The highlight of your presentation is… YOU

This presenter is doing it right. He’s not turning around to look at his slides. All eyes and ears are on HIM

I've been working recently with Emma (To preserve this client's confidentiality, I've changed her name and any details that might identify her).

Emma is coming back to the world of public speaking after a career break.

Like most of the people I work with, she's a highly competent professional, and exceptionally bright.

And yet - when she contemplates speaking at, or chairing, public events like conferences and panel discussions, her confidence fades.

Maybe it's the period away from professional life; maybe it's the fact that she's making something of a career pivot, into a slightly different field (geopolitics and international development) where she doesn't yet have the same level of expertise as in her earlier career in development finance.

Whatever the causes, the prospect of speaking to large audiences, taking questions from audiences, perhaps having to mediate discussions between opposing parties... it's all making Emma uneasy.

The irony is that the rest of the time, she's incredibly confident and easygoing. She knows exactly who she is.

It's a contrast I often see in clients: they know who they are, they know what they're talking about.

But put them on the spot - put them in front of an 'audience', of even a handful of people - and they struggle to sound and look as confident as they feel.

When Emma speaks on work-related topics, she frequently uses notes; she's careful, verging on hesitant. Physically she's stiff, and speaks in a dispassionate manner that tends towards monotone.

And then, when we met this week, she told me about getting caught in a rainstorm.

Stock images prove that getting caught in the rain is fun. NB: any physical resemblance to my client’s family members is completely coincidental

She'd been travelling in Eastern Europe with her adult children, and gone hiking in the mountains. They were caught in some terrible weather, got soaked to the skin - having packed all the wrong stuff for this kind of trip, and had to borrow had to borrow things from their mountain guides.

So there was much laughter between Emma, her family, and their hosts, at the sight of them dripping wet, dressed in traditional Slavic mountaineer garb!

When Emma told this story, she was like a different woman.

The telling of this anecdote was one of the most successful acts of speaking I've heard from her.

What made it so impressive?

• She enjoyed it immensely - the time in the mountains with her family, and the telling me about it.

• There was nothing to rehearse or study - it was her lived experience, so no-one was factchecking her. In her new professional role, she's dealing with contentious subjects, and people often aggressively factcheck or take issue with her arguments.  But here, she could just relax and tell me the story.

These are two important things for Emma to note. Both points are deeply relevant to how we make other speaking moments as successful as this one. 

On enjoyment: 

No monotone here. She was 'delivering', vocally and physically. 

Her facial expression, and eyes, were active; when she recalled these moments, her whole face lit up.

This vocal and physical energy was a reflection of the joy she found in those moments.

These were the 'highlights' of the experience for her, and so they became the vocal 'highlights' for me, the listener - 'we got SOAKED! We looked SO ridiculous!' These became my favourite moments.

This is literally what communication is: getting what's in your head, into other people's heads.

If we recognise the things we do vocally and physically, in these moments when we have genuine feelings about a topic, then we can do the same things, consciously and deliberately, on ANY given topic, so that listeners don't have to work hard to grasp the value of what we have to say. 

There's a phrase I like:  'where you put your intention is where listeners put their attention'.

It's useful to think of these key moments of emphasis as psychological hooks -  things that grab the listeners' attention and tell them 'this is worth hearing, this is important'.

Sometimes, these hooks are in the speechwriting: a powerful statistic, or a compelling piece of rhetoric, a memorable phrase.

But in the act of speaking, they're likely to be about the delivery - the energy in the speaker’s voice, the gesture she makes, the look in her eyes.

'those are the moments I actually remember'

Emma mentioned her uncle, who often talks at length: he tends to lapse into monotone, but then occasionally he'll raise an eyebrow, give a look, and as Emma said, 'those are the moments I actually remember'. 

Now,  whether Emma's uncle does this consciously or unconsciously is not relevant.

The key thing is that this is what we remember, even when a speaker has a lot of interesting stuff to say.

On not being factchecked:

This is an important issue for many of my clients. It's closely linked to imposter syndrome.

Emma is often engaging with, and trying to engage other people with, heavyweight and complex topics.

What drives her is seeking opportunities to bring people together to hear from the foremost experts in the field, but she's keenly aware that she's not as eminent as those experts.

This gives rise to a certain anxiety: she has faced, and will face, audiences containing people who know more than she does, and some who are sceptical, perhaps hostile.

And when she feels her credibility is lacking, she fears it will undermine what she's trying to do.

This anxiety is really common, and it affects us physically; it creates tension in the body, which affects the voice. It can affect the breath. You can see and hear that the speaker is uncomfortable.

All of this affects the readiness to speak. It affects our feeling that we have the RIGHT to speak. 

Confidence, and feeling physically at ease

This anxiety and its physical symptoms is absent when Emma speaks about things like getting caught in the rain.

The ease she had in that moment is linked to a deeper confidence that she possesses.

She was talking about a time when she messed up. She packed the wrong stuff, got thoroughly soaked, and had to borrow clothes that made her feel silly.

Yet she could quite happily talk about it.

The ability to be vulnerable, to be open about mistakes you've made and situations you've been in that were less than dignified... this is a rare quality that signifies you are truly comfortable with who you are.

This is what it means to be authentic. This is often what people mean when they use the word 'human', in a positive sense, as an adjective: imperfect, unforced,  unintimidating.

It's a highly prized quality that audiences appreciate when they see it in speakers.

If you're allowing audiences to see you, as you are, here and now, they feel confident to respond as they are, in the here and now. It's what makes audiences feel valued.

My aspiration for Emma is that she finds a way to be as comfortable and confident on a stage, or in a room full of important influential people, as she is when she's sitting on a Zoom call at her kitchen table, telling a funny story about getting caught in the rain.

If you can relate to Emma, and what she's working towards, then I can help you too. Message me via my website and lets talk about what's possible.