To reach proficiency in any skill requires three parts: learning, practice, and feedback.
Just like you can’t learn to ride a bicycle just by reading about it and watching others, you can’t become a savvy public speaker if you only learn techniques, strategies, and best practices. You need to use your new skills to develop them.
An Abundance of Courses – A Lack of Practice Grounds
When you search YouTube for ‘Presentation Skills’ you end up with a collection of training videos that could keep you busy almost infinitely.
So learning presentation knowledge and skills anytime and anywhere has become easy and mostly free. But what about the practice and feedback part?
That’s the question Nathan Gold and I asked when we brainstormed ways to help other presentation enthusiasts develop and refine their skills. And we realized there are so many places to learn, but not all that many places to practice, and even fewer places that provide the kind of feedback that will truly elevate your skills.
So we created the Presenter Zone, a place for those interested in improving presentation skills anytime and anywhere, and also for experts who are eager to share their knowledge.
What is the Presenter Zone?
The Presenter Zone is a community network for presenters — created and maintained by presenters.
The Presenter Zone consists of four parts:
- Social Network
The place for people to connect with each other. Members have the ability to create private discussion groups and follow each other’s activity. Just like your favorite social network, but with a pure focus on presentation skills. - Forums
The forums are publicly accessible, but only registered members can start new discussions and respond to other people’s posts. We believe the Feedback Forum will have great appeal for those seeking feedback. Simply post a link to your presentation and community members will help you improve. - Online Meetups
Pitch in the Zone is a weekly 30-minute event to give presenters an opportunity to showcase their presentation and to provide them with valuable feedback about what works well already and what could be improved. Each of these fun and educational meetups finishes with pitch tips delivered by an expert. Participating in these 30-minute meetups is free and you can register here. - Online Courses
The Presenter Zone currently has just two online courses to test the concept. These courses have been made available for free by Nathan Gold, even to non-members of the Presenter Zone, and cover presentation skills basics and how to master Q&A sessions. Our goal is to grow this online school with more of our content as well as courses from our expert community members.
Want to get into the Zone?
If the above sounds appealing to you, either because you’d like to learn, get feedback, or lend your experience others, join the Presenter Zone today and become the next member in our community community of like-minded presentation enthusiasts.
I look forward to seeing you in the Zone!