In your professional life, you’ll often be “on stage.” The stage may be in front of a thousand-seat auditorium, a six-person breakout room, or your computer screen on Zoom. Use the tips below to project energy and confidence regardless of the venue. Your audience will unconsciously imitate your mood and rise to your energy level. Getting humans together in a room (or on a screen) is costly in time and money. Use every opportunity to make a difference—for them and your career.
Moderate Rate, Pitch, and Volume
Don’t shy away from injecting feeling and expressiveness into your voice. Get feedback from peers on these features because what you hear inside your head isn’t what your listeners hear. Another option is to record a video of yourself to check your voice. Just as you need to keep your face and body mobile, keep your voice mobile, too. Vary your speed, volume, and intensity to match your message. Although your voice is an irreplaceable tool, the absence of a voice speaks volumes. Don’t be afraid of silence—particularly when you’re pausing to avoid an “um,” “uh,” or other filler words. Deliberate pauses also gather attention, emphasize a point, or give people time to ponder a rhetorical question. Silence, when wielded well, is powerful.
Avoid Eye Tricks
Your eyes are a crucial way to connect with your audience—to see and be seen by them. The problem is that we tend to focus inward and become self-conscious when we're nervous. We look down at the floor or at the wall. Remind yourself that the people in the audience generally want you to succeed. In the spirit of making your presentation a conversation, try to hold short mini-conversations with individual audience members. Look an audience member in the eyes, speak to them for three seconds, then repeat with someone in another part of the room, thus spreading your attention throughout the audience.
Display Congruent Facial Gestures
Smile: An authentic smile is one of a speaker’s best resources. It doesn’t have to be a big toothy grin, but try to look happy unless you’re announcing a tragedy. A wry smile is fine if you’re a dry-humor person. A 2015 Behavior Study on TED Talks by 'Science of People' found that "speakers who smiled at least for 14 seconds were rated as higher in intelligence than those who smiled for less" (Van Edwards, 2015).
Animate your face: A stiff, immobile expression is off-putting—even disturbing—to watch. The larger your audience, the more you need to exaggerate your expressions and move your eyes, eyebrows, and mouth with more emphasis than you might in a personal conversation. Eyebrows may seem like an odd communication tool, but they’re the first thing from the top of your head down that you can move to show expression. Raise them to show surprise or delight, draw them up together to emphasize a question, furrow them to show concern or concentration. Whatever you do, remember that these frames for your eyes draw people’s attention.
Use Purposeful Hand Gestures
Your hands are remarkably useful storytellers. They can nonverbally emphasize a trend by moving from the audience’s lower left to upper right (“sales are up”). Spread them wide to demonstrate a concept (“We’ll be spreading the task load more evenly among the teams”). Your hands can count out three points, put an end to an ineffective policy, or raise people to their feet for a stretch. The key is to use them purposefully to accompany the words coming out of your mouth.
When you’re in a large space, go big or go home. Keep arm motions above your waist and away from your body. Don’t flap your forearms near your body like you have tiny T-rex arms. However, in a small space or virtual space, a little goes a long way.
Keep Calm & Move Purposefully
Great posture conveys confidence, so roll your shoulders back and allow your limbs to hang from that strong framework. Straightening your spine pulls your head up, too, and makes managing your arms and legs easier. Believe it or not, your posture changes the hormones in your body, replacing stress with confidence.
When you’ve got some floor space, move deliberately within it to emphasize your points. For example, if you’re talking about change over time, move from the audience’s left to its right as you introduce the benefits of the change.
Avoid moving just to be moving. Walking back and forth on a single line with no reference to your content makes you look fidgety and unsure of yourself. Practice a calm, neutral stance for those times in your presentation when you’re not gesturing or moving purposefully—while you listen to a question or show a visual, for instance. When nervous, people exhibit repeated behaviors like pacing, flipping their hair back, or pulling a ring on and off. These subconscious tics are distracting to the audience. A comfortable neutral stance consists of feet at shoulder width or a little narrower with your hands hanging comfortably at your sides. Such a position will feel awkward at first, but keep practicing. If your hands hang loosely at your side, they will not distract the audience.
