Years ago, when my company was young, I was coaching a fairly high-profile financial professional who was getting ready for his firm's annual general meeting. We'll call him Robert.
Robert was brilliant and charming and welcomed my speaker coaching expertise. Like we still do today, with everyone we work with, we identified his distracting verbal and vocal habits and replaced them with more productive ones. We wrote and rewrote his content, building personal stories into his presentation. Then, we got him on his feet to rehearse and things fell apart.
He was a confident presenter, but boy did he love to close himself off, physically, and stand there, looking like a human pretzel. Arms crossed. Legs crossed. Leaning so far back, I was worried he'd fall over at any moment. I offered Robert every coaching tactic I knew at the time to lead him towards a better physical position for audience engagement. No luck. He refused to change.
Finally, I asked him, "Why do you stand like that when you're presenting?" and he replied, "Because it feels good." I paused, and matter-of-factly said, "Robert, this presentation is not about you. It's about your audience." There was a long, awkward minute of silence. Then, the pretzel unfurled. Until that moment, as smart and successful as he was, he hadn't thought about his presentation from the audience's point of view.
We spent the next few rehearsals working on a physical position for him that, at first, was very uncomfortable. There was a lot of complaining coming from that grown man. Eventually, Robert got the new position into his muscle memory and by "showtime", he wasn't even consciously thinking about how he was standing. It was now part of his onstage presence. It was a coaching win for me.
Cut to all these years later, and we're still reminding speakers, "It's not about you." It's ultra-imperative today because audiences are virtual or hybrid and a lot of what speakers need to do is new, uncomfortable, and some things feel downright weird. Here are five tips to share with your speakers to get them uncomfortable enough to shine.
