most people this happens easily, although a few may need some personal attention. However, without the direct contact, all we can do in this book is take you through some processes that will definitely help you let go of any fears, nervousness, or limiting beliefs that you have about yourself, which concern your being less than totally magnificent and powerful in front of an audience. When these fears have disappeared you can then enjoy the rest of the exercises and get the most out of this book.

For the moment, continue to mull over your personal reasons for reading this book. And while you are thinking about them, let us tell you about the practical considerations of doing a training or presentation.

In learning Presenting Magically you will be doing many exercises. To get the most out of them you need to engage in them fully, and do them to the very best of your ability. As you work through them, you will find that you are soon doing so much that you get consciously overloaded. From our side, this is intentional. The material is challenging, because it is new and different, and you have so much to concentrate on that you will no longer be able to think consciously. Then you will have to trust your unconscious mind. After all, that is where learning is really happening.

Therefore it is worth spending the time at the beginning of a project – such as working through Presenting Magically – to write down your personal reasons for reading this book, your r...