When we stand and present, we want to come across as confident and composed.
And one of the great ways to do that is by working on our body language. Let's
look at three ways to improve your nonverbal body language in presentations.
Coming up.
Hello again, friends. If you never seen one of my videos, I'm Alex Lyon.
And this channel, Communication Coach, is here to help you increase
your impact so you can lead your teams to higher levels of excellence. And I
believe that presentation skills are a really important part of leadership.
You're going to be standing and presenting quite frequently if you're in
any kind of leadership position. So we want to get just a little bit better at
this. Let's look at three ways you can improve your nonverbal body language so
that people can hear your message in a much more confident and composed way.
And these tips, by the way, go together. So each of the three tips have a couple of
pieces as you'll see. So the first tip is eye contact and smile. So eye contact.
You have to look directly into somebody's eyes that's listening about
99% of the time. You don't want to look too much at your notes. You don't want to
look back at your slides really. You certainly don't want to look at the
floor over their heads. A lot of bad habits out there in terms of eye contact.
You want to look directly in someone's eyes almost the whole time and that
really takes quite a bit of practice. The other thing you want to do is look
directly into somebody's eyes long enough to finish a thought and then move
on to the next person. So you don't want to just stare at one person the whole
time and you don't want to scan so that you're never locking in. A communication
coach actually once told me, "One thought, one look." So long enough to finish about
a sentence, feel that connection, and then you move on to the next person. So what
do you do with your face while you're making eye contact. You've got to
smile. A lot of times people get overly robotic when they present. They might be
making good eye contact but their face is stern. And it doesn't look like
anything's happening emotionally. You want to smile and warm your face up a
little bit so that when you're making eye contact with somebody they feel a
connection with you that's welcoming and supportive. You don't want to come across
as a deer in the headlights. Tip number two. Posture and gestures. And these
things go together. So in terms of what not to do for posture, you don't
want to shuffle your feet back and forth. You don't want to sway your hips. You
don't want to cross and uncross your legs repetitively. You don't want to pace
around like a wild person. By the way, if you want to walk in a presentation, it's
okay to walk a little bit but make sure when you walk you stop and you say a
little bit before you walk again. So walk with a purpose,
stop, share your message, and then maybe a minute or so later, walk again. Don't pace.
So once you have these don'ts out of the way, what should you do? You want to stand
with your feet about shoulder width apart. This is how you would stand if you
weren't self-conscious about how you're standing. We get self-conscious when we
present but really all you have to do is stand like a normal person. Then you want
to put just a tiny bit of weight on the front of your foot and a little tiny bit
lighter on your heels. And your whole foot is still touching, but you have a
little bit more of a ready responsive position. You also want to soften your
knees a little bit. You don't want to have locked knees. Bad things happen when
your lock your knees. I'm not sure of the physiology of it but when people lock
their knees, they oftentimes pass out when they're nervous. And you don't want
to do that in the middle of your presentation. So soften those knees. Now
you've got your posture. Let's add some gestures to it. You don't want to put
your hands in your pockets. You don't want to put your hands behind your back.
You don't want to grab on to different parts of your body for security. All that
looks very distracting. So here's what you should do. You should loosely clasp
your hands at about belt level. And then you should just gesture naturally from
there. You don't want to interlock your fingers you don't want to wring your
hands. Because then you'll get too locked in and it's hard to let go. But if you
practice at home just loosely clasping your hands like this then just start to
gesture naturally from here and that's the way to do it. Small little gestures
just like this. You can do this all day long and it's just going to add a nice
emphasis to your words and it's not going to be distracting whatsoever.
Tip number three. You want to pause. And when you pause after a key idea, add a little
tiny bit of a nod. I've seen some really convincing and persuasive speakers do
this. And what you'll notice if you pause after a key idea and nod that pause is
really persuasive but the nodding is contagious. You'll see that people
listening to you actually start to nod a little bit with you. And
that's one of the ways that you know you have them. It's a very subtle but
powerful nonverbal body language tip. So those are my three tips for improving
your nonverbal body language when you're presenting. But I'd like to hear your
tips. Question of the day, how do you recommend that we improve our body
language while we're presenting. Please put the comments below in that section. I
look forward to reading those. So, thanks. God bless. I'll see you in the next video.