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Confidence in communication is critical to business success, and
it's a really simple equation.
Confidence equals competence.
The more confident you come across, the more competent people will see you as, and
the more credible they'll see you as.
So we really need to work to make sure that we're confident.
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Many of us get very anxious in high-stakes communication situations, be it giving
a presentation, running a meeting, or even having an important personal conversation.
So we need to learn to manage our anxiety.
And I use that word very carefully.
We don't want to overcome it.
Anxiety actually helps us, it gives us focus, it gives us energy.
But we want to manage it, so it doesn't manage us.
And when it comes to managing that anxiety,
we need to take a two-pronged approach.
We need to first focus on the symptoms, and
what we show people in terms of our anxiety, and second we need to work on
the sources, what actually causes that anxiety So let me give you an example.
Many people, when they get nervous, they feel their heart rate beating very fast,
and they begin to perspire or blush.
This happens to me, and a great way to manage those symptoms is,
first, to take some deep belly breaths.
In doing that, you slow down your heart rate.
In addition, you get yourself breathing in a lower place,
which allows you to support your voice pattern so you don't have a shaky,
quivering voice, as many nervous people do.
In terms of the blushing and
the sweating, that's because you're actually getting hotter.
When you speak and
are nervous about speaking, your core body temperature goes up.
Just like you have a fever.
And a great way to manage that,
much like you do when you have a fever, is to make yourself cooler.
Now you're not going to hold a cold compress on your forehead when you're
giving a presentation [LAUGH] but
you could hold something cold in the palm of your hands.
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We need to think about what is driving us to be nervous.
For many of my students and the people I coach, it has to do with, for example,
the future consequences of what they're trying to do.
Many of us when When we speak in high stake situations,
we're worried about not achieving our communication goal.
If I'm an entrepeneur, I might want funding or advice.
If I'm one of my students, I might want a good grade or
to perform well on my My assignment.
And because we're worried about the future consequences we get very nervous.
So a great way to manage that source is to actually focus on the present moment,
be present while speaking.
How do you do that?
Well before you start speaking do something physical,
take a walk around the building, shake hands with people in the audience,
get yourself in the moment Athletes, before they perform their sport,
they listen to a playlist or a song to help them focus.
Speakers can do the same thing.
My secret to get present oriented is I love saying tongue twisters.
It sounds silly but
saying a tongue twister forces you to be in the present moment.
And it also warms up your voice.
Many nervous speakers, they don't take the time to warm up.
So if you want to be more confident when you present,
you need to focus both on the symptoms and the sources to help.
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We have to start by thinking about, what is our communication goal?
And a communication goal has three parts,
it's what do you want your audience to know when you're done?
How do you want them to feel, you want them to feel excited,
you want to feel concerned or just confident?
And what do you want them to do?
If you have that speaking goal, not only will it direct everything that you're
saying, but at the end of a presentation, even if you're cut off towards the end,
you should be able to recite that speaking goal.
And it's a nice way to wrap things up.
So you could say something like The bottom line is I want you to know that it's
critical to prepare for your communication and be confident in delivering it.
I want you to feel really empowered that you can do that and
give meaningful presentations and communication.
And ultimately I want you to put this into practice.
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The single best way to be more concise and
more directed to your audience is to have clear structure in what you're saying.
When we ramble, when we are putting our thoughts together as we're speaking,
that's when we risk talking too much and turning our audience off.
It's much better to start with a speaking goal.
What is it I want my audience to know Feel and do when I'm done, and
then put that information into a structure.
My favorite structure is the what, so what, now what structure.
I explain what my point is, I explained next why it's so important.
That's the so what.
Then the now what is what I'd like you to do with it.
Having a structure like that not only helps me be more confident because I know
how I'm going to say what I want to say but it keeps me very concise.
Once I'm done I'm done, there's no need to say more.
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In terms of presentations, I am on a personal mission to help people stop
the most common way of starting which is Hi, my name is, and
today I'd like to tell you about.
And the funny thing for me in that,
is most of the time when people start that way, what's behind them but
a slide projecting their name and a the title of their presentation.
It's a wasted opportunity.
I would much rather people start their presentations or
even there meetings in some kind of interactive way, ask a question
Take a poll, give some startling statistic, or perhaps tell a story.
