Get out of your head and into theirs
James Carter
Leadership & Culture ?? Field CTO @ Team Covalence ?? Developing cohesive and effective teams at scale
To maximise impact when presenting, get out of your head and into theirs.
Public speaking is feared more than death by many. Even those who enjoy presenting and make it part of their chosen career find themselves becoming nervous before presenting in certain situations. For some this ramps with the size of the audience, for others it relates to their perceived importance or status.?
Whether you avoid presenting as much as you can or enjoy it but still get those butterflies before stepping up to the mic, you can significantly increase your presenting impact by reducing the effect these nerves have on your performance.?
Get out of your head.?
Presenting nerves tend to originate from concern of how the presentation will be received. This concern manifests as negative thoughts that the mind latches onto, and this sets the stage for a mediocre performance, as you are distracted from the key message, the content, and the signals you could be picking up from the audience. Letting these thoughts go, putting your awareness outside your mind, and de-focusing on the room around you helps you release these concerns and fears, and raise your game and your impact.?
Yes, de-focusing, not focusing.?
A fantastic trick here is to rest your eyes on something but without focusing, and being aware of your full peripheral vision. This kicks the nervous system into parasympathetic nervous arousal, which enables a much calmer and balanced state of mind. Try it a few times, practice going into peripheral vision, and learn to use this superpower for when you need it. It is useful for many other situations in addition to presenting, and when presenting it enables you to pick up on a much wider range of signals unconsciously, particularly with large audiences.
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Get into their heads.?
This means use empathy, understanding and the wider awareness you can pick up from their body language to consider the topic you are presenting from their perspective. This allows you to create a much greater impact by tailoring the message more to the audience and taking live feedback into account more effectively. Now if you are thinking about how they are receiving the information and worrying they may not like it you aren’t in their heads, you are still in yours! This is still you projecting fears and worries onto them. People think critically about you far less than you imagine they do; most people are much more wrapped up in themselves. Drop these projections, get fully out of your own head, use positivity and curiosity to get into their heads and live the presentation through their perspective.?
Experimenting with techniques will seriously up your presenting game, deliver more impact, and have you excited for the next opportunity to present.?
This content by James Carter is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Helping teams and SMEs become more effective and productive with modern management techniques like agile, OKRs and the product model
1 个月Sounds a bit like Tom Peters "bias for action"
Climate - Energy - Technology - Deep Tech
1 个月James Carter excellent post - "People fear public speaking more then death" was something I heard a lot a generation ago. Still true in our era of live & lie streaming. I am very grateful that at my state grammar school debate was an essential skill - it has served me well in many public occasions. We should have a reality tv show about public speaking - after all we do dancing, baking etc. But then again developing a new batch of Cicero, ML King, Churchill, JFK, Malcolm X, Sojourner Truth (devasting speech "Ain't I A Woman") etc etc. would be seen as too much elite clap trap As for the structure of speeches - anyone interested in how a great speech is constructed should check out the TED talk by Nancy Duarte's "The Secret Structure of Great Talks" And for an even deeper dive check out the brilliant Simon Lancaster - his books are invaluable. And if you are of a nefarious turn of mind read the original works of Edward Bernays.
Leadership Consultant, Executive Coach, Facilitator and Speaker
1 个月Love this advice. I particularly like this line ‘People think critically about you far less than you imagine they do; most people are much more wrapped up in themselves’. That’s one I use all the time when I’m working with leaders on presenting. We can all be guilty of being the star of our own movie and thinking we’re therefore the star of everyone else’s!