Finding Your Voice on Naxos

Do you ever get a sore throat after speaking for a while? Lose your voice? Get told you’re hard to hear, not very dynamic or, rather horribly, a bit boring? Do you rush when you’re nervous, forget to breathe, speak too quietly, or suddenly become very aware of your hands?

You are definitely not alone.

We’ve been talking for a while at Naxos Creative about running a retreat around presentation skills and finding your voice, and it feels like such a natural fit for us. So much of what we do is about giving people time, space and confidence, and this retreat would be exactly that.

Neil will lead the presentation skills sessions and I’ll work with you on voice, breath and presence. We’ll look at the practical things that can make such a difference. How you stand. How you breathe. How you use your voice without pushing it. How to make yourself heard without shouting. How to slow down when your nerves make you want to race through everything at top speed. We’ll also think about your audience, because good speaking is never really about performing at people. It’s about connecting with them. Who are you talking to? What do you want them to understand, remember or feel? How do you make people want to listen? There will be lots of practical work, but nothing terrifying. This is Naxos Creative, after all.

You’ll have the chance to try things out in a small, friendly group, work on something you actually need, and get individual help along the way. That might be a presentation for work, a speech, an interview, a pitch, teaching, public speaking, or simply wanting to feel more comfortable when all eyes are suddenly on you. And then there is Naxos. We honestly can’t think of a better place to do this.

The day might begin with yoga, which of course fits beautifully with the work we’ll be doing on breath, posture and being physically grounded. Then we’ll have our morning session, followed by lunch, time to swim, read, sleep or wander down to the beach. There will be another session later in the day, but this is not a week of sitting in a conference room staring at a flipchart.

There will be excursions, shared meals, plenty of laughter and time to explore the island. We’ll go out, eat together, talk, practise and probably discover that some of the most useful conversations happen over a glass of wine or a plate of something delicious rather than during the formal sessions. That is really the Naxos Creative bit of it.

We want you to learn, but we also want you to have a wonderful week. We can offer presentation skills in two ways. If you are already joining us on one of our reading or writing retreats, you can add a private presentation skills session as a paid extra and work on something very specific to you while you are here. Or you can come to Naxos for a dedicated five-day Presentation Skills Retreat, with time to work much more deeply on your voice, confidence, presence and presentation technique. And because it is Naxos Creative, you will still be part of the wider retreat world, with the chance to meet some of the authors who are with us on the island. By the end, we don’t want to have turned you into some shiny, over-rehearsed “presenter”. We want you to sound like you.

Just a version of you that can breathe, stand comfortably, speak clearly, hold a room and trust that what you have to say is worth listening to.

Finding your voice, quite literally. And doing it on Naxos doesn’t seem a bad way to spend a week.