Episode #297: Eyes, Hands, Face, Toes and Energy in Presenting

Recently I have been coaching people on their presentation skills. It is always amazing to me how some small changes can balloon into major improvements. If these things are so simple, then why aren’t they making the changes themselves? Why do they need coaching? Basically, we all wander through life with a minimum level of self-awareness about anything, let alone how we appear when we present. The other problem is the zone of vision when we are presenting is in an arc in front of us. It takes some organising to be able to see how we are doing in the eyes of the audience. Most of us are just not that well organised. So we wind up giving the presentations into the void and are not really sure what needs improving. Enter the coach.

I found I was focusing on a few items to help the participants in my class improve their persuasion power. The six elements were eyes, hands, face, voice, toes and energy. Let's dig in a bit deeper with each of them.

1. Looking at your audience and engaging your audience are not the same thing. You often see politicians in Japan scanning their eyes across a crowd, trying to give off the vibe that they are connecting with the punters. However, it is a fake construct, because the length of time allocated is only around two seconds per person. We need around six seconds of one-on-one sustained eye contact, before we can create a sense of “the speaker is talking directly to me” in the audience member’s mind. If we just keep staring at them, they start to think “axe murderer”, because it is too intrusive. Six seconds seems to strike the right balance of being personable without becoming threatening.

2. This is a perennial problem people have of what to do with their hands. Holding them behind the back is a favourite of many, simply because they don’t know what to do with them and this pose seems to anchor their upper body for them. Holding them crossed in front of our body, where all the soft organs are located, creates a barrier with audience which we don’t need. Thrusting them into pockets gets them conveniently out of the way, but it also gets them out of the way, which is no particular help to us.

As a presenter, our hands have only one purpose – to strengthen the verbal point we are making. To find where your hands should be held, just hold your arms out about a shoulder height, then drop them – where they land is where you should keep them until you need to bring them up to bolster some thesis you are promoting.

3. Dr. Albert Mehrabian’s research at UCLA found that we get the maximum concentration from our audience on the words we are saying, when what we say is matched by how we say it. This sounds simple enough, but what I found when coaching the class was that they tended to have one expression on their face throughout the talk, regardless of the content of the message. People put a lot of attention into the visuals for their presentation, slaving over the slide deck preparation, but forget the most powerful visual medium they have, which is their face. If it is good news, then smile when you tell us. If it is bad news, then look serious. If it is exciting news then look excited. I think you get the idea.

4. Having a deep DJ style voice is definitely an advantage. I remember when I met fellow Aussie Chris Glenn in Nagoya. He was a local DJ there and out of this tall, slender frame came this astonishingly deep voice. I didn’t get issued with one of those and have probably fried my vocal cords, with a million karate kiai over my career, so I have a rather husky number. Folks, we go with what we have.

We do our best though, to make the most of it by having a good vocal range around tone, speed and strength. The monotone delivery is the killer of audience attention. Side note: Japanese is a monotone language! Uh oh. Does that mean Japanese speakers are forever doomed to be the denizens of the boredom zone? Not all. Japanese speakers can create variety through speed and strength changes, which will be enough to keep the attention on them when presenting.

5. What on earth is he doing talking about toes when presenting? More correctly, I am talking about the angle you are pointing your toes. Without thinking about it, I noticed a number of presenters would stand with their toes pointing off at an angle, rather than at ninety degrees to the front. This alters the body mechanics making it difficult to turn in the other direction. The result is we don’t turn, so effectively we are now speaking with only one half of our audience.

6. Passion, commitment, belief, enthusiasm for our subject are all communicated by the amount of energy we pump out. We cannot turn the throttle up to maximum output for the whole talk though. We have to release it in bursts, so that we don’t wear out our audience. On the other hand, if we turn that throttle right down, we will not be projecting enough energy to grab attention and the entire audience will be leaping onto their phones to find something more interesting happening on the internet at that moment. The key is the energy output has to match the content of what we are saying.

Think of the key points in the talk where you want to place emphasis and then marshal your energy to help you highlight that part of the talk. A very common error is that speakers allow their energy to drop right off at the end of their talk. Don’t fade out. Finish with a bang – remember final impressions are the lasting impressions and we want to be recalled in the right way.

These six points are so simple, but when corrected each of them made a significant impact on the quality of the talk. I would make the correction and then ask the audience to compare with what the speaker had been doing. When you see this before and after it is convincing.