Unless you’re a Bill Gates or a Bill Clinton, public speaking must be one of the most disagreeable things about your job that you wish you never had to do. Being the center of attention with a roomful of people staring down at you with varying degrees of expectation causes heavy-duty social pressure, and a brain-freeze that can ruin even the most well-prepared presentation. Paralyzed by self consciousness and self-doubt, you stand there in the middle of the stage with a shifty gaze, unauthentic body language, and opening jokes so weak, you can feel them falling flat with a resounding hollow sound in the pit of your stomach.<!–more–>
Speaking with eloquent charisma and compelling presence to a room full of strangers is not an innate skill, like many people believe. Bill Clinton was not born giving a stirring keynote speech to the doctors and nurses in the OR and Bill Gates was known only as a mediocre speaker before he let open that jar of mosquitoes during a TED Talk show in 2009 to prove a point about malaria, and consciously started developing his public persona thereafter.
Bringing your boldest and most confident self to the biggest challenges in business interactions and communications is a learned and practiced skill.
And behavioral coaches who are charging big bucks to train CEOs and company executives in the art of public speaking are making good on their promise by dipping into results of modern scientific research in collective social consciousness, non-verbal communication, body language and brain chemistry.
With the right techniques as part of your practiced skill set, all these components can be manipulated to drastically change the way people see you in that valuable split of a second, which is all the time their subconscious mind needs to measure, label and categorize your social hierarchy. (Hence that saying about not getting a second chance to make that first good impression.)
Body language experts like Harvard Business School Professor <a href=”https://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are”>Amy Cuddy talk extensively about `power poses’</a>: raising both arms like a winning athlete, placing hands on the hips, increasing illusion of body size by stretching out the arms and legs away from the body etc. When any of these `power poses’ are practiced in private for a few minutes before a public speaking event, it acts as a confidence booster by changing body chemistry. So when you re-enter the public space <em>feeling</em> like an all-important Alpha, the people present immediately pick up on that subliminal vibe and mentally award you with a similarly high status.
An equally effective preparation technique I’d like to talk about today is not a physical but a verbal momentum. And how you can capitalize on this verbal momentum by getting a running start <em>immediately before</em> a public speaking event.
Let me explain. You’re about to go on stage, or enter a room for an interview, or pick up the phone for a really important phone call. If you have not been speaking to anyone right before this crucial, first-impression moment, your verbal momentum is somewhere near zero. To go from 0 to say, 90, in a split second is a near-impossible feat. So at your first-impression moment, you’ve only accelerated to maybe a 5 or a 10. Thereafter, as you keep warming up, you get more comfortable in your communications, but often times it is <em>too darn late</em>.
You have already allowed people to put a label on who you are and what your worth may be in those crucial, initial moments of introduction. (According to an MIT study confirmed by the Harvard School of Health Sciences, people take as little as 2 seconds to judge your success, education, social status, friendliness, trustworthiness etc.) After that short space of time, a phenomenon called Cognitive Bias kicks into action in the brain, and they’re not so ready to re-judge and re-categorize you anymore (again, a scientifically proven fact). No matter how much proof you later exhibit to the contrary.
Given that your verbal momentum at the moment of introduction was at zero, how high do you think you scored? And how high could you have potentially scored if you were <em>already</em> in high verbal momentum, and just breezing into the scene like celebrities, politicians and super-successful, insanely charismatic people do?
Notice, how relaxed and casually confident these high-energy public figures seem to be when they step into the limelight. There is no stiffness in their body language, they exude complete mind-body presence in the moment, their facial expressions are high-energy and their <em>voice tone is well-oiled and primed to impress and please</em>.
Tonality is probably the single-most important attribute in verbal communication. The specific tone that you’re unconsciously using is sending powerful signals and a wealth of subliminal information about you to the listeners. Roughly speaking, there are 3 kinds of tonality – rapport-making, rapport-seeking and neutral.
If your verbal momentum is at a zero, then calibrating your voice tone to a “rapport-making” one is a hard task. You’ll probably be sounding “rapport-seeking” (the lower position in the power game when your inflections go up at the end of a sentence) or “neutral”, which is just as ineffective.
So how do you master this voice momentum thing?
By speaking. You’ve just got to be speaking, interacting and feeling your social juices flowing before you show up.
Call a partner or a friend or a relative and have a pleasant conversation right before the event. Be completely focused in that conversation and enjoy the exchange to grease your vocal cords with happy, confident hormones. Crack some jokes. Laugh. Say, I love you…
Don’t sit silently in the wings before a public speaking event, trying to do a last moment revision of your material. Go out and work the room instead. Talk to invited guests, focus on the interactions, laugh, joke and practice the tonality you want to project when you’re up on stage. By the time you get on, you will be so well primed, you’ll sail right into it without hesitation or a moment of awkwardness. You’ll seem casual, confident and at ease, and your audience will raise your personal status exponentially on account of it. Go a step further and supplement your vocal momentum with powerful body language and good, direct eye contact, and they will even call you charismatic!
Go on, try it! You’ll never do a public event by going in vocally dry again.
