How to Communicate With Confidence in Public Settings

Many of my coaching clients struggle with communicating effectively in different public settings. These can range from team meetings, stakeholder engagements, running workshops to formal presentations. They often cite a lack of confidence and a lack of tools and techniques to feel properly equipped. From my experience, it helps to break down the challenges into why and how you are communicating.

Why are you communicating?

Next time you have a meeting or event planned where you know you are going to speak, ask yourself 'what is my intention?' Too often, we turn up without that level of self-awareness and preparation. Yes, we may know the purpose of the meeting but that's about the substance or content and not about the mindset we are bringing.

Here are five intentions that stand alone or in combination:

• To share, inform or convey information or knowledge
• To describe and explain using your experience, skills, and understanding
• To assert and advocate your views
• To test and stimulate thinking about ideas or solutions to problems
• To discover what others want or need and identify different perspectives

Your ultimate intention is to resonate with your audience. Communicating well means creating a genuine human connection where your audience warms to you because you are believable, credible, and likeable. It's essential to the process of building a positive relationship.

How are you communicating?

There are two parties when communicating and engaging: you and your audience. It's a two-way interaction of send and receive, intend and perceive. First, look at yourself because that's what you can control.

Managing yourself

The starting point is self-awareness of your personality, preferences, skills, mindset, knowledge, and experience. What will you bring that maximises your performance? What do you at your best look, sound, and feel like?

Let's consider that through the lenses of your head, heart, and guts.

Your head is about rational thinking and reasoned arguments. Some topics lend themselves to facts and figures, but there is always the danger of being dull and uninspiring. Therefore, ensure you bring your communication alive through energy and emotion. Got a slideshow? Use interesting pictures to speak for themselves or to reflect what you are saying. Avoid cramming in too much text and ensure graphs can actually be read.

Your heart is about emotions. You may be hugely passionate about your subject, but there is always the danger of losing focus, straying too far, or drowning key messages. Bring emotional intelligence to your performance by pausing for effect and through deliberate moments of calm. As recent research shows, be aware of the difference between being on autopilot and being intentional.

Tap into your intuition. Some people need structure and discipline to perform well. Others get more creative with the freedom to explore in the moment. Both require being present to sense how to play things. Your gut feeling will tell you whether to expand or limit what you have to say, an avenue to pursue or when to move on. You know more than you think, so managing yourself well means being selective and intentional both before and during communication.

Engaging your audience

A common worry among my coaching clients is their perception that they are expected to be the expert and it's only a matter of time before they get found out (imposter syndrome in the jargon). Yes, if you are billed on a platform as an expert you will need to back it up, but we all struggle with staying ahead of the curve in an era of information overload. However, you can demonstrate expertise in other ways than the traditional megaphone approach.

One way is to tap into the wisdom of your audience. People you interact with may have cognitive biases in favour of their own prowess and who judge your expertise or knowledge against it. If you're feeling vulnerable, ask them to share their knowledge or views. Egos like being flattered. Show your expertise by being a coach to bring out different perspectives from within the room (in person and online). Encourage interaction. Balance advocating a position with being curious by asking questions and deeper listening.

Your communication intentions shape your approach. For example, testing and discovery involve dialogue, whereas information sharing can mean multilogue. Preparation and practise always help to internalise your content. However, it's not always possible to prepare in-depth or too far in advance. So, timescales may dictate what you can do so you will also need to draw on your internal resources for when you are in the moment.

Tell stories if you want to connect with people at an emotional level. In the age of fake news, facts don't change minds. If you need to share hard data, juxtapose them with your story in a way that people can make the link for themselves. I once ran an exercise where half a dozen people in a cross-functional team shared how they contributed to a huge success. Each person, at every level of the hierarchy, spoke for three minutes before passing the baton on to the next person in the organisational supply-chain. The final speaker was the most senior person who reported on the ultimate impact of the project team's work (in this case, a life saved).

It also helps to develop your gravitas online and offline so that you earn attention and respect when you communicate. Gravitas is not just the preserve of men. It's a coat anyone can wear and we don't all have to wear it in the same way. You too can be the prince or princess charming of communication.

