Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes - The Goodman ...

pg. 44
“An audience wants one thing
above all, which is for the
person to show up.”
– Paul Hawken
Natural Capital
Institute
Improving Your Delivery
Just Be Yourself. Only Better. – cont’d
Loosen Up and Open Up
Thanks to her background in theatre, Eda Roth is intimately familiar with the
relationship between how people carry themselves on stage and the non-verbal messages
they project to the audience. When she coaches public interest clients, she told us, her
main challenge is getting them to loosen up and open up. “The same people who are
very expressive at their children’s soccer games are not as expressive in their professional
lives,” she says.
To help clients relax and open up, Roth conducts an exercise in which presenters
must start their talk by literally running into the room and exclaiming, “I have the
most incredible thing to tell you!” Most clients will respond by jogging to the podium
with an embarrassed look on their faces, but Roth sends them back and demands a
full-out sprint. “I want to break through the constrictions of so-called professionalism
and get them to open up to the possibility of a bigger and more visceral expression,”
she explains.
Much to her clients’ relief, Roth doesn’t expect them to incorporate the running start into
their actual presentations. “It’s a matter of stretching out a lot so that when the personality
snaps back, it’s a little larger than it was,” she says. In a similar exercise, Roth will ask
presenters to identify the emotion – excitement, anger, empathy, frustration – that is
central to their talk. Once they have it, she instructs them to make their points saying
exactly what they feel, shorn of any euphemisms or diplomatic language. This no-holdsbarred
exercise helps presenters feel the emotion more clearly, and that’s what Roth wants
them to remember when they eventually put the diplomatic language back into their talk.
That “body memory” will make them more expressive, supporting their words with the
right non-verbal messages as well.
Wordsmiths Take Heart (Maybe It Really Is What You Say)
In the 1960s, UCLA professor Albert Mehrabian conducted research to measure the
significance of non-verbal cues in communications. From a series of tests involving
face-to-face conversations, he concluded that 38% of communication is inflection and
tone of voice, 55% is facial expression, and only 7% is based on what you actually say.
Since then, many communications consultants and public speaking coaches have
cited this study when telling clients, “It’s not what you say but how you say it.”
Unfortunately, like George Miller’s “Magic Number 7,” Mehrabian’s measly 7% does
not necessarily hold for all forms of communication.
In Mehrabian’s study, subjects who played the role of “listener” had only one task: to
determine how the “speaker” felt about them. In addition, the speakers and listeners
were complete strangers, so there was no additional context for the listeners to draw
on. Given that most audience members will have some knowledge of the subjects and
speakers they come to hear, and that their intent is more to learn than to figure out if
the speaker likes them, it seems that where presentations are concerned, Mehrabian’s
findings, while fascinating, probably do not apply.