Style and Substance

So how did you do.

I hope you gave yourself an honest assessment and a fair assessment.

If all you did was see negative.

Awful awful everything’s awful ahead.

You weren’t being honest.

You weren’t being fair.

There’s something you do well now we want to work on all the negatives.

We’re not going to whitewash it or push it under the rug.

But I do want you to develop the ability to see yourself speaking objectively.

I want you to focus on just one thing you don’t like so far.

And let’s pick it of the style.

And if you’re not sure what that is.

Go back and watch the video again with the volume off.

I want you to pay attention to your eye contact.

Now I realize you might not have been practicing in front of an audience but if your head is down and you’re reading notes there’s no way that is going to see assertive.

So I want you to focus on one aspect of how you look how you move things you’re doing that don’t relate to your substance and Let’s practice again.

Videotape it again and try to get improvement in just one area.

Now the other big thing that sort of robs people of their confidence and their assertiveness when they speak is this fear of well I might be given a really awful boring speech.

Well it makes complete sense to be a little nervous and uncomfortable fearing you’re going to bore the you know what out of people if you fear you don’t have an interesting presentation that you’re just going to give a boring data dump.

Guess what.

It makes perfect sense to lack of confidence to not be assertive.

That’s like baking a meal that you know taste awful.

And now you’re having a dinner party and you’re like here please eat this I know it’s awful it’s going to make you sick but please eat that.

Well that would destroy the confidence in any dinner party host.

I wouldn’t want to serve that dinner.

And unfortunately that’s what way too many people do when they are giving presentations.

So the problem is not that you’re lacking assertiveness.

The problem is you’re forcing people to eat horrible bad tasting stew at a horrible dinner.

The problem is you don’t have a good speech.

So we’re going to switch gears now.

It’s all related but now we’ve got to focus on how you can actually give a great speech how you can create a good speech how you can have interesting content that’s memorable because when you have that it’s almost hard not to be confident when you have that confidence you will be perceived as assertive and it’s going to solve all these problems.

So that’s why I want to get to the underlying problem.

Sometimes it’s just physiologically we’re speaking too softly we seem timid but sometimes the problem is the actual substance.

We’ve got to deal with both.

So the first exercise right now tape yourself again saying the same thing and let’s really focus on making one improvement on the visual side the body language side the eye contact.

Next we’re going to hop right in to making sure we have a great speech and not a boring awful data dump.