Monthly Archives: March 2018

Appearance, General

Appearance? Who Cares?

Personal Competitive Advantage
Unless You’re an Ex-Beatle, shun slob cool

Let’s move from the realm of what you do and say in front of your audience to the realm of your appearance.

How you appear to your audience.

Likewise, let’s immediately dismiss the notion that “it doesn’t matter what I look like – it’s the message that counts.”

In a word . . . no.

This is so wrong-headed and juvenile that you can turn this to immediate advantage by adopting the exact opposite perspective right now.

I’d wager that most folks your age won’t, particularly those stuck in liberal arts, for better or worse.

Much more dramatic to strike a pose and deliver a mythic blow for “individuality” than to conform to society’s diktats, eh?

Well, let those folks strike their blows while you spiff yourself up for your presentations, both in public and in private job interviews, and gain a superior competitive advantage.

The Upshot – Slob Cool, Isn’t

Here is the bottom line.  Your appearance matters a great deal, like it or not, and it is up to us to dress and groom appropriate to the occasion and appropriate to our personal brand and the message we want to send.

especially powerful
Spiral down, if you like, with personal competitive disadvantage

“Slob cool” may fly in college – and I stress may – but it garners only contempt outside the friendly confines of the local student activities center and fraternity house.

Is that “fair?”

It certainly is fair.

You may not like it.  It may clang upon your youthful sensibilities.

Tough.

You’re on display in front of a group of buyers.  They want to know if your message is credible.  Your appearance conveys important cues to your audience.  It conveys one of two chief messages, with little room to maneuver between them.

First, your appearance telegraphs to your audience that you are:  sharp, focused, detailed, careful, bold, competent, prudent, innovative, loyal, energetic . . .

or . . .

Your Appearance?  Important at All?

https://www.ihatepresentations.com/personal-competitive-advantage-2/
Your Brand is key to your personal competitive advantage

Your appearance telegraphs to your audience that you are:  slow, sloppy, careless, inefficient, incompetent, weak, mercenary, stupid.

Is that what you want?  Really?

Moreover, you may never know when you are actually auditioning for your next job.

That presentation you decided to “wing” with half-baked preparation and delivered in a wrinkled suit might have held in the audience a human resource professional recommended to you by a friend.

But you blew the deal.

Without even knowing it.

Think . . .   How many powerful people mentally cross you off their list because of your haphazard, careless appearance?  How many opportunities pass you by?

How many great connections do you forfeit?

Granted, it’s up to your discretion to dress in the first wrinkled shirt you pull from the laundry basket, but recognize that you may be paying a price without even knowing it.

Your appearance on the stage contributes or detracts from your message.  So, as a general rule, you should dress one half-step above the audience to convey a seriousness of purpose.

For instance, if the audience is dressed in business casual (sports coat and tie), you dress in a suit.

Simple.

Personal Competitive Advantage
Personal Branding should occupy you every day in some way

But beyond your presentation, you’re always on-stage.

You’re always auditioning.

And you are creating your personal brand one wrinkled shirt at a time, one exposed pair of boxers at a time.

Or . . . clean, sober, professional, serious, decisive, thoughtful, competent, and bold.

Personal appearance overlaps into the area of personal branding, which is beyond the scope of this space, but two books I recommend to aid you in your quest for appearance enhancement are You, Inc. and The Brand Called You.

Both of these books are worth the price and filled with stellar advice to propel you into delivering Powerful Presentations enhanced by a superb professional appearance.

This is a key to your personal competitive advantage.  Don’t blow it.

Audience, General, Story

What’s In It For Your Audience?

WIIFY – What’s In It For Your Audience?

especially powerful!
What’s in it for your audience? It had best be something interesting!

This catchphrase comes loaded with a freight-train of wisdom for your business presentation.

And no, it isn’t about you . . . it’s about your audience.

Always ask yourself this question with regard to your audience . . . from the point-of-view of your audience.

This strikes at the heart of a powerful and well-received presentation, as speaking master James Winans noted back in 1915:

“The young speaker can do nothing better for himself than to fix firmly in mind that public speaking is a dialogue and to emphasize constantly the part of the audience, anticipating and watching for its response.”

This speaking basic also runs under the tag of Know Your Audience.

Know Your Audience = WIIFY?

To achieve its greatest effect, your story must focus on the needs and interests of your audience.

At its best, your presentation should focus on the deepest desires of the audience, but should do so subtly and with great skill.

Your story should fulfill a need in the audience with regard to your presentation topic and the stories you choose to illustrate that topic.

Ask yourself these questions:

especially powerful
A key to personal competitive advantage

Why have they come?

What is it that motivates these persons to gather in one place to hear me?

How can I speak to the audience as a group, and yet speak to each person individually?

How can I make the persons in the audience feel like a hero?

The hero of your story must be in the audience.  The CEO.   The Stockholders.  Employees.

The people who are praised, instructed, lifted, motivated, excited must be the heroes of your story.

Aim your story at them and ask the question WIIFY.  Make them feel good about themselves, and they’ll surely feel more disposed to feel good about your message.

Speak with them as individual people, not as a group.

WIIFY?  Your Audience is the Hero!

The members of your audience do not attend your talk as a group, so do not address them as a group.

They come to hear you as individuals, because they have goals and aspirations and hopes.

hey hope that your talk will benefit them in some way as an individual person.

