121 The Hard And Soft Of Presenting

<p align="center">Hard and Soft When Presenting</p> <p> </p> <p>It is so easy to become “Johnny One Note” when presenting.  We get locked into a modality of voice and body language power. We just keep hammering away with that mode throughout the whole talk.  That might be fine for us, but for our audience it is killing them.  If we are all massive power and bravado, after about five minutes, people want a break.  If your “aura” is too strong they worry about radiation.  If on the other hand, you are a mouse at the microphone, then they feel all their energy being drained from their body, as they shrink into the chair.</p> <p> </p> <p>If we have a lot of energy, are excited about our topic and eager to share the goodies with our audience, then we can easily find ourselves to talking to our audience, rather than talking with them.  The best presentations feel tremendously personal.  The speaker has hit on a theme or topic that really resonates with us. The way they deliver it, feels like they are speaking only to us in the room.  When we are at full power, it can feel like those cartoons where the audience member’s hair is being blow waved back off their head from the full force of the assault.  Not a good idea. They quickly tire and lose interest in our message.</p> <p> </p> <p>If we are very quietly spoken, modest, perhaps shy and by some supreme misfortune, find ourselves in front of an audience, we struggle to get through the content.  We make no attempt to engage with the audience. We are scared of them and want this over as quickly as possible.  Our voice whimpers low confidence, we deny our vocal chords the necessary air to project our voice and our body language is in shut down mode.  The audience doesn’t feel we are sold on what we are saying and rapidly conclude they are not sold either.</p> <p> </p> <p>It is easy to get locked into one mode and difficult to break out of it, to inject some vocal and body language variety.  We need that variety to keep our audience engaged and also to cover all the bases w