Get Good At Presenting Podcast with Lee Jackson

Get Good At Presenting Podcast with Lee Jackson treats public speaking as a trade best learned from the people who practise it. Host Lee Jackson works as a motivational keynote speaker and presentation coach, and the show is built on his conversations with other speakers and coaches. Many are old friends. He reckons he has known Dr. Simon Raybould for somewhere between ten and fifteen years, and he and Rikki Arundel go back a long way around the PSA. That familiarity sets the tone: teasing, digressive, quick to laugh. Still, Lee keeps pulling the talk back to the stage and asking for the tip a presenter could take away. Storytelling is the clearest pattern. Episode titles attach the word to Raybould, Arundel, Sam Knowles and Michelle Mills-Porter, and each of them comes at it from a different side. Raybould speaks as a researcher. Lee asks him point blank whether the reticular activating system material is sound neuroscience, and Raybould says it is, then backs it up with the objects in a room that nobody notices until someone points them out. Knowles runs a data storytelling consultancy, Insight Agents, and Lee puts to him the case of a client who loves facts and figures. Mills-Porter, introduced as 'the people reader', is asked how a raw story with trauma in it becomes sections of a keynote that fit twenty-odd minutes and can be remembered. Her answer is a tidy rule: the story is the wrapping paper, and the gift is the lessons. Arundel brings the performer's side, recalling a 1990 speech about why websites mattered, given to some five hundred financial advisors on a cruise, and an onlooker's remark that it was like watching someone step through a portal and come out as another person. Arundel's point is that a big room has to be filled with energy, power and humour. Lee makes his own argument too. In the Knowles conversation he describes conference days where eleven of twelve presenters share one PowerPoint template, and says personal and corporate stories are how a speaker stands apart. Two other episodes go beyond storytelling. Olga Geidane and Frederika Roberts appear together to discuss presenting in English when it is not the speaker's first language, something Lee says he meets often in his coaching. That chat wanders through Luxembourg, Bradford and the curry houses on Leeds Road before settling on tips. Big Ian Donaghy, billed as a speaker, author and film-maker, spends a stretch insisting that a daily walk, in shorts and in any weather, is a total game changer. The research gets a hearing, but practice carries the weight. A listener who wants the evidence behind a technique might start with Raybould, and one shaping a personal story into a talk might start with Mills-Porter.