What do you know about your audience? What is really important to them? What do you want your audience to know? What do you want them to feel? How does the content fit your intentions?

Tailor your communication to their needs and desires. Do your research beforehand. Reflect on the words you use considering context and culture. Rehearse when possible. Be flexible and adaptable during your interactions.

What has influenced my self-confidence?

I've spent 40 years in a variety of roles (student, employee, manager, facilitator, consultant, business owner, coach, and mentor) and settings (managing/leading teams and projects, running workshops, conference speaking, tender presentations, one-to-one and one-to-many, online and in-person). Through experience, you pick up recurring themes about what works in communicating well and how to handle difficult situations. Check out my post on 11 Strategies for Building Your Self-Confidence. Included in it are three things that have influenced my self-confidence (although not unique to me):

Face your fears

The book by Susan Jeffers, Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway, has always rung true for me. The anticipation of having to perform generated anxiety and the fear of falling flat on my face with the consequent damning judgement from others. Training and repeated exposure to communicating in public helped lessen the negative effects.

For example, I went on a communications training course in my 20s where each week I had to stand up in front of a group for different lengths of time (1, 3, 10+ minutes) to talk about anything or a subject given to me or one I prepared. From abject dread to weary pragmatism to positive energy over 15 weeks. Don't get me wrong, my anxiety didn't disappear completely but at least I had more inner resources and techniques to help me.

Be kind to yourself

Being a perfectionist, as I tended to be when younger, can feel like you are never good enough. Like everyone else, you learn over time that there are times when you make mistakes, get things wrong, and do not perform as well as you would like... even if it irritates the hell out of you! How you respond to setbacks is crucial.

For example, I was facilitating a conference for an organisation with a hundred people in the room. After a session ended, I stood up to move things on and my mind went blank. As the silence became increasingly uncomfortable and all eyes bore down on me, my self-consciousness went into overdrive. So, I turned that potentially negative situation into an opportunity by putting the elephant on the table and saying out loud "I have absolutely no idea what happens next!" Everyone laughed with me and the atmosphere changed instantly. They were on my side because the audience knew that anyone of them could go blank at some point. The pause in proceedings gave me sufficient time to remember what was next. It taught me that being kind to yourself is about acceptance and working with the grain rather than against it.

Use success to anchor yourself

There are two phases of learning anything. The initial phase is about mastering your subject and reaching a level of competence. That's when you are at your most vulnerable and self-conscious because you worry more about performance than impact. Once you internalise things, it becomes more about refining techniques, expanding your repertoire, expressing your strengths, and deepening your knowledge and expertise. These two phases of learning can be characterised as moving from the transactional to the transformational, from the mechanical to greater meaning and value.

When you are comfortable in your own skin, you move towards what you fear as an opportunity to riff your talents, embracing the adrenaline hit so that fear enables rather than disables you. Your accept your anxieties and don't let fear phase you because you've already proved to yourself you can do it. So, nourish your self-belief and identity with your stories of personal success. Use them as an anchor when negativity threatens to blow you off course.

On a practical level, I like to use props to feel more comfortable. Having a microphone in your hands can be empowering. Using pictures on a screen deflects the spotlight away from everyone staring at me. Many times I've used a glass ball to represent a crystal ball and also a physical compass to prompt conversations with groups of students about career choices and direction. What props would work for you?

In summary, communicating well in public settings is a journey from intentions to impact through managing yourself well and connecting with your audience.

What are your communication struggles? What has helped you?

Useful resources

Finally, here are some helpful blogs and videos on the theme of communicating well:

(Photos via unsplash.com)

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David provides career and workplace coaching to help your clarity, confidence, purpose, and decision-making. He is the author of Learning to Leap: a guide to being more employable, and co-author with Mark Babbitt of 21st Century Internships (250,000+ downloads worldwide). His commitment and energy are in promoting lifelong personal and professional development.

 www.learningtoleap.co.uk @LearningtoLeap

Visit the Learning to Leap blog to read more of his work and check out his other published articles on LinkedIn:

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