Present Like The Pros, With Confidence and Grace

As an audience member we measure confidence by the evidence we see before us. Before you open your mouth your audience is deciding whether or not to trust you. Your stance, your clothing and your eye contact are all creating split second assumptions in your audience members. If we feel you are confident we relax and ultimately we want to trust your knowledge, experience or energy.

Now, if I asked you to tell me what you would need to do display confidence, then I’m sure you’d come up with a very long list of things to do. You may well say – stand tall, have good eye contact, have open hand gestures, have a strong clear voice etc. Concentrating on a long list just before you begin to present is probably not the best advice I could give – the reason being that our brains prefer simple and clear instructions rather than a dossier.

My advice is not to focus on the physical attributes, but to use a cognitive technique often employed by actors. Give yourself a number between 1 (low) and 10 (high) that represents your level of confidence. When you stand in front of an audience what’s your confidence number? What’s the number of someone you think is great in front of people? If you feel like a 4 then ask yourself what you’d look like as a 6? What do 9 and 10’s look like? What do they physically display? Steal those attributes and adapt them to your own style. Your body will instinctively know what to do if you say ‘I’m an eight”. It will know because it will have processed that sensation before – perhaps not during a presentation but certainly in a situation where you’ve felt relaxed, e.g. when you’ve been out with friends, or given great feedback at work or a pay rise.

The next time you present hold an achievable number in your head throughout and feel the difference.