Your clients, your prospective customers, your students - your audience -- want to hear your confidence in your presentation. They want to get a solid feeling from you. They're looking for you to provide an answer. Whatever you're offering, they need to hear your certainty - in your words and tone. And they need to see it in your body language. You need to be bold in presentation.
What Presentation Boldness Is
Webster defines boldness as showing courage, being distinct and clear, being confident and conspicuous. How does this apply to speaking? When you're talking, to be bold you need to:
be honest and direct - Here's where courage comes in. Just tell the truth. That's what people want to hear.
be clear - Take a stand and state it clearly. Forget trying to please everyone or trying appeal to everybody. Doing that makes your message vague, way too general, and even confusing. So be clear.
be direct - Again, take a stand and just say it! Leave out your disclaimers, minimizers and the maybe's.
be sure - Communicate certainty with a strong voice and by showing your own enthusiasm about what you offer.
What Presentation Boldness Is Not
Boldness is not aggression. Being bold is being assertive, not aggressive. That's a whole different thing. I see a lot of confusion here - especially for spirit-centered businesswomen. Because of that confusion, they avoid being bold in talking and in presenting.
Being bold is not about being pushy or hype-y. It's not about having a hostile edge in order to appear powerful.
Why Speakers Get Aggressive
When you're anxious about speaking, being a bold speaker can seem almost impossible. So many people use some form of anger to power through their fear. It's anger that turns it away from boldness and into aggression.
They may get mad at themselves and scold themselves enough to just FORCE themselves to speak. Or they motivate themselves with a battle-mode message to find the strength to overcome the fear - like a football team in the locker room - before the presentation.
When you rev up your engines with all that adrenaline, you come across as aggressive - in your facial expression and in your words. And people run in the other direction, don't they? No wonder you're avoiding presentation.
What's The Solution?
Follow these three steps:
- Honestly assess your own speaking style and get outside feedback. Are you bold, aggressive, or (yikes!) forgettable as a speaker?
- Keep in mind those boldness qualities when you're crafting and delivering your talk.
- Eliminate your fears of speaking so they don't get in your way of being bold.
