Tag Archives: Presentation skills

Interpretative reading is good training for public speakers

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From our club meeting two weeks ago.

Next week, the Famous Speeches Reading Club is going to be one and a half years old 🥂🔥Not bad for something that started as a spontaneous idea on the Finnish Independence Day in 2024. Also, it’s pretty exciting how the club has evolved during this time. 

We started by reading Martin Luther King, Jr’s speeches. We still do it, at least I do 😃, but we’re doing a bunch of other interpretative reading as well. 

Apart from speeches, we’ve read poems, song lyrics, movie speeches, even short stories. 

I suppose the latter one is a bit too much for people to endure in an interactive meeting, so I guess we won’t be doing a lot of short stories in the future. 

But it was cool to do that experiment, too. 

Because I can testify that Ursula Le Guin’s short story ”The ones who walk away from Omelas” was a nugget of gold for me. 

If ”The Animal Farm” is a masterful allegory of the Soviet Union, ”The ones who walk away from Omelas” is an equally masterful allegory of the United States, in less that ten pages.

We were five people at the meeting two weeks ago, and our next meeting is two weeks from now on Tuesday, as usual. Tomorrow will be an exception: instead of reading speeches, we opted for a workshop about stage fright 😳 

As always, we continue to meet online.

The purpose of this informal club is that by learning from the best speakers and writers, we can practice skills that are useful for a public speaker. 

Studying and practicing famous speeches is something public speakers have done at least since ancient Greece.

Another goal is just to enjoy beautiful texts that make us think, discuss, and hopefully make the world just a little little better a place 🌎

What’s your happy place?

Have you ever NOT felt nervous before giving a presentation – Workshop on Tuesday, May 26

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Have you ever NOT felt nervous before giving a presentation? 😬 Most of us feel at least some butterflies in the stomach in that situation.

I’ll give a workshop on how to control those nerves on Zoom on Tuesday, May 26, at 18:45-19:30 Finnish time ⏰

You’ll get useful facts and exercises. The content is based on my client work as well as my experience and conversations with professionals. 

You’ll be able to use this knowledge and the skills yourself or you can teach them to your friends and family who might benefit from them. 

If you got interested, drop me an email at info@pekkakanerva.com so I can send you the Zoom link.

The workshop is free of charge and doesn’t require you to commit to anything. The duration is 45 minutes, and we will adhere to safe place principles.

👉 Confirm your attendance asap to secure your place as there’s limited capacity.

You’re warmly welcome!

This is the same workshop I’ll give at a Toastmasters International conference in Poland at the end of this month.

What’s your killer recipe for managing your nerves before a presentation?

Drones and presentation skills

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In Mikko’s hand, a drone that destroys drones. Behind us on the screen, a container that is actually a transportable drone factory that can make dozens of drones per day. 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀

What’s the current state of drone warfare and drone defense in Ukraine 🇺🇦, Finland, and elsewhere? How does the future look like? 🚀

How does it sound when the topic is presented by one of the most knowledgeable experts in the field, Mikko Hyppönen, who is also perhaps the world’s #1 expert in drones in terms of presentation skills? 🎤

📌 Mikko’s content is always relevant, interesting and engaging for the audience.

📌 He always begins and ends on time.

📌 His visuals (PowerPoint) were full of insightful pictures and video. 

📌 He had brought with him a bunch of props. In this case it was products of his own company Sensofusion, and a bunch of other drone-related artifacts. 

Now I’ve held in my hand the kind of optical fibre the drones leave behind them and that now covers vast areas in Ukraine. 

What you see in the photo is a drone that kills drones.

📌 Drones are scary, but as always, the more you know about a topic, it becomes slightly less scary. Drones are not omnipotent.

❓On another note, I asked Mikko how he prepares for his presentations nowadays, as compared to in the past, when he was still honing his presentation skills.

He’s a modest guy. His reply was that as he’s recently joined a new business, the main thing is to spend time learning lots and lots of new subject matter. 

However, he added there’s one thing that hasn’t changed in his presentations: 

He’s always considered himself to be an interpreter of making complex technical topics understandable and interesting to the general public. 

This continues to be in the core of his presentations, wherever he speaks.

Have you ever listened to someone who’s able to distill a complex topic so that the audience gets it? 🔥

Is it harder to be a contestant than the master of ceremonies at a speech contest?

