I was listening to a recent episode of Victor Antonio’s Sales influence Podcast show and one of his guests was quoting some research which showed that assertive and arrogant salespeople did the best when it came to selling. Their discussion pinned the key factor back to the seller’s confidence and belief in what they were proposing. Being an arrogant presenter isn’t going to a formula for success with your audience, so I don’t recommend that route. Being confident however is certainly a winner in the persuasion stakes. Think about it though, how many of the people you have seen presenting looked totally confident? I would vouch not too many.
If this is such an important attribute when presenting and it makes perfect sense irrespective of any research on the matter, then why isn't everyone when presenting doing their best to project confidence? The pendulum tends to sit in the middle. Not too hot and not too cold and so the presentation and the presenter both become instantly forgettable. Vanilla style efforts are a formula for obscurity. This is ironic really because often the intention is to increase the presenter’s profile and raise the levels of business credibility being attached to the speaker. These are important motivations to go to the trouble to prepare a talk and to put one’s personal and professional brands out on display for all to evaluate.
How can we project more confidence when presenting? It sounds too simplistic, but speak louder than normal. We have to separate our normal work day roles from our speaker role. We cannot give our talk as if we were chatting over coffee with our colleague. We have a different set of responsibilities now and we have a greater profile to boot. The effort to speak louder forces us to raise our energy levels. This now sets up a transmission of our energy from our position on the stage to the audience members seated in front of us. They can feel the energy we are projecting. I don’t mean shouting or screaming, but I do mean trying to “throw” your voice. One thing to help with this is to try and project your voice to the farthest wall not just to the audience members seated in front of you. Having that distance objective in mind will help to raise your energy level and also your connection with the audience.
Another simplistic sounding piece of advice would be to look at your audience. In Japan we don’t make direct eye contact very often, because it is considered to be confronting. Again, there is a difference between chatting with a colleague over coffee while not staring them straight in the eye and giving a business presentation. The roles are different and we have to accept that construct. When we are the speaker we want to stare straight into the eyes of our audience.
The way to do this is to regulate the length of the eye contact. Three or four seconds is too short because it doesn’t allow us to make that one-on-one personal connection. If we start holding the eye contact for over seven or eight seconds then the connectivity bridges across into axe murderer, psycho maniac levels of intrusion. It is too much and it makes people feel very uncomfortable in Japan. Around six seconds gives us enough connection without too much pressure. Living in Japan beats the direct eye contact power out of you, so it takes a bit of concentration to suspend the usual societal norms and start making eye contact with strangers. I would notice it when I went home to Australia and I would find myself avoiding making direct eye contact with people, through force of habit from living here in Nippon for so long. So it requires confidence and guts in Japan to make eye contact with others in a public forum such as a speech.
When we make the eye contact, we have one thing in our mind. We want to have the person we are looking at feel as if it were just the two of us in this room and that we are giving them our full concentration. After about six seconds we shift our gaze to the next person and then we repeat the exercise. In a forty-minute speech, we could make one-on-one eye contact with four hundred people. In other words, we could connect with every single member of the audience in most cases and with smaller audiences, we could do this multiple times.
We want to be unpredictable with our eye contact, so we should mix it up, rather than moving along the rows of seated audience members in a linear fashion. We do this to keep our audience members on their toes and not allow them to zone us out and daydream about picking up the dry cleaning or whatever it is they need to be doing after this talk. Having the speaker suddenly fix their eyes on you and stare at you while they are talking, definitely wakes you up.
So if we can just change up two things – the power of our voice and eye contact – we can make a big difference to how we are being perceived by the audience. That high level of confidence will translate into the listeners being more open to believing what we are saying.
