Presenting With Confidence

In this interview we hear from Cordelia Ditton, a trained actor and director of the Voice Business Consultancy, about some of the strategies you can use to overcome nerves and speak with confidence.

Cordelia begins by explaining why effective presentation and communication skills are so important in business today.

Cordelia Ditton: Well, who doesn’t need to present nowadays? I mean, people are either having to make formal presentations or speak in public or if not, they are often having to present ideas in meetings and they have to think about the kind of personal impact they make. So the kind of training I do really encompasses all of those things. You might look at it in a formal context but then think of all the other contexts in which you can also use it.

Female interviewer: And when it comes to perhaps speaking in an important meeting or giving a presentation as you say, nerves can sometimes be an issue for some people. What kind of tips would you give to help someone prepare when they have got to give an important presentation?

Cordelia Ditton: Well, the first thing to do is to understand that nerves are completely natural. They are an animal reaction to what your body and your mind are perceiving to be a threat. And a threat is anything that takes you outside your comfort zone as that animal. So if you think of animals being either pack animals or loners, think of cats and dogs, we are much like the dogs, we work in a pack.

As soon as we take ourselves, remove ourselves slightly from the pack, and that’s if you imagine you are standing in front of an audience or even standing up perhaps in a meeting or having those eyes looking on you, your instincts, your animal instincts are saying, ‘Oh, this is dangerous, get out of here.’ And so therefore there are reactions that are happening in your body to counter the threat. In other words, your body is looking after you. And those reactions; we have all heard of fight and flight haven’t we? Fight and flight and freeze being the other one. Now, flight is when your body is telling you to get out of there, so that’s kind of making you move around a bit perhaps, and freeze is making you sort of shut down and fight is when you are getting bits of the body ready to fight, your centre of gravity is lowering, stomach muscles tightening, your hackles are rising, your body is producing adrenaline to rush round and make you faster and tougher and so on.

Now all these things are fine if you were that animal getting away from the potential threat; your body doesn’t distinguish between a wild tribe about to attack you and an audience. So it’s just preparing you for this. Now, the very fact of your knowing this is happening helps you prepare to counter it and really what we are talking about is relaxing physically, a few physical exercises or going for a walk round the building, something like that, and breathing properly and that really is important. And when we are feeling nervous, concentrating on breathing out, when we get a shock we breathe in and hold it and when we relax from the shock we breathe out, so when you are feeling nervous breathing out.

And the other thing to do is really it is all about preparation; I am talking there about preparing you, and it is also of course about preparing your content. We feel much less nervous when we know what we are doing. So rehearsing out loud, having a clear structure and most importantly, remember and rehearse your first and last line. Make your first line intriguing. It’s what is going to get people’s imagination going. So really rehearse that. Make sure you know exactly what you are saying. And your last line is what you leave people with so make sure again that that’s a strong line and possibly even link it to your first one. So learn your first and last lines and make sure then that that helps you sound very confident and it makes your presentation sound complete.

Female interviewer: And Cordelia, in your view, what do you think makes the difference between a presentation or a speech which is really quite memorable and one which really isn’t?

Cordelia Ditton: Well, the short answer would be I suppose one you remember and one you don’t. So what, why do we remember something? Now, if you have ever been in that situation where someone is trying to tell you a great deal of facts without really linking them that well, if you think about children, they respond very well to stories and it is not just children, it is all of us. We respond to stories. Why? Because it is a logical sequence, one thought builds upon another, and also they are using descriptions, they are using metaphors, sensory descriptions, so in other words, talking about something in a more concrete way rather than abstract. We find it hard to remember abstract. So often I think what we have done is lost the narrative.

If you look at bullet points, for example, people put bullet points up on the screen. It is very hard for anyone else to really relate to those, I think. It is fine for the person who has created them because they can see the narrative, but the rest of us don’t. So the key is really getting people to use their imagination and helping them do so. So anecdotes and so on are very, very useful.

Now the other thing I think is really important is thinking, what do you want your listeners to feel when they listen to you? Because if you think about it, do we remember all, think of a presentation you felt, you thought was fantastic, do you remember absolutely everything the presenter said? No, you don’t. You might remember the gist of it or some few things that really stood out for you; what you will remember is how you felt about it. So it is thinking about ‘What do I want my audience to feel?’ and thinking also about this key thing, what’s in it for them? What is it that is particularly going to reach that audience? Because we only really remember things that are important to us or that strike a chord with us in some way. So it’s really about thinking much more about narrative rather than lots of facts. Don’t try and give people all the facts, get them interested in a few key points so that they will want to find out more for themselves.

Female interviewer: And what advice would you give to help keep an audience interested and engaged in quite a dry subject matter?

Cordelia Ditton: Well, I would say really the difficulty with dry subject matter is, do you need to make a presentation about it at all to begin with. I think sometimes people make presentations at the drop of a hat because it’s what they are used to doing and it’s how other people share material. Now, you have to find a way to make it accessible and as I have said before, just pick out two or three points of interest and explore those, get people interested in the key concept, create a mystery is rather nice. You create a mystery at the very beginning, say, how does X = Y, well, over the course of this presentation I am going to show you how. And that can work very well. So there is a way of presenting what you might call dry material, but don’t let material be dry. You know, if it is so dry and difficult, don’t make a presentation about it, write something about it and then give, get people excited about two or three key points. It might be you are talking about the benefit of whatever it is you are talking about rather than going through the entire process for example. So it’s find a way to make it accessible really is the key answer.