Moreover, you must understand your audience.  You must understand their wants and needs, interests and desires.

Find what motivates them.

Find what shames them.

Find the common thread among them, then speak to that common thread as they are individuals.

Build your story with WIIFY in mind.

If the idea of corporate storytelling strikes a chord with you, note that three entire chapters of The Complete Guide to Business School Presentations are devoted to the craft of business storytelling and answering the question WIIFY.
Let it be your source for personal competitive advantage.
General, Power, Stance
Powerful posing
Power posing leads to especially powerful business presentations

I truly don’t mean to be a pain to my long-suffering students, but one exercise that probably elicits more scorn than it deserves is called “Especially Powerful.”

It consists of everyone rising to a standing position to strike a confident stance with feet shoulder-width apart and arms outstretched to either side, palms turned upward.

Picture this.

This is a critical and powerful pose.

Then visalize a slight tilt of the head up and, in unison and in the best tradition of the deep-voiced Darth Vader, everyone repeats after me . . . “I feel especially powerful today!”

Several times.

Feeling Especially Powerful?

“I feel especially powerful today!”

I’m not satisfied until the room reverberates with the appropriate tone and volume, indicating a robust and vibrant embrace of the exercise and what we’re trying to accomplish.

Which is . . . what?

Why do I engage in what, to some, might appear gimmicky or cute?

First, I don’t do cute.  Second, the exercise accomplishes several superb physiological goals that improve a range of characteristics associated with business presenting. Voice . . . stance . . . posture . . . confidence . . . poise.

In short, much of what we call body language.

Body Language

We hear in some circles that nonverbal communication – your body language – comprises more than 50 percent of your message.

Some studies contend that it comprises more than 70 percent.

personal competitive advantage
For good or ill, especially powerful posing has played a large role in history

For no other reason than this, we should be concerned with the messages we transmit with our posture, our expressions, our gestures.

Yes, body language is critical to conveying your message.

But it is essential for another equally important reason.

It’s a reason not generally well-known or understood, and it constitutes a secret that I’ve utilized with my presentation students for years to invest them with confidence and new-found presentation power.

Its core idea stretches back well more than a century, to one of the world’s first theories of emotion: James-Lange Theory.

William James and the Danish physiologist Carl G. Lange developed the theory independently of each other in the 1880s.

Here’s a taste of the real thing from Mr. James himself:

“My theory … is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect … and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble …

Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we should not actually feel afraid or angry.”

So what does this have to do with powerful business presenting?

Everything.

We generally believe that our emotions affect our body language, and we ourselves have experienced the effects of stage fright.

Emotions influence the way you stand, the way you appear to your audience.

They influence what you say and how you say it.

So if we feel stage fright and lack of confidence, our body language telegraphs that.  Moreover, once we become conscious of the effects of our fears, they worsen, and we get caught in a downward spiral of cause-and-effect.

But what if we could reverse that cause-and-effect?  What if we could, say, strike a confident pose and suddenly find ourselves infused with confidence and personal competitive advantage?

Impossible, eh?

But James-Lange Theory suggests that very thing, that you can reverse the process.

Turn Negative Energy into Positive

You can use your gestures, movement, posture, and expression to influence your emotions.

You can consciously affect body language associated with the emotion you want to experience – namely, confidence – and so gain confidence.

personal competitive advantage is yours
You can control to a large extent how you feel by affecting an especially powerful pose

This means that we should lay the groundwork for our emotions to reflect our body language and our posture.

Consciously strike a bearing that reflects the confident and powerful speaker you want to be.

This may sound too easy and leave you asking “what’s the catch?”

No, there’s no catch.  Unless it’s this:

You actually must do it for it to work.

And now that recent research has scientifically confirmed the dynamic I just described, the secret is out.

Several theories later and after many attempts to debunk James-Lange Theory, the most recent research at Harvard University and the Kellogg School of Business would seem to give Mr. James and Mr. Lange the proverbial last laugh.

A 2010 Harvard study substantiated James-Lange Theory and found that power posing substantially increases confidence in people who assume them while interacting with others.

The Kellogg study yielded the same findings.

In short, the way you stand or sit either increases or decreases your confidence.

The study’s conclusion is unambiguous and speaks directly to us.

Our results show that posing in high-power displays (as opposed to low-power displays) causes physiological, psychological, and behavioral changes consistent with the literature on the effects of power on power holders — elevation of the dominance hormone testosterone, reduction of the stress hormone cortisol, and increases in behaviorally demonstrated risk tolerance and feelings of power.

This finding holds tremendous significance for you if you want to imbue your presentations with power.

Personal Competitive Advantage through power posing
Especially Powerful posing is the norm among the powerful figures of history

In our 21st Century vernacular, this means you should stand the way you want to feel.  Posing with power – “I feel especially powerful today!” – improves your entire presentation delivery tremendously and in ways you’ve likely not imagined.

Power Posing can flood your system with testosterone and can suppress stress-related cortisol.

You actually do invest yourself with confidence and relieve the acute anxiety that presentations sometimes generate.

The lesson here is to affect the posture of confidence.  Square your shoulders.  Fix a determined look on your face.

Speak loudly and distinctly. Extend your arms to either side and take up lots of space.

Seize the emotional energy flow and make it work for you.

And remember . . .

“I feel especially powerful today!”

To feel even more powerful, consult The Complete Guide to Business School Presenting.