Maurice DeCastro

What I specialise in

Public speaking and presentation skills. Most people treat those as two different things, and I don't.

Some people come to me because the thought of speaking up fills them with dread, whether that is standing at the front of a room or sitting round a table with six colleagues. Others speak regularly and competently, and cannot understand why so little of what they say seems to land.

Those are genuinely different problems, and they need different work. What they share is the cause. Both people are giving the room a version of themselves rather than themselves, and until that changes, nothing else you do about either problem holds.

One-to-one coaching for people preparing for something that matters, or working on something that has held them back for years. Group courses for professionals who want to develop alongside others. In-house training for teams, built around the situations they actually face rather than a standard curriculum.

More than anything, though, I work on the part most training leaves out entirely: what is going on in someone's head long before they open their mouth.

The Presenter's Operating System

Over the years, I came to understand that what separates speakers who genuinely move people from those who merely inform them isn't any single skill or technique. It is something more fundamental, a way of approaching communication from the inside out rather than the outside in.

I call it The Presenter's Operating System. It rests on a foundation I call the Headstuff, the accumulated fears, beliefs and inherited stories that keep most professionals from speaking with their full power, with six layers built on top of it: Message, Intention, Resonance, Clarity, Centring and Voice.

It is the approach behind every course, workshop and coaching session we run, and I have published the whole thing free to read rather than keeping it back.

Where I came from

I left school at sixteen with few qualifications and no particular advantages, and I spent the next stretch of my working life in the corporate world, eventually reaching the boardroom of a global brand.

By any measure I could have applied at sixteen, I had arrived, but something about those rooms did not sit right, and it took me years to understand what it was. On the way up, I had received an education nobody explicitly delivered, but everybody somehow understood, and its central lesson arrived as two instructions given at the same time with no apparent awareness that both cannot be followed. To get on, look and sound like everyone else. Also, be brilliant, different, powerful and creative.

I watched capable people spend enormous energy trying to obey both, and I did it myself for years. That is where this work comes from. Not just from studying communication, but from having been on the wrong side of it in rooms where it mattered.

Twenty years on both sides of the room

Before any of this became my work, it was simply my job.

I spent over two decades in the corporate world presenting under real pressure, in the UK and internationally, in the sort of rooms where the outcome mattered and there was no allowance made for a bad day. Pitching. Influencing people who had every reason to say no. Leading change that not everybody wanted. Standing up in front of colleagues who would still be my colleagues on Monday, whatever happened in the next twenty minutes.

I also sat through a great many presentations given by other people, which turned out to be the more useful education. You learn more about what fails from the receiving end than you ever learn from the front, because from the front you cannot feel the room emptying.

And I got it wrong for years, in ways I can name now but couldn't then. I over-prepared and under-connected. I mistook thoroughness for value and gave presentations that were technically faultless and left nothing behind, which I did often enough to eventually stop blaming the audience for it.

None of that is theory I have read about. It is a job I did, badly and then better, for twenty years before I ever stood in a training room.

How Mindful Presenter began.

What I believe

Audiences want your information. That part is real, and it is not in question.

What most speakers never think to give them is the rest of it: the sense that the person at the front actually sees them, knows something about who they are, and has cared enough to work out what they ought to hear and why it might make their lives better.

They want to feel something. Information alone has never changed anyone, and it never will.

I also think public speaking is too often used to take control, enforce ownership, and impose one person's will and beliefs on others. That is rarely done by attacking anyone. It is driven by ego; it has run through every century I know anything about, and it produces division where speaking could just as easily have produced unity.

I would rather help people do the second thing.

How I work

Every delegate completes a questionnaire before we meet, and one question on it matters more than all the others: how do you want your audience to feel? Most people find it disorienting, which tells me more about their relationship with communication than anything else they could write.

In the room, the work is practical, not theoretical. People speak, receive honest and specific feedback, and speak again. Six is the optimum number for our in-depth workshops, because at six everyone gets real time on their feet rather than watching others take turns. We work with more when it suits the client, and we say honestly what is gained and lost at each size.

None of this is about performing better. It is about needing to perform less, which sounds like less work and is usually more.

Who I work with

Professionals at every level and across every sector, from people newly promoted into a role that requires speaking to senior leaders who have avoided it successfully for twenty years. Global financial institutions and small charitable teams. Executives, salespeople, managers, technical specialists, graduates.

What they share is rarely a lack of ability. Usually, nobody has ever shown them an alternative to the version of themselves they perform under pressure.