Presence Training

Can a former barrister teach a nervous executive to speak in public without resorting to the usual breathe-and-smile platitudes? That is the bet Presence Training makes, and the answer it puts forward rests on Daniel Kingsley, who practised law for fifteen years before turning to coaching. He has spent more than fourteen years working with speakers since, and the company itself has been running for over a decade. The London operation centres on a single branded approach, The Presence Method, applied across courses, coaching, and corporate work.

Public speaking courses and executive coaching

The flagship is a Public Speaking Foundation Course, run in person as two two-day modules totalling four days. That structure tells you something about the philosophy: this is not a one-off seminar you sit through and forget, but a programme split to let practice settle between sessions. Alongside it sits one-to-one executive coaching, which covers leadership presence, presentation delivery, and slide design, available both face to face and online. Organisations can commission bespoke in-house training, and there are standalone online courses for people who cannot get to London. Consulting rounds out the commercial side.

Speaking Circles for ongoing practice

What gives the offering texture is the practice infrastructure around the core teaching. Presence Training runs Speaking Circles, a recognised methodology that puts participants in front of a supportive group to rebuild their comfort with an audience, and it positions these as ongoing classes rather than a single exercise. For graduates there is the Presence Club, an alumni-only public speaking club the company describes as the only dedicated club of its kind run by a London training provider. Whether or not that claim is literally unique, the intent behind it is sound: most courses end and leave you on your own, and a standing place to keep speaking is a genuinely useful thing to attach to a programme.

Four audience types from anxious speakers to organisations

The audiences are clearly defined. People carrying real public speaking anxiety are named directly, as are executives and business leaders who want more authority in the room, and experienced speakers chasing sharper impact. That range is honest rather than scattered, because the same method scales from someone terrified of a wedding toast to a director rehearsing a board presentation. Organisations form the fourth audience, served through the bespoke route.

Review ratings across multiple platforms

The credibility evidence here is unusually strong. On Google, Presence Training carries over 350 reviews at a 5.0 average, and the company describes itself as the top-rated public speaking course in London on that platform. A separate Trustindex aggregation shows 372 reviews at five stars, and the site's own reviews page points to more than 340 five-star participant ratings. Numbers that high across more than one source invite a note of caution, since a perfect average always invites scrutiny, but the volume is consistent, and in a field where a single bad day in front of an audience tends to generate vocal feedback, that consistency is harder to accumulate than it looks.

The three figures sit close together, roughly 340 to 372, which reads like the same body of feedback counted slightly differently across platforms instead of an inflated tally. Presence Training also appears in a number of media features and speaker event listings, which adds some external confirmation beyond the review platforms.

Reaching Presence Training is straightforward. A phone number and an email address sit on the homepage and recur across the site, and the company is openly based in London. There is no street address on the front page, which is a mild gap for anyone wanting to confirm exactly where the in-person modules run, though for a training provider whose courses are venue-based and likely move between hired rooms, that omission is easy to forgive.

From legal background to fourteen years coaching

One thing the site does not hide is the human at the centre of it. Coaching businesses often blur the trainer behind a brand, and putting Kingsley's legal background and coaching tenure up front lets a prospective client judge who they would be learning from. For high-stakes presentation work, that transparency counts for more than any marketing line, because you are buying access to a person's judgement, not a methodology PDF.

On the whole, Presence Training is a credible option for a senior professional who freezes before presentations or a leader who speaks competently but lands flat. The four-day foundation course is the obvious entry point for structured group work; executive coaching suits anyone who needs private, targeted help on a specific upcoming talk. The Speaking Circles classes offer a way to keep working between course modules or after completing the programme, which is a practical detail that many providers skip entirely.