BECOME A CERTIFIED INSTRUCTOR/FACILITATOR IN JUST 5 DAYS — ATTEND IN PERSON!
- Join Us in Atlanta!
- November 3-7, 2025
A presentation delivers information to an audience: to inform, persuade, inspire, or entertain. Training goes further, because after the information comes practice and feedback, until learners can actually do something new. Facilitation is different again, guiding a group to its own answers. Trainers do all three, often in the same hour.
The distinction between training, facilitating, and presenting matters more than it sounds. One trainer told us, after five years on the job, “I just realized I haven’t actually trained anyone.” She delivered polished lectures, but nothing followed them: no practice, no feedback. She was presenting, not training. Neither is wrong; they’re just different jobs, and the purpose of your session decides which one you’re doing. This guide covers the presenting part of a trainer’s job: how to prepare for a presentation, how to start a training session, and how to hold a room once you have it.
Most weak presentations were lost before the speaker stood up. “Winging it” reads as exactly what it is, and the fix is a preparation process you run every time. Ours has five steps.
1. Plan. Before you write a word, answer three questions. What is the purpose (to inform, persuade, or inspire)? Who is the audience and what do they need from you? And what are the constraints: date, location, time slot, budget, equipment? Then generate your ideas and organize them. Skipping this step is how presenters end up delivering the right content to the wrong room.
2. Write. Write for the ear, not the eye. A reader can go back and reread a confusing sentence; a listener can’t. Build a strong, clear opening and a strong, clear close, then fill the body with key facts and just enough supporting material to make them stick. Less is more. The time slot, not your enthusiasm for the topic, decides how much content fits.
3. Prepare. Rehearse out loud, more than once. Then check the logistics: supplies, audio and visual equipment, the room itself, travel details. Assume Murphy’s Law will apply, because it will — the projector that worked yesterday is the one that fails today.
4. Deliver. Think about the speakers you admire, then develop your own authentic style rather than imitating theirs. Know your strengths and weaknesses, and plan for the unscripted parts: questions from the audience and the occasional difficult moment.
5. Evaluate. After every presentation, collect feedback from yourself, from peers, and from the audience. What worked, and what will you change next time? Presenters who skip this step give the same presentation for ten years. Presenters who don’t get noticeably better every quarter. The full walkthrough is in our 5 steps to prepare a professional presentation.
The first ten minutes of a training session set the tone for everything after them. Learners decide early whether this will be worth their attention, and a flat, disorganized opening is very hard to recover from. The good news: a strong opening is a sequence you can learn, not a personality you have to be born with.
Here is the sequence, in order:
1. Start with energy. Greet people as they arrive with a smile. Be enthusiastic and mean it, because energy is contagious, and so is its absence. A short, funny anecdote works better than a cold read of the agenda.
2. Run a quick icebreaker. Choose one that connects to the training topic and suits the group. (More on this below, including options that don’t make introverts want to leave.)
3. Introduce yourself and clarify your role. Share who you are, your background, and why you care about this material. Make it personal enough that they see the human behind the trainer. Then clarify the roles of others in the room, and appoint any that haven’t been assigned.
4. Do a tech check. Especially in virtual sessions: confirm everyone can hear you, see you, and use the tools before you need them. Two minutes here saves twenty later.
5. Cover housekeeping and ground rules. Hours, breaks, restrooms, phones, how to ask questions. Then the rules of engagement — your expectations for participation. Invite the group’s input so they own the rules too.
6. Review the agenda and the objectives. Give learners a roadmap: what’s ahead, what they’ll be able to do by the end, and why it matters. This is where you connect the content to their real jobs: a concrete example or story that shows what the material looks like in their actual work.
Here’s what that looks like in practice, for a 9:00 a.m. session:
9:00 – “Good morning! Great to see you all. Grab a coffee and a seat.” (You’re at the door, not behind the laptop.)
9:03 – Icebreaker: an anonymous live poll asking “What’s your biggest frustration with the topic we’re covering today?” You read a few answers aloud and connect them to the agenda.
9:08 – “I’m Dana. I’ve spent twelve years doing exactly the job you’re doing now, and I built this course around the mistakes I made in my first two.”
9:10 – Housekeeping: hours, breaks, lunch, phones on silent, questions welcome any time (unanswerable ones go on the Parking Lot flipchart).
9:13 – “By noon, you’ll be able to handle the three most common objections you get from customers. Here’s the agenda that gets us there.”
