Presenting With Confidence

How To Cut Through The Noise So Your Ideas Stick

Ideas are the currency of the twenty-first century. The ability to persuasively sell your ideas is the single greatest skill that will help you accomplish your dreams and live up to your full potential.
– Carmine Gallo

One of the biggest challenges for today’s leaders isn’t coming up with new ideas, instead it’s having the ability to sell and speak to those ideas. Your ability to craft presentations that are compelling, is one of the most critical skills leaders needs to develop.

Presenting with confidence is about inspiring your audience to come with you on your communication journey. It’s where you rally your people to help transform your ideas into reality.

Whether you need to pitch a persuasive argument to your executive, sell change to your colleagues, inform people to inspire action, present a message from the heart, deliver a workshop or represent your company through a keynote, leaders are now expected to do this exceptionally well.

Your Leadership Is Demonstrated When Speaking

At Proteus, we emphasise that ‘your leadership is demonstrated when speaking’, and the way you communicate will make or break your credibility now and into the future.

Whether you like it or not, your audience will be judging you, both consciously and subconsciously. So as leaders, we need to continually work on becoming exceptional communicators and presenters, where we capture people’s hearts and their minds.

James C Humes who was a US Presidential speechwriter, stated that, “Speakership is leadership. Every time you speak in public, you are auditioning for a leadership position.”

However, in our highly distracted digital world, it has become even harder for leaders to cut through all the noise with messages that stick. There is also the extra challenge of having to compete with the best speakers in the world, who are all available for people to watch, whenever they want.

As Carmine Gallo, TED speaker, coach, and author states:

“Depending on your perspective, 2006 was either a really bad year for public speaking or the start of a world-changing transformation. In that year the famous TED conference began streaming 18-minute presentations from the world’s top minds, for free… they have become the gold standard in public speaking and presentation skills. It also means that, like it or not, your next presentation will be compared to a TED talk.”

Communicating in today’s technological environment, where we can access information anywhere and at any time, you need to ask yourself. “Do I really need to present my information live in a face-to-face or virtual forum, or can it just be posted and made available to everyone to access on their own terms?”

If it’s critical that your message must be heard live, then you need to make it an amazing experience. Your audience will be busy and distracted and they will be asking themselves, “Why should I listen and engage with you right now?”

Public Speakers Are Made

One myth about exceptional public speakers is that they are born. This is simply not true – they are made! They put in the work, the practice, along with constant rehearsals, so that they look ‘comfortable and confident’ while on stage.

We can all do this by decoding the art and science of public speaking. By replicating these skills, templates, and techniques of great speakers back into our own leadership communication repertoire.

By taking a moment to stop and reflect on all the presentations that we have both delivered and participated in over our careers, we can then ask ourselves the question, “What made these presentations either tragic or magic?”

This allows you to identify the things that you need to do and stop doing as a public speaker and make your future presentations great.

For some, minor adjustments, a few ‘tricks and tips’, along with a robust roadmap is all that is needed to navigate and improve your public speaking abilities.

However, for many people it isn’t that easy. The fear of standing up in front of people and speaking publicly is straight up, the biggest factor that is impeding your success.

The Fear Factor

If you have a deep fear of public speaking, know that you are not alone. Many people rank the fear of public speaking higher than a fear of dying!

When we stand up in public, we are immediately vulnerable. We are exposing ourselves to the potential of being judged, humiliated, and rejected ‘from our tribe’. Rejection is tribal and it runs deep. This is the reason why so many of us are terrified of public speaking. And as such, the fear of public speaking is perfectly normal and will understandably, trigger some fear based physiological responses.

We experience things like a dry mouth, shaky hands, wobbly knees, churning stomach, focus loss, forgetting words, and we speak too fast. Added to this, adrenaline and cortisol will have quickly kicked in!  Where we not only go into a fight or flight mode, but often, we freeze!

“Just when we need it the most, our brain checks out!” as we like to say at Proteus.

The good news is, there are many successful techniques that work to limit the negative impact of nervousness when speaking publicly. Here’s four tips that will help change the game with your next public speaking session.

1 Reframe It – Get Excited

Let’s get excited about the privilege of sharing your ideas. We can reframe our ‘high arousal’ energy of nervousness into excitement. Your brain cannot tell the difference between the two. What we are doing here is turning a threat into an opportunity. Don’t say you’re nervous anymore, say that you’re excited!

2 Turn Nervous Into Service 

If you become too overwhelmed with fear, you risk becoming self-indulgent. You become too focused on yourself. Instead, flip ‘nervous into service’, by focusing on being of service to your audience. Create a mindset that this is an amazing opportunity to share and give your audience a unique and positive learning experience.

“You are not being judged, the value of what you are bringing to the audience is being judged.”
– Seth Godin

3 You Need a Roadmap (Not a Script)

You only get one chance to make a first impression! So we need a great introduction.  Unfortunately, this is when we typically freeze. That’s why we need a simple and robust roadmap to help get us through the first few minutes. This roadmap done well, will give us credibility, engage our audience and grab their attention with a bold declaration, all while having absolute clarity on our objective that has a clear call to action for your audience.

4 Exposure Therapy – Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse!

The best way to overcome your fears is exposure therapy. The key to getting better at public speaking is to immerse yourself in it. Don’t avoid it and don’t try to eradicate your fear, and don’t just ‘wing it’!  Make sure that you rehearse your presentation out loud many times over, ideally with some trusted colleagues. These rehearsals are low stakes ‘exhibition matches’ that will help create muscle memory and match fitness. The by-product is a confident performance on the actual day.

People Want You To Succeed

Always remember, your audience (well most!) will want you to succeed and are looking forward to hearing your ideas. As Gina Barnett – TED speaker, coach, and author states, “They want you to have a good time up there, they want to hear your ideas, even if they don’t agree with them, and they want you to succeed.”

So set yourself up for the best chance of success by becoming an exceptional public speaker and leadership communicator… by designing, practicing and then moving forward by delivering compelling ideas that stick.

“Presentation literacy isn’t an optional extra for the few. It’s a core skill for the twenty-first century. It’s the most impactful way to share who you are and what you care about.” – Chris Anderson – Head of TED

Richard Dore
CEO – Proteus Leadership