5 behaviours to support your peak personal performance within a group, team or audience setting.

Focusing on your personal performance and what underpins it is a great start. Over time though you may well need to bring your A-game performance into a group, audience or team setting.

What behaviours and habits will platform you should you assume a leadership role?

Or a group or team facilitation exercise that offers the opportunity for you to show your qualities?

Or the requirement to show your skillset and expertise via a presentation or talk?

Some or all of these may reside a little outside your comfort zone. In that space it’s best to have some principles that you can fall back on to allow your perform-ability shine through and support the type of performance you need and desire.

Recently I’ve been working with a start-up owner in the tech space, Carol, who was enjoying great growth within her business. Progressing from coaching and mentoring Carol through personal performance challenges, our next focus was how she could function at a high level within a group setting.

She’d soon have to pitch to groups where she was seeking investment or bigger contracts; her team was growing quickly so she’d need to be able to address & lead the wider group; and, of course, attend events where she could address attendees, network and become better known as an key person of influence within her market space.

Just as personal performance is underpinned by consistent habits, so too is your performance within a team or group setting. Knowing what to focus on makes all the difference.

I wanted Carol to enjoy fluency, focus and flow in her dealings with groups, big and small. Central to this is a series of habits & behaviours that help Carol resonate with the people she’s talking with to the point where they see her as a trusted ally.

So first up was the challenge of an important event involving a presentation with key industry figures and potential investors in attendance. Working with with Carol we’ve distilled some of the most rewarding behaviours and given them an acronym; The 6E Principles. Some or all may well help you too.

1. Engineer - Start by reverse-Engineering - Look at the challenge by starting at the end and figuring out what a great outcome will look and feel like - both for your audience and yourself. The whole experience has to be one that you’ve shared and that you’d all repeat in a heartbeat.

“To begin you must study at the end”

José Raúl Capablanca

It’s important to work to an outcome where your audience are completely satisfied. Where they feed back that the session was a tremendous investment of time. Important too that you are completely satisfied with your own performance - notwithstanding that we’re all continually taking learnings from every session so that we can move our performance needle upward.

1. Excitement - Both in yourself and the people you are working with. You can do this early by establishing the direction you are heading and the outcomes they can expect. You’ll have done some homework to ascertain what’s important to them and what message will resonate the most. This also helps communicate that we’re not in a classroom but a learning-rich environment. With regard to your own excitement levels remember that you are putting on a performance - a big challenge for Carol was learning to prep herself for a peak performance so that she’s “playing from a 10” and bringing the best version of herself.
2. Empathy - We decided that, early on, it’s important to establish with the audience that you’re here for them - you are here to listen, help , assist, understand, guide and empower them….You’ve got to establish a trust and gain their faith in you as a trusted ally. So whilst they have to do the work on their own, because you are in their corner they don’t have to do it alone.
3. Energy - Appropriate pace and momentum offer huge return. The setting, your materials, the complete environment have to lend themselves to the notion that this is a shared learning journey and everyone is being brought forward. No one will be left behind. Making sure you’re only ever a half-step ahead of your audience is critical. Getting to grips with the cadence of communication and seducing the audience with your stories are really effective tools. If you want the people in front of you to visualise success then you need to know how to play in the dynamic zone.
4. Engagement - So this is all about seeing, sensing and hearing where people are at throughout the whole conversation, presentation, meeting etc. It’s about your pitch, pace and passion and about using and leveraging elements like use-case and real-life examples where your approach, message or expertise has worked with people like those sat in front of you. Share how you can help them not just read the map but navigate the terrain. Our focus was for Carol’s audiences to think “Carol understands me/us and helps people just like me/us everyday.”
5. Expertise - Your tone, body language and/or source materials all have to communicate loudly that the people you are talking with are in safe hands. That they can trust what they are hearing and seeing. And because of this they can surrender, without fear, to your process, principles and promise.

For the entrepreneur, professional or start-up owner it’s important to do your work - what matters most though is how we position ourselves and our work for our audience, clients and colleagues. Understanding how to develop your perform-ability is your first step; sharing it with the world is your next step. Your success will flow from there.

Do you want to know more about how to ‘play from a 10’ or ‘play in your dynamic zone’ daily?? Interested in taking control of your personal performance and making peak performance your better normal?? Let’s start talking - reach me today at [email protected]