We often urge speakers to get feedback from every available source – audience evaluations, audio and videotape, etc. we’ve also suggested that you ask associates who plan to attend your presentation to give their honest appraisal of how you and your message come across.

Invite an associate to attend with the sole purpose of critiquing you. Tell him or her what specific aspects of presenting you’re concerned about or working on developing and ask them to concentrate on those aspects alone.

For example, if you’re working on increasing your eye communications, have your personal “evaluator” take note of how long you look at individuals in the audience. Tell hem or her to watch out for any darting, fixations, or looking up or down when thinking.

Decker trainers, like all good business communicators, are continually fine-tuning their skills. During workshops and other programs conducted by two trainers, each one makes it a habit to ask the other for specific feedback.

The information you’ll get from this feedback technique will go a whole lot farther than the all too common, “Oh, you were just great.”