THPS Diagnostic: “Sanity Check” your Important Presentations

Each coaching session is a 5 stage process designed for you. 1. I ask if you have any specific upcoming presentations or skills you want to learn. 2. I conduct a speaker assessment to measure your skills, progress and any skill atrophy and benchmark that against the Fitts & Posner model of skill acquisition. In almost all cases, performance goes up over time and strain goes down over time. But Performance atrophies faster in the early stages and eventually atrophies at glacial rates when you arrive at the Autonomous phase. 3. I provide you with exercises and feedback throughout the entire session. You speak about 80% of the time. The exercises and feedback are dependent on whether you are in the Cognitive Phase, Associative Phase, or Autonomous phase. More quiz questions and “spot the mistake” exercises while you’re learning; more increasingly difficult and realistic speaking scenarios when you’re self-correcting and building intrinsic feedback; and more variable and extraordinarily pressurized scenarios when you are able to perform multiple skills effortlessly. 4. Each session ends with a written report on your progress and performance. 5. In between sessions, you are provided with exercises, videos and AI tools if you want to improve in your own time.

Check out the links at the very top of this website. You will be able to Book Coaching and Book Classes by using Calendly or Appointlet to find coaching and class times to suit your availability.

Tom Hendrick has coached a diverse range of people and organizations. Here is one example. One client (who has left a testimonial) owned a hair accessory business and she wanted to grow the business by speaking at conferences and social media more. We did 4x 1 hour sessions on the Repeat Count method, Sound Change, and Say What You See. She was able to speak without notes, control her voice and nerves in front of large crowds, in podcasts and now records multiple short videos a day. No matter your situation, I help people un-inhibit their ability to speak clearly, intelligently, with control of their voice and gestures under pressure. Here is a general list: Medical students and doctors improving patient interview skills. Business Founders speaking to teams, clients or at conferences or social media. Subject matter experts that want to speak for a living and want to design workshops and measure and master their unique communication style. CEOS and leaders that need to speak well in high-stakes board presentations and stakeholder conversations.

Tom Hendrick is the sole owner and operator of the business. So you will be speaking directly with Tom Hendrick. However, to make the booking experience quick and easy, Tom has incorporated Calendly and Appointlet booking systems for coaching and class availability and scheduling.

That is a complex question, and individual persons are affected differently. But therein lies the need to put speakers through a speech assessment to measure the effects. Most coaches do not do this and simply provide the same advice to every individual client.

This is how the Sympathetic Adreno-medullary system generally affects public speaking performance. The amygdala is a part of the brain responsible for taking signals from what you hear, see and think and will provide certain hormone signals if those signals are predicted / interpreted as threatening. But in my experience with hundreds of clients, the amygdala is usually very bad at predicting, and even worse at helping. The amygdala often “helps” by increasing heart rate, stress (cortisol), over-energizing the speaker (adrenaline), and producing other uncomfortable side effects. This results in people losing their ability to otherwise speak intelligently and confidently due to pressure. It’s not their fault they are so inhibited, it is involuntary.

That’s why each coaching session with Tom Hendrick starts with a speaker assessment. We measure the baseline physiological and biomechanical response before we Master the technique. A client on their 3rd session will quickly fill out a mostly unfinished template of the theory covered so far and by the 3rd session they can do so without much strain or error. However, I will then give them an activity of similar difficulty to their best effort in the previous session, and they almost always perform worse (less coherent, more mistakes) than last session. This is a sign of two things: one that some inhibition exists, secondly their skills may have atrophied (although significant atrophy is unlikely within a week). This physiological load inhibits the word association and self-regulation systems. We use drills like 'Repeat Count' and 'Sound Change' to re-establish control while the SAM system is active

However, after another 2x similar difficulty exercises, they outperform their session 2 performances. Because it only took 10minutes for that to happen, the remaining 50minutes of the session can be spent progressively overloading their skills. Clients need to ask their brain for more adaptation than it is willing to give to create the adaptation to improve their sympathetic adreno-medullary system.

By progressively overloading the cognitive challenge in our 4-Session Protocol, we force the brain to move from a 'Reactive' state to an 'Autonomous' state where performance remains high despite adrenaline spikes