If you're looking for public speaking training in the Greater Manchester area, this website aims to tell you all you need to know. Whether you're preparing for a business presentation, gearing up for a political campaign or wanting help with a wedding speech, the training can be customised to meet your specific requirements. The techniques of successful public speaking are broadly the same whatever you're talking about but there are twists and traditions to different types of speech, which can be reflected in your training.
Public speaking training courses in Manchester for corporate clients
Manchester is a big, thriving city with a great deal of public speaking going on all the time and a strong training scene supporting this. A variety of training companies offer both open courses and in-house group courses.
In my opinion as a public speaking coach, group courses are useful when a number of people are all at a similar stage and need to learn the basic principles of public speaking in a short time. They are not the most effective forum to promote each individual's development. Group training is an efficient way of disseminating information and it works well when the subject matter is academic, theoretical or purely fact-based. Public speaking involves a set of practical skills that are best acquired through practice. My experience suggests that having the rest of the group there to act as audience actually adds nothing to an individual participant's learning; being in a group just blurs the focus and dilutes the training.
The best way to learn public speaking skills is through customised, one-to-one coaching. Everyone approaches public speaking with different experience, expectations and concerns, and the quickest path to success is the one with the fewest distractions. Instead of moving several people on a few steps, individual coaching moves one person on a long distance.
If you have the task of arranging public speaking training for a number of members of your organisation in Manchester, I recommend you consider one-to-one, personalised coaching for them. Depending how many participants we're talking about, a 90-minute coaching session each may well cost about the same as a day's course for them as a group - and the benefits will be vastly greater.
Read more about public speaking training in Manchester.
Public speaking training courses in Manchester for private clients
If you're an individual living or working in or around Manchester, you have quite a few options when it comes to public speaking training. Many national training companies have branches in Manchester and many local organisations also offer training courses in public speaking. So how do you choose what's best for you?
My advice is not to join a group course but to get yourself some one-to-one coaching. The perceived disadvantage to this is not having a big audience, removing the 'public' aspect to the speaking and undermining the whole point. This is an intuitively logical objection but my experience shows it's actually not accurate. What we're learning on a good public speaking course is not literally the speaking to a group but the techniques involved in doing this well: how to use one's voice for maximum impact, how to stand, how to move, how to use notes, how to build a rapport with the audience, and so on. Of course, the audience, as a concept, plays an important part but, in my experience, it works just as well if the audience is imaginary.
If you find public speaking difficult and/or scary, honing your skills before you have to worry about what a live audience is thinking takes away a lot of the pressure. If you're confident being the centre of attention but you want to learn how to speak effectively in public, you don't need a live audience, you just need someone to teach you the techniques.
Another benefit to one-to-one training is the flexibility. Not only is the course customised to your specific requirements, it is also timetabled to suit you. You can book your training in blocks of an hour and a half and take as many sessions as you want to. It's a waste to enrol for hours and hours of training when - who knows? - you may nail public speaking in 90 minutes.
Read more about getting your own, personalised public speaking course in Manchester.
Personalised public speaking coaching in Manchester
We all learn best by doing and the most effective way to learn public speaking skills is to stand up and speak - with a coach to give you constructive feedback and useful advice.
For over 20 years, I've been coaching clients to success in public speaking. For the past 15 or so of those years, I've been living in Manchester and working with a wide variety of clients in and around this vibrant city. Although I train people in London and other places too, most of my clients are more local - Manchester city centre, Manchester suburbs (Didsbury, Chorlton, Northenden, Fallowfield, Prestwich, Whitefield, Worsley...), Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Cheshire, Lancashire, West Yorkshire.
Read more about public speaking coaching in Manchester and the surrounding areas.
If you'd like to, you can also read more about me and see testimonials from some of my clients.
Public Speaking Training Manchester (UK)