7 Secrets.

Could there be anything more tantalizing?

Everyone loves secrets. Dark secrets. Sweet secrets. Secrets to tickle the fancy. Secrets to gain the upper hand.

And not just one . . . but seven of them!

I offer you – beginning here and now – 7 Secrets of Power Presenting.

Seven consecutive days of Secrets to gain the upper hand in business presenting.

These 7 Secrets promise to launch you on your way to personal competitive advantage in an ever more challenging job market. Incredibly powerful techniques and secrets are coming to you over the next week, one-per-day, right here in your Power Presentations Blog.

These secrets have been hidden from you. They certainly don’t appear in your business communication textbooks. Face it . . . has anything good ever come out of a business communication textbook? So where do these secrets come from?

They reside in the collective wisdom of more than 2,500 years of history. This is the link that you share with every great speaker that history has seen fit to remember – you share their humanity. And this is why their secrets speak to us across the mists of time.

Cicero in 50 BC?

You in 2011 AD?

More than two millennia separate you from the Roman Republic’s greatest orator, so what could you possibly have in common with a man half-a-world away and 2,000 years ago?

Here’s the link

Perhaps Cicero spoke to the Roman Senate during the last days of the Roman Republic, while you now speak to your Business Policies class with PowerPoint on the screen behind you . . . but you both share a core necessity.

You share the necessity to convince your audience by using a handful of reliable tools that have not changed in two millennia. For your purposes, the greatest orators in history are still alive with respect to their techniques, their tools, their words, and their abilities to sway audiences.

Demosthenes

Cicero

Quintilian

Patrick Henry

Frederick Douglass

William Jennings Bryan

Daniel Webster

Abraham Lincoln

What could these long-gone people possibly say to you to help you become a superior presenter here in the 21st Century?

All of these orators and many more utilized the highly refined and powerful secrets of elocution, declamation, debate, and oratory to command the stage and to sway audiences. They were the superior presenters of their day. The techniques and tools comprise the 7 Secrets of Power Presenting.

The best speakers of the past 50 years use and have used these Secrets – Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Steve Jobs, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King. They don’t announce that they’re using secret techniques and tricks of the trade, of course. They wouldn’t be secrets any more. So they let you believe that they were gifted with special talents. Not a chance. Techniques, practice, personal branding . . . and 7 Secrets.

You begin to learn these Seven Secrets over the next seven days. They are the secrets utilized by every great orator until the age of television, radio, and the computer rendered them lost to the vast majority of us. They faded from use, supplanted by technology in the mistaken belief that technology had rendered you, the presenter, superfluous. And so presenting as a skill has withered. Until now.

These secrets do not appear in today’s textbooks, and they appear only in partial form in many trade books. The secrets remain lost to the majority. Many students don’t even know about them. They think great presenting is alchemy, magic, or a product of superior talent. Many don’t reach the point at which you read these words right now. Many who read these words this second sneer at them with a world-weary sigh.

But a tiny minority reads on.

A tiny minority will join me tomorrow, and the next day, and the next . . .  And that select few will begin to acquire the power, dexterity, energy, and charisma to grow into a bold presenter – at home on the stage, at ease with yourself, and facile with the material. You will become a fabulous business presenter.

Each day, the door opens on a new Secret, and you are presented with a challenge.

Master these Seven Secrets, which form the Seven Pillars of your personal speaking platform, and you will soar higher in the business world than you possibly could have imagined. And your career will soar farther and faster than you ever thought possible.

I hope that you are in that tiny minority that continues to read.

Let’s meet here tomorrow for Secret #1.