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A speech contest trophy from way back when.

Many years ago I was a contestant at a public speaking contest. Tomorrow I’ll be hosting this same Toastmasters contest in Tallinn, with fantastic speakers from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland 🔥🔥🔥

For the contest speech, you spend from 5 to 7 minutes on stage. As the master of ceremonies tomorrow, I’ll be on stage from 11:35am until 6pm. It already feels like running a marathon.

They say the shorter you need to make a speech, the more preparation it takes. The contestants have done a huge amount of preparation for their speeches and they deserve all the respect from the audience. 

Wearing my “winning shoes” at a speech contest, telling a story about a duck and a couple of other animals.

Hosting an event is hard work, too, and requires careful planning and practice. Tomorrow there’s a minute-by-minute schedule of what will happen on stage between the opening words at 11:20am until the closing words at 6pm. 

And something always goes wrong 😃 You need to be prepared for that, too. 

The best thing is that you always learn something. And you improve your routine. And it’s fun.

May the contest begin! 💥

Is your boss nervous about public speaking?

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Who’s the customer of a firm selling fish lures? It’s the fish 🐟 

I learned this lesson about the business philosophy of the fish lure producer Rapala from the late professor of international business, Reijo Luostarinen, at the Helsinki School of Economics.

”You were amazing! This was the best townhall meeting ever!”

That’s what the audience of one of my clients told him after I had coached him on public speaking and presentations skills.

He had contacted me a couple of weeks earlier because he felt very nervous about an upcoming presentation. 

It’s feedback like this that tells me I’ve been able to help someone at an important moment in their career. 

This speaker is a C-level person at an international company that recently promoted him to lead a business unit of hundreds of people.

He wanted to be at his best when talking to a gathering of all his employees for the first time in his new role. 

👉 Is your boss nervous about public speaking? I bet they are. Everyone is. Luckily we can all learn how to manage that nervousness.

I’m pretty sure all of Reijo Luostarinen’s students still remember the lesson about who your real customer is. How do I know? Because he told a story. Even better, it was a story with a hook 😀

One sentence that turned an awkward moment into opportunity

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Photo credit: Laura Oja

What do you do when you realize you’re about to have a business meeting with a client, and at the reception desk you hear the person next to you is going to meet the same person at the same time? 😃

You network. 😃

I said ”Excuse me, I get the impression we’re about to meet the same person at the same time”. 

We introduce ourselves to one another and assume there must be some kind of a misunderstanding. 

While waiting for the meeting to begin, the Swedish guy and I have a conversation and realize we’re not competitors to each other. We exchange contact details and agree on a meeting about potentially working together at some point. 

This happened yesterday. 

I’ve seen a lot of interesting situations in meetings, but this was a first. 

Sometimes buyers like to put people in awkward situations, but not that buyer I was about to meet, he is not that kind of a guy. Yesterday was about a misunderstanding.

What’s the strangest thing you’ve encountered in a meeting? 💥

Join Finlandia Toastmasters and improve your Spanish speaking skills!

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Photo: A blast from the past, when we used to meet at a local café in Helsinki, in 2019. 

Join us tomorrow and practice your Spanish! 🇪🇸 🇨🇱🇵🇪🇨🇴🇻🇪

Finlandia Toastmasters meets again and as always, the program includes improvised speeches as well as prepared speeches that receive tailored evaluations by experienced speakers to maximize learning and personal development.

As to the atmosphere, we are a deadly serious club 😃

Join the meeting either online or face to face at Oodi Central Library in Helsinki, in meeting room #1, Wednesday Jan 21 at 6pm Finnish time. 

The membership fee is a ridiculous 60 euros for half a year (plus a one-time fee of 20 euros for new members), and it’ll give you a tremendous boost on your Spanish and public speaking skills. 

Having said that, you’re always welcome to visit for free to check us out.

You’ll meet people from various Spanish-speaking countries, as well as a couple of non-native speakers.

We meet twice a month, always on Wednesday’s at 6pm Finnish time.

👉 Let me know if you’d line the Teams link.

#Toastmasters #publicspeaking #presentationskills #Spanish

It’s speech contest time!

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Just for the heck of it, a keynote speech in ten seconds 😀

It’s this time of the year again: the season of the Toastmasters autumn speech contests. All over the world, people are competing in two categories: humorous speeches and improvised speeches. Loads of fun. 

