EMS Glossary

Here’s a laundry list of terms that we use in EMS training programs, along with our own interpretations of their definitions.

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Movement (see The Fundamentals)
Purposeful movement, such as walking around the room, stepping forward, and approaching your audience helps to create a stronger connection to the listener. To help avoid nervous movement such as rocking, plant your feet when standing in place.

Nervousness
There’s a big difference between being nervous and looking nervous. Use energy to keep your voice strong and your movement natural.

Non-words (see The Fundamentals)
By all means possible, work to eliminate meaningless words (such as umm, OK, uhh, and others) from your presentations. They are extremely distracting to your listeners. SNAP!

Paper Training
Practice standing on a large piece of paper to eliminate rocking and shifting caused by nervous energy. When you hear the paper crinkle, you know you’re distracting from your message. (No, we are NOT puppy trainers!)

Pauses (see The Fundamentals)
Taking short breaks between thoughts helps the audience focus on your message, and also helps the speaker eliminate non-words. Pause early and often, we always say!

Personal Style
The image you want to convey to listeners each time that you communicate. Do you want to be professional, trustworthy, insightful, confident, or all of the above? You pick the adjectives, and then back them up with purposeful action.

Perception
Reality. It’s never wrong. Get it? Good speakers use techniques such as The Fundamentals to impact how they are perceived by their audience.

Persuading
A vital objective in almost every presentation: most speeches are delivered to convince audiences to take on a specific belief, cause or action. Don’t ever confuse this with informing.

Playing Soft
Going through the motions, taking the easy path, and giving less than full effort conveys doubt and encourages negative perceptions. Competitors love when you play soft.

POW! Statement
The term we use to emphasize the importance of a strong opening. Start every presentation with a compelling introduction, and start every introduction with a POW! Statement  (such as an attention-grabbing question, statistic, quote, analogy, story or joke) that will grab their interest and set the stage for the rest of your content.

Practice
We’re not your parents, so we won’t bug you to do your homework. But the best presenters we know are ones who prepare, ask for feedback, and practice ahead of time.

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