There are also many other ways to prepare for your presentation ahead of time that have more to do with the space than with your delivery choices.
Choose a "Right-Sized" Room
People are sensitive to how full a room is. If you can, choose a venue that accommodates the expected number of guests without much room left over. Empty space can makes your turnout look lame and drains energy from your presentation. If you can’t change the space, remove extra chairs, and pull the remaining ones into a semi-circle. In a space with lots of extra chairs, people will naturally sit near the back or far apart from each other, so don’t give them the option. Squeezing people into fewer chairs gets them talking to each other and increases the anticipation level in the room. Regardless of the size of the room, try to arrive early so you can shake hands and meet a few people. Thank them for being there. Ask them what they want to get out of the presentation. Don’t let your nerves or your desire to pre-test the audio system prevent you from making a few friends before you start.
Check Your Tech
Technology is both a blessing and a curse in presentations. To help reduce the stress and increase the success, use the following technology checklist:
If you are relying on slides or a microphone, arrive early enough to practice a bit and meet a few audience members before your speech.
Bring extra cords and connectors, and/or test your bluetooth.
Bring a printed copy of your notes and slides just in case.
Check the volume on a microphone and know how to change it.
Test the house-provided remote control or bring your own.
Have a backup plan in case your tech fails you completely—for example, additional stories, participative exercises, or an artifact you need for a simple object lesson.
Push the Podium Aside
A podium is a good place to keep your water bottle, but don’t hide behind it. People trust you more when they can see your whole body, and you’ll be able to use the floor space to keep your audience’s attention and make your points clear. Similarly, don’t just stand beside the screen. Your slides and visual aids are there to support you, not the other way around.
PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE
Three times. That’s the magic number for confidence and success. Don’t write your presentation word for word and try to memorize it—that approach uses a different part of your brain that’s not as nimble. If you try to deliver a memorized speech and lose concentration or forget a word. If you have good notes and practice your talk three full times in front of a co-worker (or even your smartphone’s camera), your brain has a solid but flexible framework. Practice also gives you an innate sense of timing, helping you know where to stretch or cut your content if needed.
Pay Attention to Your Dress and Grooming
Arrive fresh, clean, and dressed one-step above the audience average. Depending on the importance of the event and your own fashion awareness, asking for dress advice can be useful. Wrinkles, baggy knees, uneven hems, and stains are all distracting and reduce audience confidence. You should still dress professionally for virtual presentations—even if the audience cannot see your basketball shorts. Dressing professionally makes you feel professional, which boosts your confidence.
In a classical speech presentation, positions on the stage serve to guide both the speaker and the audience through transitions. The speaker’s triangle indicates where the speaker starts in the introduction, moves to the second position for the first point, across for the second point, then returns to the original position to make the third point and conclusion. This movement technique can be quite effective in helping you remember each of your main points. It allows you to break down your speech into manageable parts, and putting tape on the floor to indicate position is a common presentation trick. Your movement will demonstrate purpose and reinforce your credibility. Dlugan (2018) finds that effective movement can help support your message, increase authenticity, enable balanced audience connection, appear confident, attract audience attention, help dissipate nervous energy, and even avoid muscle stagnation.
Attributions:
Content for most of this section was adapted from the following:
Management Communication Copyright © 2017 by Lisa Thomas, Julie Haupt, and Andy Spackman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution -ShareAlike and made possible by Management Communications Group, Marriott School Of Business, Brigham Young University.
Content for the 'Speaker's Triangle' section was adapted from the following:
Business Communication for Success Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
References:
Dlugan, A. (2018, July 22). Body movement tips for public speakers. Six Minutes: A public speaking and presentations blog. http://sixminutes.dlugan.com/body-movement-speaking/
Van Edwards, V. (2015). 5 secrets of a successful TED talk. Science of People. https://www.scienceofpeople.com/secrets-of-a-successful-ted-talk/