This Saturday, I’ll be hosting this speech contest in Helsinki. It’s called an area contest, with participants from Finland and Estonia.

No one, except me, knows the topic of the improvised speeches. 😃 The contestants will find out the topic 30 seconds before they begin their speech. 😬

In the attached video from exactly a year ago, from the same contest, you’ll see a primer in stage presence and body language in ten seconds 😀

Also, you can find a couple of brief thoughts about hosting an event behind this link.

I’ll publish something more comprehensive on the topic of event hosting later this year. 

For now, come and see a bunch of superb speakers at the event space ”Vapaakaupunki” at the Redi shopping center at Hermannin Rantatie 5 in Helsinki this Saturday, October 25 at 12:00 (doors open). The program starts at 12:15. The language of the contest is English.

You’re warmly welcome!

Three opportunities to improve your public speaking skills during your freetime

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Waiting for my time to shine. Photo credit: Alessandro Rampazzo

Would you like to improve your public speaking skills in a hobby setting?

In addition to paid work in the public speaking coaching domain, the hobby side of practicing public speaking skills is now in full swing after the summer holidays. 

Here are a couple of options that I’m familiar with, because I’m there myself 😃

  1. Last Monday I gave a speech at the Stadi Talkers Toastmasters club. 

    It’s always a pleasure to be on stage at this club that meets at a bar downtown Helsinki. The audience is friendly and supportive. They don’t throw you with a pint of beer, even though based on the feedback I know that every speech of mine, while having its strengths, it also  has room to improve for the next time. This club is in English. 🇬🇧

    Stadi Talkers meets bi-weekly on Monday evenings at 6pm Finnish time, next time on September 8.

  2. This Wednesday evening I’ll be hosting a Finlandia Toastmasters club meeting. 

    It’s otherwise the same as described above but this one is in Spanish. 🇪🇸 We have native speakers as well as mere mortals like me. 

    We are hybrid, so you can also participate via Teams from anywhere in the world. Meetings occur every second Wednesday at 6pm Finnish time. Bienvenid@!!!

  3. The Famous Speeches Reading Club is something I started with a couple of friends last year. 

    As the name suggests, we practice public speaking skills by reading renowned texts, a method of learning that has been used already since the ancient Greeks. We read traditional speeches, movie speeches, poems… whatever contains impactful language in a compact package. This one is in English. 🇬🇧

    We meet on Zoom every two weeks on Tuesday evenings at 6:15pm Finnish time for about one hour. Reach out if you’re interested in joining!


All in all, I would encourage you to use every opportunity you get to speak up and to be on stage, because the best way to improve your public speaking skills is to practice, practice, practice, constantly. 

It’s a lifelong journey and today is a good day to begin.

Why does the term ”shooting star” inspire more than a ”meteor”?

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”Le stelle cadenti ci ricordano ogni anno che c’è seumpre qualcosa in cui sperare, c’è sempre qualcosa da desiderare. Ama, sogna, desidera e ele stelle faranno da contorno alla tua luce.”

”Shooting stars remind us every year that there’s always something to hope for, there’s always something to desire. Love, dream, desire, and the stars will frame your light.”

Pretty poetic. Or is it?

Here’s something useful for those who study the art of influencing people through language, e.g. for public speakers.

Note that the key term in this quote is different in different languages and gives a different message to the reader.

Usually something going upwards is understood as positive, and something going downwards is considered negative. 

In Italian, ”stelle cadenti”, ”falling stars”, go down. That’s usually understood as something negative and not seen very often in quotes that are supposed to inspire. 

So, why are the ”stelle cadenti” still inspiring for us? It’s because of another popular dichotomy used in metaphors: light versus darkness. Light is good, and shooting stars shine a bright light.

Herein lies the reason why the inventor of the above quote didn’t use the term meteor instead of a shooting star. After all, both words are about the same thing.

Our minds visualize a meteor more easily as something going down. In addition, the remains of a meteor are called by a similar term, meteorite, and a meteorite is made of dark stone. No shining light.

So, two bad things in a meteor. We are brought up learning that light is better than dark, and upwards is better than downwards. 

Therefore, a ”shooting star” inspires, a ”meteor” does not.

The choice of words is of crucial importance for a writer, as well as for a public speaker.

My daily Duolingo.