All of those are ways to pull your audience in, I like the joke that
a good presentation starts like a James Bond movie, not with all the action and
the violence, but it starts with something that gets you attached right away.
And then after that, you see the title and the credits for the move.
Presentation should start that way, too.
Start with something that draws your audience in, and then step back and
say your name and your relationship to the topic.
And in terms of ending, we know that both primacy, that's what happens first,
and recency, that's what you hear last, are really critical.
So when you end a presentation Or you end a communication, make sure you sum up
your key ideas, but help your audience to understand what they can do with it, and
why it's important that they do that.
The most common way I hear presentations end in the business world where I do my
consulting Is oop, somebody else has got the room, we got to leave.
Or in my classes, people just say, I guess I'm out of time, thanks.
Those are missed opportunities, so really think about how to end
with something memorable and something that summarizes your key ideas.
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Non-verbal communication is really important.
People make assessments of your credibility and
form impressions within milliseconds of seeing you.
Some really simple rules around what to do in terms of your non-verbal presence.
Fundamentally it's about being big, balanced and still.
And by big I mean you want to be upright you don't want to make yourself smaller,
when we're nervous and concerned we make ourselves small and constrict,
we want to be big.
We want to be balanced, meaning our head is straight our shoulders are squared,
we're not leaning we're not resting.
Additionally, we want to be still.
When we get nervous we fidget, our hands move, our legs shake.
We want to make sure that we seem composed.
So the biggest thing to make a very effective, quick impression in terms of
your confidence is to be big, balanced, and still.
When it comes to your hands, you want them to be ecpansive.
That is you want them to go beyond your shoulders.
A lot of people carry their hands up tight and in front of them.
It's a very defensive posture.
So we wanto to make sure that we're out and
that when we're not gesturing our hands are still in calm.
Those are by far the most important non verbal postures we can take
to convey confidence.
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Making mistakes while speaking isn't normal and natural we're human beings.
One thing to do is not call attention to it, not focus on it,
sometimes when, when I make a mistake I'll just say.
I'm just so excited about this topic, I get ahead of myself.
Let's go back and start again.
Othertimes, what I'll do, is I'll just ask the audience a question.
So if I find myself floundering, or if I made a mistake, I'll stop and say,
let's take a moment to reflect on the value of what we've discussed so far.
What does this mean for you?
And while they're thinking or
perhaps I'll even have them turn to the person next to them and
exchange their answers, that gives me time to reset and get myself back on course.
There are times when people in your audience can be challenging for you.
It could be they're asking a difficult question, perhaps they have a disagreement
with something you've said, or they just want to air their point of view.
That can be very challenging.
The difficulty for you is not only handling that person in a respectful,
polite way, but you also have to be very cognizant of your audience's
perception of how you manage that.
So So I like to say I have two kids, and they like to play lots of video games.
And in their video games, their characters have life points above their head.
And as they do more poorly, they lose those life points.
As a speaker, you have credibility points above your head.
And if you handle a situation like that poorly, you lose credibility.
To me, the most valuable tool to help deal with hecklers or
challenging people is paraphrasing.
Listen to what they're saying for a little bit, then paraphrase what they've said and
move on.
So it might be something like, I clearly hear you have some passion on this topic
and I appreciate your feedback, but what I'd like to do is address, and
what I've done is I've acknowledged their Energy, perhaps their emotion, and
then I've redirected to the next place I'm going.
I've been known in meetings where somebody gets up in my face,
I've been known to say, thank you for sharing, clearly you're very passionate.
I'm curious to know what somebody on this side of room thinks about,
where I just take the floor away.
And for communicators that can feel rude But
not doing that is being rude to the rest of the audience.
So you have to be very aware of not just how you treat the troublesome individual,
but all the others in the audience.
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A wonderful mindset to have when communicating is this interatction I'm
about to have, be it a big keynote or an interpersonal interaction,
This is one of opportunity.
This is one where I have an opportunity to share my thoughts,
my beliefs, my feelings.
And it's one where I get to get information back from my audience.
Many of us see speaking as a threat or as a challenge.
And when you see that, you become very defensive.
And that manifests itself in our body in terns of being tight and constricted.
And it manifests us in our willingness to share, and
to go deeper into the information that we want to convery.
So having a mindset of, this is an opportunity, this is something where
I can share, and I can learn from others, really makes a big difference.
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