That’s thirteen minutes, and the room is warmed up and pointed at the objective. One more thing: end your introduction the way you started it, on a high note. Summarize what’s coming and thank people for being there. Then get into the content while the energy is still up. For more, see our top 10 tips for introducing a training session like a pro and the 8 essential steps to open a meeting or session.
You have 30 to 60 seconds to capture an audience before they go mentally restless. Well-researched, technically accurate content falls on deaf ears if the opening doesn’t earn attention first. Four openers reliably do.
Humor. Keep it tasteful and weave it in naturally, never announced (“So a funny thing…”). Jokes from your own experience land better than borrowed ones, and testing them on someone beforehand is cheap insurance.
A remarkable statistic. A bold number wakes a room up and builds your credibility at the same time, provided it’s accurate, current, relevant, and from a source the audience trusts. A CPR instructor who opens with “almost 90% of people who suffer out-of-hospital cardiac arrest die — and a bystander who knows CPR can double or triple survival odds” has a fully invested class before minute two.
A quote. Cite someone your audience considers an expert, pick something genuinely thought-provoking and on-topic, and credit the original author.
A rhetorical question. It needs no answer; it needs only to make people think. A trainer opening a sales course with “Who wants a bigger commission check next payday?” has everyone’s attention, every time, because the question is aimed at what the audience already cares about.
Once you have attention, stories are the best tool for keeping it. Storytelling is the oldest teaching technology there is, and it still outperforms most of the new ones: a well-told story triggers the senses and helps learners store and retrieve information. The mechanics are learnable. Paint the picture with concrete language: characters, setting. Introduce a conflict that relates to the skill you’re teaching, build to the point, then summarize the takeaway explicitly. Keep your voice and gestures more subtle than you would for children; adult audiences read small signals. And above all, keep it relevant. An off-topic story, however entertaining, is a time waster, and a badly rehearsed one leaves people confused. Practice it until it sounds unrehearsed. The words between the stories count too; a handful of deliberate phrases can lift your whole course delivery.
For sessions that run hours rather than minutes, attention has to be re-earned continuously. The levers: make learners do things (discussions, hands-on exercises, role-play) instead of only listening; vary the format so no single method wears out; connect everything to their real work with cases and examples; give them some control over pace and topics; and set clear goals with regular feedback so they can see their own progress. Engaged learners learn more and actually use what they learned; passive ones just wait for the break. Go deeper with 4 presentation techniques to grab an audience’s attention, 5 tips for effective storytelling in training, and 12 ways to keep your learners enthusiastic and engaged.
Questions belong on that list of levers; the right question types keep a room thinking instead of drifting.
Reading about presentation skills is a start, but real presentation skills training means presenting and getting feedback. Every Langevin presentation workshop is practice-based, and all come with our money-back-plus-$100 guarantee.
BEST SELLER
FOR INSTRUCTORS
Plenty of learners hate icebreakers, and the memes about introverts and icebreakers exist for a reason. The problem is rarely the icebreaker itself; the usual culprit is a mismatch between the activity and the people. “Stand up and share a fun fact” works fine in a sales course full of extroverts; the same activity in a technical course full of people who don’t present for a living just makes the ice thicker. Choose for the room. A few that work:
The anonymous live poll. Set up questions in a tool like Poll Everywhere; learners answer from their phones and answers display anonymously. Mix personal (“What was your first concert?”), creative (“What would be the title of your autobiography?”), and training-related (“What’s your biggest frustration in your role?”). Then read a few responses aloud and tie them back to the course. Everyone participates and nobody is put on the spot, which is exactly why it works for introverts.
One word on the name card. Ask everyone to write a single word on their name card that describes how they feel about the topic, then volunteer a few explanations. It takes ninety seconds and produces surprisingly honest data about the room. Speaking is optional.
Expectations harvest. Ask learners to jot down what they want from the session and what challenges brought them here, then collect answers in pairs or on a flipchart. It doubles as a needs check: you find out immediately whether the agenda matches the room.
The review quiz game. For any audience with prior exposure to the content, open with a short team quiz. Build it in rounds so you can cut it short if time is tight, form the teams yourself in advance so nobody is left out, and let people answer on a volunteer basis; a “no one answers twice in a row” rule keeps one keener from playing the whole game. The same format works mid-course to review content, and the rule for all training games applies here too: the game must explore the content, not just decorate it.
More on both: an icebreaker for introverts and how to use games to present or review content in training.
