Episode #282: What If I Am A Low Energy Speaker

Being persuasive is a key element to business success. You can argue the rights and wrongs of that statement, but it is the reality. We cannot avoid the fact that being able to present to others and get their agreement is a critical skill which we all need. Now we meet vigorous, go, go, go people and so when they give a presentation, their passion, motivation and power come to the fore. For them, they are not even thinking about being a high impact speaker, this is who they are. For others though, they are demure, calm individuals who speak quietly, even softly. Both types are being their true self and being authentic, so isn’t that enough? Actually no.

Being an authentic individual and being a professional and successful speaker are related but not derivative. Being authentically boring isn’t much help. Being authentically monotone in your delivery doesn’t work. Yelling at people for the entire forty minutes of the talk, so that all the audience hair is being blown back like we see portrayed in cartoons is not humorous in real life. Authentic yes, but grossly ineffective.

Regardless of the style of the presentation, the content and the structure of the talk have to be well constructed. This is a given. However the impact of the delivery is not a given. The best, highest quality information with the best navigation for the talk can be a disaster if we are yelling at the audience the whole time or speaking so softly that hardly anyone cares what we are talking about.

You might think it is easier to calm down the fast talking, high energy speaker, so that they can get some variety into their delivery. You think this would be the easier of the two to fix. Not in my experience. They are both tricky and for different reasons. People who speak fast get on a roll and away they go. They disconnect from the audience and have created a new audience of one – themselves. They are talking to themselves, the way they like and are not focused on the listeners at all. Because this is their normal speed range, slowly down really kills them. They find it so uncomfortable and fake, they hate it.

The softer presenter, when encouraged to put more energy into the delivery and ramp things up they stop going any further, because they feel they are screaming at people. I tell them to double their output and the most they manager is a five percent lift. Well they aren’t screaming at anyone and there isn’t much appreciable difference from what they normally do, so there is a lot of scope to become more energised, but it feels uncomfortable and they stop.

These are the two extremes of speakers – the loud and the quiet. Should they do us all a favour and not become presenters? Every single one of us can improve what we are doing, me included and certainly it is not game over for these representative extremes. This is where coaching comes into help them develop range in their energy and voices.

A good metaphor for public presentations is classical music. We are not sitting there subjected to crescendo after crescendo. Nor are we being put to sleep with a constant lull in proceedings. There are passages in the music which are intense and some which are almost inaudible. There is distinct power in both and we have to learn to master both.

Not every word in a sentence of a presentation is equal. Some words require more emphasis than others. That doesn’t mean those words have to always be yelled out. It can be equally powerful to deliver them like an audible whisper, a conspiratorial sharing of some key information. The point is to decide which words or phrases need emphasis and then decide how we are going to deliver them.

For those who speak quietly, the conspiratorial whisper will be easy to pull off. The high energy speaker will be dying to speak so quietly. The going hard part presents the opposite problem and the quiet speakers believe they sound crazy at that amplification. We video our presentations and when we do the review, the quieter speakers are always amazed that they don’t sound or look like they have lost their minds. The most common reaction is that “this person on screen looks very positive and committed to their message”. That is a good thing for a speaker to be doing isn’t it. The boisterous speakers comment that “this person looks very professional and considered”. Again, a good result by any measure.

The key is to get the coaching and to do lots of rehearsal. Usually business speakers give their talk once – when they are in front of their audience and usually they get no coaching beforehand. This is pretty adventurous stuff, given these are our personal and professional brands that we are putting out there on display. If you are too quiet or too loud, then you need to work on your range and find the strength in what you are good at and add to your presentations, elements you are not good at. The coach will make that happen for you because it is very, very difficult to do it by yourself. What you think is soft is still yelling and what you think is yelling sounds soft. Our range sensitivity is not well calibrated enough to make the adjustments by ourselves. Get coaching and do rehearsals would be my advice.