Female interviewer: I want to move on to ask you about what someone can do on the day of a presentation itself and what practical strategies or techniques you would perhaps recommend to help them calm any pre-presentation nerves that they might have?

Cordelia Ditton: Well, first of all, I think, arm yourself with knowledge. Find out about the venue, where you are speaking, and if you can go into the space itself and try out the beginning of your presentation.

You might want to ask them if they can hear you, whether you perhaps need a microphone, for example, if you are talking at a big event. And it is about focusing on that event in hand. Do not let yourself get distracted. Don’t work up to the wire and then walk in and expect to make a good presentation. Give yourself time. Give yourself time to physically relax, get rid of tension, build your energy, work on your breathing. And concentrate really on what you are doing and don’t get distracted. And if you can, on the day, just rehearse it through once out loud, that’s very important.

Of course, in business presentations people often don’t have a great deal of time, but if you want to be really effective, you have got to put the work in. It’s like most things in life, give it a little bit extra work and I think you will find the benefit of that.

Female interviewer: Now, sometimes, it has happened to the best of us during a presentation or speech, things don’t always go according to how you plan them. For example, your technology can die on its feet or stage fright can really take hold. What would you say to someone to help them recover from a difficult situation such as this during a presentation?

Cordelia Litton Now, in the training I do, I always get people very balanced, it’s the first thing I do with them. And by that I mean that literally the body is balancing. If you think, you put your feet parallel, slightly closer together than your hips and just stand imagining a line going from your ears, balancing over your shoulders, over your hips, over your knees, over your feet, and just get balanced in that position. When we are balanced everything works well, your voice and your body are going to work well; you are going to be tension free as much as possible.

Now if things go wrong, the body starts tightening up, the voice starts tightening up and of course we have all got radar. We can tell when someone’s not looking terribly comfortable. So it’s a question of getting yourself back into that position and again it is calming and focusing. And once you do that, then the mind is not scrabbling and trying to think of ways around what it is you are doing. You are actually slowing the brain down a bit. And going back to also breathing well. So it is breathing, position of balance, you can focus, back to there. The interesting thing is that if mistakes or things happen and things go wrong and you deal with it, audiences love you all the more.

I think the difficulty often comes for people when they are using things like slides because of course that kind of slide technology does go wrong. And I think people tend to use slides by default and I don’t think you necessarily have to. Think about other ways of presenting where you are not having to rely on technology. I think if you can get away from that and just be very clear on the structure that you are using. Using odd notes, using mind maps, anything like that that helps you to see the picture as a whole.

Now that’s true in fact, whether you are just speaking to audiences or whether you are using slides. And in my view, too many people, by default, use technology when they don’t need it, when they would actually be better off speaking to people. So that’s one thing to think of. Do you need the slides? And then thinking about the kind of anchor position, ways of getting your focus back so that you can calmly deal with whatever is going on.

Female interviewer: Cordelia, I would like to ask you about body language now because people often underestimate the importance of good body language to a successful presentation and I wondered if you might be able to highlight for me some of the pitfalls to be aware of and really how body language can be used in a more positive way?

Cordelia Ditton: Well, I think what people respond to is when the presenter looks comfortable. So sometimes people say to me, ‘Well, should I move around or should I keep still?’ and I go, ‘Well I don’t know, what makes you feel the most comfortable?’ because as long as you feel comfortable, I’m likely to feel comfortable. So, in other words, I don’t think there is a hard and fast rule here.

I mean I talked a moment ago about the position of balance, of getting anchored, of getting a kind of square one or default position that you can come back to if you feel that you want to just be very sure that you are feeling sort of calm and secure. So stillness can be very, very effective. You don’t have to use your hands; you don’t have to move around unless you want to. On the other hand, if you are someone who enjoys moving, then move as long as it is not something too repetitive, that’s the issue I think, if it is repetitive and distracting. Lots of pacing about can be a bit annoying, but then on the other hand, if you have got something startlingly wonderful to say, people are not going to notice that.

There are certain little things like, for men in particular, change jingling in your pocket. So you are absentmindedly jingling that change, is very off-putting to audiences. So avoid that, take the change out of your pocket. I think looking at screens and looking at laptops, again if you are using slides, be careful of that because that can be very irritating to audiences because they don’t feel that you are necessarily relating to them.

So, it is really, it is being comfortable, start from the position of stillness and balance and see where it goes and always come back to there when you want to.

Female interviewer: Thank you for listening to this audio interview. For more information on how to overcome presentation nerves and deliver a successful presentation, why not run a search on presentations in your toolkit?

Find out more

You can find out more about Dilly and her voicebusiness consultancy at www.voicebusinesstraining.co.uk. Dilly’s blog, ‘Talk About Speaking’ can be found at www.talkaboutspeaking.com.