Presenting with impact!

Making a presentation to colleagues, management, or customers is an important moment in our working lives.

Because we are on show – being judged for our confidence, appearance, and even our personality. And because the second thing that people respond to is our message... they firstly respond to our style, appearance, and professionalism.

Much of our impact is non-verbal…

Back in 1967 Albert Mehrabian published research which suggested that in communicating just 7% of the impact is the result of what we say and 93% is the result of how we look and sound.

Now these figures, much-quoted in the world of NLP and even in Wikipedia, as a way of emphasising the importance of non-verbal communication, might need to be treated with a degree of caution. How any one person responds to another person is likely to be based on a lot more factors, and have a lot more subjective variables, than can be accurately measured in a piece of research – and responses will vary significantly from one context to another.

Nevertheless Mehrabian's formula does underline the importance of how we look and sound over when getting our message across.

It's not what you say – it's the way that you say it!

It's amazing how many people, when presenting their ideas, think that it is enough to deliver information. Or have a good PowerPoint show. Or having thoroughly researched and organised their information.
This seems to be true for people at all levels within organisations, from senior management to frontline staff. They stand in front of the group, open their mouths and begin to lose credibility and sabotage their message by their behaviour.

Self-sabotaging the presentation

The following is a lot of some on the ways in which we can undermine our impact and our reputation.

- No real eye contact with the audience
- Reading from our notes
- Back to the audience while we read aloud our own PowerPoint slides
- Fidgeting with a pen, marker or slide pointer
- Looking distractedly around the room
- Boring people with a monotone delivery
- Babbling on so rapidly that people no time to think about what is being said - or ask questions
- Making rapid distracting gestures
- Shuffling our feet uncomfortably.

(You fill in the rest of the list with your favourite 'presenting glitches' – and perhaps add them as 'comments' to the Pegasus NLP Blog entry for this newsletter

People buy people

There's an old saying that 'people by people first - and then they buy their products, services, or ideas'. And it's largely true. If people don't like the messenger they will often reject the message.

Many of us have had the experience of going into a shop to buy something that was in stock - only to walk out without buying and spend time searching for another store simply because of the patronising or aggressive style of the salesperson.

In the workplace, how we come across has a huge bearing on whether or not our ideas will be given a fair chance. And our verbal and nonverbal style has a huge impact on how people evaluate us. We can get away with perhaps one or two of the distracting habits or mannerisms on the above list – but more than that and we may be jeopardising our standing in the organisation.

'Well I told them - what more can I do?'

One of the NLP fundamental principles is 'the meaning of your communication is the response you get'. In plain English this means that the effectiveness of your communication can be gauged by how and your audience responds to you.

It's the opposite of the quite common 'well I told them - what more can I do!' approach and suggests that if we want to move hearts and minds then we need to do a lot more than just talk at people.

Six action points

The following are six ways in which you can self assess how you present or how you speak in meetings. Take the topics one at a time and tweak your style based on how each presentation or session is received and responded to.

Eye contact (1)

Only speak when you have eye contact. This is especially important in one-to-one communication. If people are looking away as you speak it's likely that they are thinking about what you have said - making pictures, self talking, and/or checking their feelings (the NLP Representational Systems).

So pause and allow them to regain eye contact with you before continuing. An exception would be someone who is very shy or have cultural concerns about direct eye contact. And, yes, sometimes people look away because they are bored!

Eye contact (2)

When speaking with a group ensure that you give everyone sustained rather than fleeting eye contact. Around three or four seconds per person is about right.

With very large audiences give this eye contact duration to small groups within the audience. Incidentally, this type of eye contact is one of the best ways of increasing your own confidence.

Eye contact (3)

If you're using presentation slides remember that most people in your audience can read! You don't need to read it out for them. Silently allow them to read what's on the screen and only begin speaking when they re-establish eye contact with you.

Pace

Nervous people babble rapidly, often because they want to get it over and done with as quickly as possible or because they're afraid that if they paused to take a breath somebody in the group will jump in and ask awkward questions!

Pauses

This is very closely related to the previous one on 'pace'. Confident speakers use pauses for impact and to enable listeners to process what they are saying.

Some people who are processing what you are saying through visual thinking (V) will be happy with a rapid fire up-tempo style, not allowing pauses can cause resentment or even hostility in people who think primarily with self talk, or in through their feelings (A, K, Ad)

Tonality

To begin with consider four tonalities. Visual: Somewhat high-pitched and rapid - usually accompanied by upper chest breathing. Auditory Tonal: Mid-range with lots of variety of sound – mid chest breathing. Kinaesthetic: rather slow and deep – abdominal breathing. Auditory Digital: somewhat aggressive and in some circles considered 'authoritative' because of the edginess of the tonality.

None of these is 'right'. The ideal is to have the ability to use all four within any presentation since it will match the thinking styles of different people at different times. (Tonality is hugely important and we'll come back to this in a future newsletter).

Fine-tuning your skills and style

Working on the above list will go a long way towards increasing our impact. And it can be useful to recruit an ally in this process since few of us are aware of our and vocal and physical mannerisms.

Ask your ally to pay attention to how you come across in meetings and presentations. And it may be prudent to reassure your ally that you will really be open to this truthful feedback!

To keep things manageable, and palatable, ask your ally to give you feedback on just one of the above points per session. Finally, ask them to also tell you what they liked about your presentation. We are none of us immune to sincere compliments!

© 2009-2010 Reg Connolly

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