Your presentation is judged by what the listener receives, not by what you send, and the voice is the delivery vehicle. Most presenters have exactly one vocal tool: getting louder. Ask any parent how well repeating a request at increasing volume works. There are better tools.
Pitch. Voices stuck in the middle of their range go monotone, and monotone is where attention goes to die. Vary your pitch deliberately; speak the way you’d speak to a friend about something you actually find interesting.
Inflection. Emphasize the words that carry the meaning. An upward inflection on a key term tells listeners what to hold onto.
Enunciation. Mumbling is a habit, and it reads as a lack of confidence. Pronounce each word fully; clarity signals command of the material.
The pause. As Mark Twain put it, no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. Every pause gives the audience a moment to catch up and reflect. Presenters fear silence; audiences need it.
Then there are nerves. Even trainers with fifteen years in front of rooms still get them. The goal is to manage nerves, not eliminate them. Forget “picture the audience in their underwear.” The technique that actually works is mental imagery, the same visualization method elite athletes use: a mental rehearsal of the performance you want. Find a quiet spot, close your eyes, and relax (breathing exercises help). Picture yourself delivering your opening in full detail, down to the clothes you’re wearing and the lighting in the room. See yourself confident, shoulders back and head high. See the audience nodding and applauding. Repeat until the successful version plays easily in your mind, whenever you have a few minutes during a break or at lunch. Then open your eyes and take a few deep breaths. You’ve replaced the mental movie of failure with one of success, and your body follows the movie.
Body language does the rest. Stand up straight and smile; the posture you visualized is the posture you should occupy. Use gestures and facial expression to reinforce your message, keeping them measured for an adult audience. Confidence you don’t feel yet can be rehearsed into existence. Start with vocal tools to improve your presentation style and mental imagery to minimize nervousness and anxiety.
Every workshop includes hands-on exercises with personalized feedback from master trainers.
Not satisfied? Full refund plus $100. No other training company makes this promise.
Retake any workshop once for free to reinforce your skills after your workshop.
Submit your course materials for expert review for a full year after your workshop.
Delivery skills get the attention, but the room quietly decides how much of your work lands. Treat setup the way you’d prepare your home for guests: you want learners to walk in and feel welcome and expected. Set up the day before if you possibly can; a ready room buys you a calm morning.
The setup checklist:
Then, within the first hour of the session, cover housekeeping, the guidelines that prevent confusion later. It’s a softer word than “rules,” and it should feel that way: common sense and good manners, agreed on together. Cover the hours (restate start, break, and end times each morning of a multi-day course), the restrooms and emergency exits, cell phone expectations, and lunch — where to eat, when, and how long, plus the coffee situation.
Explain the course manual and supplies. Tell the group you’ll be mixing table groups mid-day so they work with different people. Offer availability after hours for one-on-one questions. And encourage questions at any time, with a Parking Lot flipchart for the ones that need to wait. Invite the learners’ agreement and input on all of it; guidelines the group helped set are guidelines the group actually follows.
For the room itself, run through our 15 quick tips for successful training room set-up.
A presentation has one of four purposes: to inform, to persuade, to inspire, or to entertain. Identifying which one you’re serving is the first step in preparation, because it drives everything downstream, from what content you include to how you deliver it. Most business presentations inform or persuade; the best ones usually do a little of both.
Briefly and personally. Give your name, your relevant background, and why you’re excited about this material, in one or two sentences that establish credibility without reciting your resume. Let learners see the human behind the trainer: a short story about your own experience with the topic does more than a list of credentials. Then clarify your role in the session and move the attention back to them.
More than you think, and mostly before you touch slides. Plan for the full five-step process: planning the purpose and audience, writing for the ear, rehearsing out loud and checking logistics, then delivering and evaluating. As a working rule, a high-stakes one-hour presentation deserves several hours of preparation, and the rehearsal step (actually saying it out loud, more than once) is the part most presenters skip and most regret skipping.
Structure and delivery, in that order. Structure means a planned opening, a body organized around a few key points, and a deliberate close. Delivery means the vocal tools (pitch variation, inflection, enunciation, and the pause) plus confident body language and managed nerves. Trainers need one more on top: the ability to shift from presenting information to running practice and feedback, because presenting alone isn’t training.
Presentation skills stick when you practice them and someone who presents for a living tells you what to fix. That’s what our workshops are for. Start with Instructional Techniques for New Instructors, or browse all upcoming workshops and dates. Money-back guarantee plus $100: if the training doesn’t deliver, you don’t pay.