10 ways to be like Mr Drymousis

You may not be a doctor and you may not always have a captive audience, but you do have an audience you can captivate. It’s not up to them, it’s up to you. All they have to do is walk in the room.

Here are 10 ways to own that room, win your audience and make them want to thank you for speaking!

01. Welcome your audience

When I walked into Mr Drymousis’ office I was a little nervous. He knew this and was deliberately warm. He shook my hand, invited me to take a seat, smiled and then sat down. That was what was appropriate for his space. What is appropriate for your space? If you are online, sitting straight or standing up with your eyes looking at the lens of the camera means your audience will feel deeply welcomed. Camera off and face looking to the side means they won’t. If you are in person, shaking someone’s hand warmly with a smile can break so many hidden barriers.?

02. Give them a headline

Mr Drymousis knew I needed to have an operation. He started off by saying, ‘You have a hernia, which in Latin means “hole”. We need to fix the hole.’ It was a clear headline that let me know exactly why I was in the room. Often in presentations we don’t take the time to give the ‘why’—we leap into long sentences full of data and forget to take the audience with us. We need to remind the person why they are in the room. Tell them about the hole that needs to be fixed. Do it in a short, sharp, series of headlines. You could call it an introduction. Or an elevator pitch.

03. Assume they know nothing

Most people who present suffer from the curse of knowledge—they have 10 out of 10 knowledge on what they are speaking about. They assume the audience knows 6 out of 10. You need to assume the audience knows 2 out of 10. Mr Drymousis assumed I knew very little about a hernia and he was right. But even if I did know something, I wasn’t offended by his picture. I felt considered. If you start with the assumption that people know little, you will slow down in your thought process and consider how to take them from a 2 to a 10.

04. Assume they can pick things up very quickly

To get an audience from 2 to 10, you also need to assume they can pick things up quickly. That way you don’t turn into an over-explaining patronising professor with long waffly sentences. As soon as Mr Drymousis could see that I knew what needed to happen he led me to the next bit of information. You will always have insight to give to others—don’t assume they know it. They don’t know what is inside your head.?

05. Paint a picture

How do you get your audience up to speed and take them with you? The brain is wired to process 90% of information in pictures.? So paint a picture. Always. Mr Drymousis painted the picture of a hole needing to be filled in. That helped me to grasp why I needed an operation. I don’t want a hole in my body! The conversation then became about how we filled in the hole—the picture helped the conversation move forward.?

06. Take your time

The way to get connection is to take your time—to allow for a beginning, a middle and an end. Painting a picture takes time because you need to use words, or images on a slide deck, to paint the picture.?Don’t rush to the ‘important facts’, build up to them. Everything about your presentation is important—from the welcome to the introduction to the headline and the picture. If you rush one of these you could lose your audience.?

07. Speak in short sentences

Most people think long sentences make them sound important and worth listening to, but the opposite is true. Daniel Kahneman (Nobel Prize winner for his work on how the brain works—pretty clever guy) says that when we speak in long sentences the audience doesn’t trust us. When we speak in short sentences the audience does. It’s true. Mr Drymousis did it and I trusted him and felt confident he would do the job.

08. Repeat the picture

Mr Drymousis? used the picture of the hole to tell me, throughout our conversation, how large the hernia was and how they were going to fix it.?I went home and told my wife and children about it confidently—because he had repeated enough to land it in my brain. Repeating a concept is a powerful thing and repeating a picture at the right time can cement everything you are trying to do.

09. Ask for questions

Everybody likes to be given the opportunity to ask questions. Mr Drymousis asked me if I had any questions about the procedure. He allowed me permission to talk about recovery and to ask how long it would take. Allowing for questions shows you are open to discussion and it shows you are giving time to the audience. But don’t say, ‘does anyone have any questions?’ You will probably get tumbleweed silence. Be specific. Asking about one thing allows people to focus on one thing.

10. Exit your audience

Mr Drymousis ended my meeting with him with a smile, a shake of the hand and a promise to see me soon. He didn’t look in the other direction, jump on his phone or just disappear (sound familiar?). He used the basic understanding of ending well. Online we are all so keen to move on to check our messages and emails, to leap into the next meeting that we forget to thank the person for giving us their time. A good ending is a smile, a thank you, a summarising, a, ‘See you in four weeks’.

It doesn’t require a lot to do but it does require thought. People will be grateful for it. I walked away with a spring in my step.?What if you could do that for someone?