TikTok, Reels, Shorts, etc., are video snippets training everyone to micro absorb information and stimuli. If it doesn’t grab our attention in three seconds, we are off that screen and scrolling forward to find something more interesting. The modern instrument of torture for the presenter is the mobile phone. It whips our audience away from our message and us, to the siren calls of the internet. Presenters must understand that how they start the presentation is that same three second space which will determine whether the audience pays any further attention to us or starts reaching for their phone.
When we are called up to start speaking, the uber judgmental audience assesses us for reasons to flee. The worst mistake we can make is to dive straight into the laptop screen and get bogged down in the logistics of getting our slides up on screen. Either have your slides up ready to go or get the event hosts to remove their holding slide and replace it with your slide deck and your first slide. Do not become the mechanic and have your head down under the hood. Your body language is screaming “I am ignoring my audience”, while you tap away on the keyboard, looking totally absorbed by the screen.
Instead, walk to the center of the stage facing your audience, command the room and add in a dramatic pause of ten seconds before you start speaking. You need guts to pull this off, because ten seconds of silence is long. Silence creates a vacuum, which confuses audiences used to feasting on constant stimulation. It creates a postive tension in the room which stops people chit chatting and being absorbed with each other.
It forces everyone’s attention to the stage and they mentally begin asking “what is going on?”. This is good, because they are focused on us now and we can use our body language to project, “I am so confident, I can hold all of you in silence, before I choose to start”. This confidence is convincing and sets the right platform for us to launch forth from.
There are physical and mental barriers separating the speaker from the audience. We must shatter that barrier. We do that with our stage positioning, body language, eye contact, gestures and how we direct our voice. Depending on the venue, the stage could be at a distance far from the audience or we could be able to walk inside the audience area.
If we are far away, we need to work on projecting our ki – our intrinsic energy - to reach the farthest members of the crowd. We should be pushing our ki all the way to the back wall and sending our energy to the audience members in the cheap seats at the rear. We can also move to the apron of the stage and stand as close as possible to the audience, towering over them to bring more physical presence to our talk. People talk about having “Executive Presence” and this technique is that “Presence” on steroids. We can choose to move to the wings of the stage and standing on the apron, work on those members seated to the sides as well, to bring them into our web.
When we are far away from the audience, we need to make the most of our gestures to bring energy to the point we are making. You cannot get this effect if you have your hands behind your back, in your pockets, arms folded across your chest or hands coyly protecting your groin from the audience. Open body language must communicate, “I am not afraid of you. I welcome you close to me to receive my message of hope. Come to me, come to me”.
The gestures add to this openness by using inclusiveness through open hands and the wide spreading of the arms. Many speakers in our training are afraid to use big gestures, yet once they use them and review them on video, they realise it doesn’t look too much as they feared. In fact, they can see it makes for much better communication of the points of their message.
We add to the power of the gestures by locking our eyes with each member of the audience, one by one, to drive in the message. The objective is the eye contact is so intense that they feel we are speaking exclusively to them and there are only the two of us in the whole room. An important point is to lock on to just one eye of the person you are looking at and not split the power of your gaze.
By moving from one audience member to the next every six seconds, we use the power of our eye contact to fill the entire space in the venue. In one minute, we can make direct, intense eye contact with ten people and in ten minutes we have covered off one hundred audience members. If the talk is forty minutes long, we get to repeat this engagement intensity four times for each individual. We will fill the entire room with our presence when we do this.
If we are at floor level amongst the crowd, we can use our physical proximity to connect with the people seated, by standing over them at close range, to drive home a key point. We can’t stay there though, because the pressure is too strong. We must retreat to a more neutral location to reduce the intensity. We don’t just do this once - we go back in again and again and take a series of bites like a shark in a feeding frenzy. It is like a blast of unassailable energy, which we choose to release whenever we want to make a strong point and drive home our message.
Body language, in combination with our full delivery onslaught, makes for a differentiated, powerful, memorable brand building presentation and that is what we want, isn’t it?
