Our mental approach to our activities determines our success. We know this in sports and in business, but when it comes to speaking in public, we somehow manage to forget this vital point. In fact, when it comes to presenting in front of other people we often have a negative mindset about the activity. We may be reliving humiliations from elementary school or high school, when we had to make a presentation and were teased about it. Without actually remembering any particular incident, we manage to maintain a dread for speaking in public into adulthood. This was me by the way. I avoided public speaking pretty successfully, until I was around 29 years of age. I was fearful of it and there must have been something in my darkest memory, which was driving that fear.
As we get older and advance in our careers, we cannot avoid public speaking and giving presentations, whether we like doing them or not. We know we have to make a presentation, the date has been set and there is no escape. How do we approach it? We get straight into the details, mechanics and logistics, without spending even a moment on our proper mindset for the activity. Given we are putting our personal and professional brand out there for all to see, you would recognise this was a fairly important opportunity to get it right.
The mindset game is a critical one, especially if we are nervous about giving presentations. Confidence is paired with credibility in the presentation game and we have to exude both. We may be very unsure, nervous, even petrified but we must never show that side to our audience. Hesitation kills the message delivery and therefore the impact.
I saw a speaker recently and I felt he was impressive. Thinking back about why I felt he was a good speaker, I realized he wasn’t saying anything breakthrough or particularly valuable. He wasn’t bringing much in the way of new information or insights to his audience. What he was bringing though, was a tremendous amount of confidence to be there, in front of all those quizzical eyes, looking back at him. We the audience we re buying his confidence more than anything else.
Often when we are anticipating the presentation, we imagine that our wondrous content will carry the day. We justify our ineptitude by that presuming that we can be hopeless presenters, but somehow because of the quality of our material, it won't matter. This is pretty delusional and basically it is folly. There are very few subjects where we are the font of all knowledge and therefore everyone else has to put up with our lack of professionalism.
Normally, we are competing for the attention of our audience. Social media has made a hell for presenters, because within two seconds our audience can escape to any number of other more interesting worlds. People are becoming used to multi-tasking. They are reading their Facebook feed, searching for things on Google, checking out Instagram, replying to emails and scrolling through LinkedIn or Twitter all the while they are doing something else, like supposedly listening to us.
We need to have a powerful presentation and speaking faculty to compete with the wonders of the Internet. A big part of our appeal is our message’s worth and the delivery of that worth. We need to understand that both are required. To get the right combination, we need to sell that we are confident in what we're saying and that our content is valuable. This means we are able to deliver the talk without having to read the text. We can talk to key points in front of us or up on the screen. This is different from burying your head in text notes and not engaging your audience. To have the confidence to work the room while speaking, means you have to know the content. You can do it because you created it or you adjusted what someone else had put together for you.
Start with a powerful opening, including the key message captured in your conclusion. Isolate out 3-5 key points so make your argument and support them with evidence. Design both your first close and your second close for after the Q&A.
You have managed your schedule well, so that there has been ample opportunity to practice the delivery. People who are spending all their time on the making the slides
forget they have to rehearse the delivery for an audience. They usually prefer to practice on their audiences, then wonder why the whole thing was very flat with no engagement of their audience.
In the weeks leading up to the talk we are the thinking about what we want to say and how we might say it, we are combing the media and books for juicy quotes and examples to back up what we are saying. We are playing it out in our mind's eye. During this mental imagining, we see ourselves as very confident and successful - we are predicting our success by seeing it before we even do it. We are seeing the audience nodding and agreeing with what we say. We can see ourselves enjoying the moment and feel in full control.
When we have rehearsed, we know the timing, the cadence of the talk. We know where to pause, which words to hit harder than other to emphasize our key points. We are confident on the flow of our talk and with this knowledge we can now relax and enjoy the process rather than dreading it. We have to work on our mindset toward what we are doing. We have to change our self-talk around how we approach the talk. We have to focus on the benefits of building our personal and professional brands. We have to look for every opportunity to talk, because that is how we become better and better. If we can change our mindset, we can change our starting point and that will bring the results we know we need to generate.
