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People with a true command of The
Skills know that a large part of engaging the audience is
simply being you. For some reason most people think that
once you get up to speak, you've got to take on an entirely new
persona. You have to be an entirely different person at
the front of the room, because you're speaking to a group.
The reality is that people come to a presentation not to hear what you
have to say, not to be impressed by your knowledge base.
They’re actually there for your humanness. They want to
see and hear information delivered by a human. They're
human. They know what it's like. They want to see
what value you can add to information that they could just as
easily obtain by getting a copy of the handout.
The more spontaneous you can be, the less "practiced" you
seem, the more likely you will come across as the genuine person
you are and the more impact you will have on your audience.
And when you learn to forget the fact that there's 500 people
out there, or 50 people, or even 5 people, because you're only
ever speaking to one person at a time, well, then, what you
realize is that public speaking is no different from having a
conversation across a lunch table. Speaking to a group
never needs to be any different from talking to your colleague
on the same topic.
Do you feel uncomfortable talking one-on-one to people? Most
people don't. Similarly, when you have a discussion with
somebody about what's going on at work, do you prepare for it
for three or four hours ahead of time? Do you go into a
lunch with a co-worker with a written set of talking points, and
a practiced set of word tracks, or do you just kind of let
things happen?
You will become a master of The
Skills only when you convince yourself that you must
approach your presentation not the least prepared way, but the
least practiced way. You don't want to be practiced,
because it's going to flatten out your delivery. A
flattened delivery has less passion, and it's passion that
people come to feel and hear.
One last little bit of advice that you’ll begin to notice
quickly as you observe people when they speak: people with The Skills know that when all else fails, smile.
If you can't do any of the things we’ve coached you on in
this course, if you can't do anything else right, learn to
smile. People who are known as great communicators know
how effective just smiling can be. People in the audience
are hard-wired from birth to be receptive to a smile – and
thus more receptive to your message when you do. Think
about the first thing you do when you meet a little baby.
“Oh, look. Isn't she cute? Oh, look, [tickle,
tickle] let me see a smile”.
We conducted presentation skills training for The World
Bank some time ago, and the group was comprised of people from
every continent except
Antarctica
. Whenever we talk about the way we equate eye contact
with veracity, we always preface it by saying, in Western
cultures, we assign a lot of value to eye contact because we
equate looking people in the eye with telling the truth.
Well, a woman from
Kenya
told us that in many cultures in
Africa
, a little bit of eye contact is a good thing. Too much
eye contact is a bad thing.
She explained to the group that if you avoided eye contact
when talking to somebody, they didn’t trust you. If you
held eye contact too long, they would kill you.
Evidently, the way that you ameliorate the threat from sustained
eye contact is by smiling. So if you want to talk to
somebody, have eye contact, but make sure that you smile.
It disarms people. And when people are disarmed, they're
more receptive to your message.
In our design classes we demonstrate that human brains
process different forms of information differently. Speech
is a form that our brains don't readily absorb. When we
receive information in the form of speech or text or numbers or
sequences, we don't just absorb them at face value - our brain
first filters the information before it stores it or acts on it.
So there's always a wall, there's always a barrier up there.
You've got to overcome that barrier. One way you can
do that is smile.
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