Understanding Your Audience
The question that changes everything, audience research that beats guesswork, reading the room while you are in it, and presenting across cultures.
Brewster Wickersham Publications
Presentingwith Impact
A Practical Guide to Effective Communication
Think about the last ten presentations you sat through. How many do you actually remember? Knowing your subject and communicating it are two different skills. This is a short, practical book about the second one.
Paperback and Kindle edition, on Amazon
Pendleton B. Wickersham, MD, FACP, FACR
A presentation is not a performance you give.It is a result you cause in other people's heads.
Ten chapters follow a talk from the first planning conversation to the follow-up email: how to understand your audience, distill your message, design slides that support you instead of competing with you, handle hostile questions and technical disasters, and manage the nerves that never fully go away.
Inside the book
Ten chapters, in the order you need them
Each chapter ends with key takeaways, so you can prepare a talk with the book open beside you.
Crafting Your Message
Information is not a message. Start with the destination, choose a structure on purpose, and use storytelling and data that actually persuade.
The Power of Visuals
Your slides are not your presentation. One idea per slide, the design fundamentals that matter, and the five deadly slide sins.
Mastering Delivery Techniques
Your voice as an instrument, posture and gesture, eye contact as the connection channel, and the practice that multiplies everything else.
Navigating Virtual Presentations
Engineer your setup, talk to the lens, never go ten minutes without the audience doing something, and plan for the glitch before it happens.
Q&A and Challenging Situations
Where trust is actually won: a four-beat rhythm for answering, the hard cases, and what to do when the room itself misbehaves.
Leading Engaging Panel Discussions
A different sport entirely — how to be the panelist people remember, and how to moderate so the panel is worth attending.
Personalizing Your Presentation Style
The problem with becoming someone else. Find your baseline, handle humor with care, and calibrate to the setting.
Building Confidence and Overcoming Fear
Everyone is nervous, including the author. Why fear occurs, the long game of durable confidence, and a pre-talk toolkit.
Sustaining Engagement Beyond the Talk
The follow-up playbook, social media used like a professional, and how to measure what happened so the next talk is better.
Who it's for
Anyone with a talk coming up
Good presentation skills matter in almost every profession. This book assumes you have a presentation to give, not that you want to become a professional speaker.
- Preparing an important business presentation
- Speaking at a conference for the first time
- Delivering a medical or scientific lecture
- Leading a team meeting that needs to land
- Pitching to a room that can say no
- Teaching, training, or running a workshop
- Presenting to a camera instead of a room
- Sitting on — or moderating — a panel
The author
Thousands of talks, including the ones that went wrong
Pendleton B. Wickersham, MD
FACP, FACR — Board-certified rheumatologist
Dr. Wickersham is a board-certified rheumatologist in private practice with two decades of experience both in the clinic and as a longtime speaker and consultant in medical education.
He has delivered thousands of presentations: across a desk to a single skeptical colleague, from podiums in packed lecture halls, on panels, and to virtual audiences scattered across time zones. He has bombed, recovered, and adapted in front of all of them — which is what led to this book.
He is also the author of Managing Life with Chronic Pain: The Resilient Path. When he isn't at a podium or in clinic, he is usually outdoors: rockhounding, hiking, or fishing.
Order
Your next talk is the one to fix
99 pages in paperback, or read it on Kindle tonight.
ISBN 979-8167073890 · Published by Brewster Wickersham Publications
Also from the author
Managing Life with Chronic Pain
A separate series for a different reader: people living with chronic pain, and the people who care for them.
The Resilient Path
The book, the workbook and the companion app, by Dr. Wickersham and Louise Locker, LCSW.
theresilientpathbook.com →The Resilient Path, paperback
Managing Life with Chronic Pain — the main book, on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
Amazon →Brewster Wickersham Publications
The independent press behind this book, its workbooks and its apps.
The publisher →