I’ve always considered the art of persuasion to be a secret art mastered only by Jedi knights. Imagine using words to manipulate your audience’s feelings and forcefully nudge them into doing your bidding. Robert Ferrucci, an award winning public speaker and presentation coach with over 20 years of sales experience, has a slightly less aggressive approach to giving an effective presentation.
Why it Matters
Your presentation skills can make or break your career. If you can’t successfully communicate your ideas, it doesn’t matter how good they are because no one is going to take you seriously. Unfortunately, the fear of public speaking is all too real for more than a few people. If you want to have a fighting chance at furthering your career and ultimately conquering your fear, Ferrucci gives a nearly fool-proof guide for doing so.
Determine Your Objective
You need to know your end game. After all is said and done, what do you want your audience to be left thinking? Give your listeners three reasons why they should support this objective. Why three? Because, as insanely brilliant as the human mind is, it’s more likely to remember three chunks of information before rapidly losing interest. Proceed to prove your objective by offering three substantial pieces of evidence to support it.
Technique
Like any good manipulation scheme, technique matters, arguably more than your content. Avoid data dumping, but toss in a few statistics that give your points some grounding. Tell a story that’s relatable to your objective because who doesn’t like a good story? Ask interactive and rhetorical questions to keep your audience involved and their minds fully engaged. Remember back in grade school when no book report was complete without supportive quotations? The same is true here. That’s right; something you learned in school is actually useful in your adult life. Find someone important that said something relevant to your cause and quote them. Again, if our schooling has taught us anything, it’s the necessity of analogies and metaphors to really drive the point home. Finally, use the two most powerful motivating factors: gain and loss. What will your listeners gain from heeding your objective and what could they lose if they ignore you?
Regardless of how on point your technique might be, if you’re shuffling around with a defeated posture and mumbling words directly off a slide, no one is going to listen. When you let fear seep into your brain, your heart rate elevates and part of your mind actually shuts off. It’s what causes you to stutter, forget crucial parts of your argument and ultimately deliver a poor presentation. Luckily, practice really does make perfect if you do it right. Don’t just sit down and review your slides in silence; get up, project your voice and act like it’s the real deal. Repeat this about five times or until you feel comfortable and confident. Speaking of confident, learn and embrace the power pose. The way you carry yourself directly impacts your confidence. In a moment of weakness, I once agreed to perform in a karaoke contest, so I strutted up to the DJ with my shoulders back and my head held high. A random woman stopped me and said, “I don’t know what you’re about to do, but you look like you’re going to rock it.” I didn’t, but I never gave myself away. If you make yourself small, slouch your shoulders or wrap yourself up, you actually release chemicals in your body that makes you nervous. In contrast, by doing the exact opposite, you increase your testosterone levels by 25% and reduce your levels of cortisol by 20%, which combats feelings of nervousness.
Being able to persuade an audience to agree with you is a practiced art, but the best thing about art is that anyone can do it.
Tayla Carpenter is the project manager for iPROMOTEu. She developed and currently manages A Woman's View, a program specifically designed to support women distributors in the promotional products industry. Contact Tayla at tcarpenter@ipromoteu.com.