Joel Elfman testimonials

As someone who already has public speaking and training experience, I had been looking for a course that would help me further develop my skills for a long time. Most courses either only cater for the absolute beginner, or focus on the less important aspects of speaking - where to hold your hands, how to use Powerpoint for example. Jonathan Altfeld's Speaking Ingeniously course however is different. Right from day 1, I realised I was in for something special. The massive growth both myself and other attendees experienced in our speaking skills would be hard to believe if we didn't have the DVD evidence! Jonathan's ability to train a mixed ability group is unrivaled, and on this course there were already-confident public speakers like myself, right down to people who had never spoken in public before, and even one who had a fear of public speaking! The way Jonathan trains means that everyone, regardless of their current skill level, gets massive benefits from his courses. He has mastered the hard-to-master art of training different skill levels at one time, without anyone feeling he's going too fast or too slow and it's the most effortless learning I've experienced (and among the most powerful). Who would I recommend this course to? Anyone that wants to improve their speaking skills - whether they want to speak in public or just improve their position at work (and believe me, you'll be able to negotiate more money after this course!). In my opinion, this is THE best course on speaking skills, and having researched lots of courses before I chose this one, I can guarantee you won't find the majority of this material (or have this sort of experience) anywhere else. If you want a 10 out of 10 experience, I wholeheartedly recommend Jonathan Altfeld and this course over any other.

Consider taking Jonathan Altfeld’s "Speaking Ingeniously" course. To start with, Jonathan is a very powerful public speaker himself, so even if there was nothing else to recommend about this course, just the ability to model someone who’s able to deliver an amazing impromptu presentation on just about any topic I can think of is well worth the price of the workshop. What’s even better, Jonathan, in addition to being a great communicator, is also a very skillful and dedicated teacher who’s quite able and willing to deploy his considerable NLP skills to make his students better public speakers. Add to this a powerful "Speaking Ingeniously" model of delivering both prepared and off-the-cuff presentations and you get a hell of a training! Before the course I had some idea about spatial and tonal anchoring, as well as state-chaining in the context of public speaking. After the course, I have experience of moving people through various states while creating anchors. I also became much better at generating attention grabbing headlines. Bottom line – Jonathan delivers what he advertises and then some! I highly recommend this course to anyone who wants to improve their public speaking skills.

I hired Jonathan for weekly 1-on-1 executive coaching, as well as invited him to spend two days with my team of scientists and managers, for a customized presentation followed up with individual employee coaching sessions.

Jonathan was tremendously helpful in coaching me through some very difficult situations. We focussed primarily on "emotional state management" which he quickly diagnosed was where I needed the most help. Maintaining the proper emotional equilibrium while going through stressful situations to a large extend comes natural to me. Nonetheless, there was a lot of room for improvement, and Jonathan definitely helped me reach a higher level of performance. Working with Jonathan was an absolute delight because he would quickly assess the situation I would describe to him and give me clear, specific pointers on how to adjust my perceptions and options to create a more positive emotional state regarding the situation. From there we would seamlessly transition to specific training exercises to prepare for future situations. I use many of these techniques now without thinking about them; they've become part of my repertoire and toolset.

Not only was Jonathan able to help me improve my performance, he worked with my entire team to help them improve their internal communication. By appropriately confronting them with the need to take responsibility for the outcome of their individual attempts at communication, he was able to help many of them move towards a greater awareness of their own specific communication needs and approaches and to make adjustments to improve the outcome. One team member told me what an amazing resource he was. I was very pleased with the changes in the team's approach to communicating with each other. While communication is still of course not yet perfect among them, it has improved considerably, and this allowed the team to achieve an amazing result. We set goals for the end of the year that we thought were aggressive. In fact we ended up beating the date by 2 months. No doubt we got lucky of course in terms of not encountering major technical obstacles we could not easily overcome. Nonetheless I credit a significant part of our success to Jonathan's work in enabling better team communication. Just the knowledge that in fact there were specific, attainable ways to make communication better encouraged the team and gave them the confidence to work through tense or difficult situations more smoothly than before.

Jonathan is indeed a tremendous resource for those who want to improve their communications (in the broadest sense of that word). Ultimately all human achievement is based on our proficiency to interact with others in a way that makes it more likely we will achieve a mutually beneficial, mutually desired outcome. Jonathan is able to work with any team or individual motivated enough to seek help in doing better, and helping them improve. What I appreciate the most about Jonathan is that he does not try to create an unnatural dependence. On the contrary, he happily shares his techniques and uses exercises and training to help you internalize them. Like any good coach, he helps you get better and acquire new skills that you can use on your own to achieve amazing results.

 "KE is pure Dynamite and when used with [SoM], the combination is explosive! The tools compliment each other so well, you'll find you can not only smash a nut with a hammer but also finely craft and cut and piece back together an issue or problem with the finesse of a skilled craftsman."