Every time I begin a workshop, I like to start by asking everyone to share something meaningful to them. It’s not about project updates or professional summaries, but about a personal turning point, a passion, or something that truly resonates with them.
Without exception, they are remarkable.
Articulate, warm, and specific in a way only passionate individuals can be, they make eye contact not out of obligation but because they genuinely want to; their voices are alive and resonant, filling the room. The difference is truly noticeable; you can feel the audience gently leaning in, captivated by something they might not fully grasp but can definitely sense on a deeper level.
Then I ask them to present their work, and almost everyone changes.
The warmth recedes. The personal touch softens into something more composed, more careful, more professional. The message is still clear, still respectful, still competent in every way I could measure it, and the room that was leaning forward a moment ago settles quietly back. I never interrupt. I let them finish, because every presentation deserves to be given and every person deserves to be heard. When they have sat down, and the room has quietened, I often find myself saying the same five words I have been saying in training rooms for twenty years.
“You’ve just lost your power.”
I’ve never really been challenged on this. The expressions on their faces are always the same: a moment of recognition, because they’ve experienced it themselves while doing it. What they didn’t realise was that everyone else could see it too.
THE TWO PRESENTATIONS
Here’s my perspective on what’s really going on in that room, and it’s why I’ve dedicated twenty years to this work instead of showing people where to place their hands.
Every time you speak, you deliver two presentations at the same time.
The first aspect is the external presentation. This is the part you can showcase, rehearse, and receive comments on from your colleagues afterwards. It includes your slides, your structure, your opening line, and even whether you remembered to pause. This presentation is what visibly makes an impression, and because of that, it tends to attract most of the attention, the bulk of the training budget, and the lion’s share of the nerves.
The second is the internal presentation. It is what is happening inside you while you deliver the first one, and it decides how your audience experiences everything they see and hear.
The people in my workshops do not lose their technical ability between the first exercise and the second. Their vocabulary doesn’t shrink, and their intelligence doesn’t dim. What changes is entirely internal, and the room feels it immediately, long before anybody can explain what has gone on.
WHY ALMOST NOBODY WORKS ON THE SECOND ONE
The visible layer naturally draws all the attention, which makes sense because it’s the part you can see and fix in just an afternoon. It creates clear before-and-after examples that can be very satisfying. If your slides seem cluttered, someone can help tidy them up while you watch, and together you’ll both feel a real sense of accomplishment once it’s done.
The internal presentation offers none of that comfort. It cannot be tidied in an afternoon, it does not photograph well, and working on it means asking questions that most professional development carefully avoids. What do you believe about your own right to be heard? What are you actually trying to change? Who is in that room, and what do they need from you? What is happening in your body in the minutes before you begin?
So the work goes into the visible layer, and the visible layer alone has never been able to carry a presentation. That is why so many people finish a course with better slides and the exact same problem they walked in with.
SEVEN LAYERS, AND ONLY ONE OF THEM SHOWS
Over the years, I have come to understand that what separates speakers who move people from those who merely inform them isn’t a single skill. It is a way of approaching communication from the inside out rather than the outside in. I call it The Presenter’s Operating System™, and it has seven layers. Six of them rest on a foundation, and only the topmost is visible to the people listening.
Headstuff, the foundation — the accumulated fears, inherited stories and inner critic that stop most professionals turning up as themselves, in a room or on a screen. Everything else rests on this, which is why technique alone so rarely holds.
Message — the one thing worth saying, and the reason you called people together in the first place. Not everything you know, but the single thing they should leave with.
Intention — why you are speaking at all, and what you want your audience to think, to feel and to do. If nothing will be different afterwards, send an email instead of asking people to listen to you.
Resonance — understanding the specific people you are speaking to well enough to build it for them rather than for yourself. Audiences can always feel when they were an afterthought.
Clarity — making everything ruthlessly aligned to your message, your intention and your audience. This is the layer of removal rather than addition.
Centring — the return to yourself in the moments immediately before you speak. Almost nobody protects those minutes, and they decide whether the work underneath arrives with you.
Voice — the body, voice, breath, habits and presence that carry all of it to your audience. It cannot make up for anything missing below it, and it can lose good work that is already there.
THE LAYER YOU ARE STANDING ON
What makes this truly helpful instead of just intriguing is that no one has perfectly balanced layers. Usually, most people have two or three layers that function really well, a few that are a bit uneven, and one that quietly holds everything else back. In all my years doing this, I’ve rarely met anyone who could identify which one it was before we looked at it together.
Understanding this helps because it shows you where to focus next. If the main message is the challenge, just practising your delivery won’t solve it. When doubts are loud inside, organising your speech won’t quiet them. Focusing on the wrong thing isn’t just a waste of time; it can make good people feel they can’t be natural on stage. In truth, they’ve been putting in a lot of effort on the wrong areas for years, trying to improve what wasn’t really holding them back.
THE M POINT
In my work, I use something I call the M Point, a personal moment of truth. The M stands for Mindful, and for the moment that matters. It is a question that asks you to stop for a moment and think not about presenting in general, but about you, specifically, in the rooms you actually walk into. Here is one.
Think about the last presentation you gave.
Were you fully there, or were you performing a version of yourself you thought the room required?
Most people know the answer before they finish reading the question.
If your honest answer was that you were performing, the meaningful question isn’t how to try harder next time. Instead, it’s about understanding which layer of yourself the performance is coming from, because it’s rarely the one most people assume, and it’s unlikely to involve all seven layers. Some presenters perform because their Headstuff keeps them from simply being themselves on stage. Others do it because they haven’t clarified what they truly want to communicate; after all, someone without a clear message has very little to offer besides a performance. Still, others may have both aspects but somehow lose the connection with the audience in the moments before they start speaking. Each situation calls for a different approach, which is why figuring out which one is yours matters more than trying harder in every case.
FIND OUT WHICH LAYER IS YOURS
I’ve put together a quick self-review based on the seven layers. It takes just about six minutes and includes twenty-eight simple questions. At the end, you’ll discover which layer might be holding you back, along with one practical tip to help you improve before your next presentation.
It’s completely free, and there’s no need to provide an email or worry about passing or failing. The score is simply there to guide you on where your next effort will have the biggest impact.
WHERE TO GO NEXT
One to one public speaking coaching
Presentation skills training for teams
If this was useful, please share it with someone who is preparing to speak. The layer holding them back is rarely the one they are working on.
Image courtesy of Canva.com
