If you’ve never sought the kind of help with personal impact that I offer, you might find it daunting to take the first step. Maybe you are unsure about how the process will go or maybe you don’t feel ready to face the anxiety that comes from being in the spotlight. Whatever the reason is, you have an event coming up and you are not going to improve your communication skills by just sitting there!
Let’s walk through what it might look like working together to improve your personal impact.
How It Works
Lyndon took time out to understand my needs and helped me to find my voice. She built up my confidence in public speaking and enabled me to present far more effectively than I had previously ... more
How we work together depends on who you are, where you are in the preparation process, and what you need to accomplish. People come to me for a number of different reasons:
- To prepare for something specific
- To work on personal impact and presence
- To recover lost confidence
- To find confidence in themselves for the first time
- To stop being dull and becoming someone worth listening to.
Our initial conversation gets to the heart of exactly what you need and where you are. Absolutely nothing that I do with my clients is off the shelf or the same old same old.
Like any good presentation coach, I work with posture, status, breathing, voice, energy, pause, and audience connection. But, I get the results I do by going way beyond the basics and micro-personalizing your sessions. After a very short time with you, I’ll know whether you will benefit from a creative drama-based approach or a structured, pragmatic one. I’ll watch all the signals you give out in the first few minutes of our session and know exactly how you will present before you have uttered the first word of your presentation. I’ll know too what you think about yourself and how the world looks on you.
Where it all starts
My starting point is always to film you (gasp!) so we can analyze your impact. We then do 3 things:
- Mute the sound and concentrate on what our eyes take in about you
- Bring up the sound, lose the visuals and take in the impact of your voice alone
- Put the 2 elements together again to assess the full impact!
I encourage you to be as objective about ‘this person’ as you can be. We don’t worry much about the content at this stage.
I’ll be asking myself (and you):
- What signals does your body give out to your audience?
- How can your audience detect your nerves and anxiety?
- Are they drawn in by the expression on your face or put off by it?
- Are they at ease with your gestures or irritated and distracted by them?
- Can they sense your life force, or are you coming over as a husk of a human?
- Do you look as if you are worth turning up the sound for?
- Does it look as if anything interesting is being said?
- Do you look like a contender?
On to your voice. Again, we’ll answer a set of questions:
- Is it a pleasure listening to you, or a trial?
- Does the tone of your voice match the words that you are speaking?
- Does your voice reach out to your audience or demand that your listeners strain towards you?
- Is your voice flat and lifeless or does it have variety of pitch?
- Do you speak at a speed that suits your listeners?
- Are you breathing well or are you struggling and snatching at air?
- Do you sound trustworthy? Does your voice suggest integrity?
We’ll determine where your communication strength lies: is it physically or vocally? Does one dominate the other or are you evenly balanced? I’ll use your strengths and weaknesses here to determine how to approach the 7 attributes that determine your personal impact and performing ability.
7 Critical Attributes of Personal Impact
Pace and pause
Many, many people do something I call ‘spaghetti speaking.’ Out the words come, in a uniform way. Each sentence sounds like the last. Each paragraph sounds like the last. There are no pauses, no moments of respite, when the audience can ready itself for the next point that’s going to be made. The repetitive monotony of pace renders the message indigestible. Most people who do this don’t do it in everyday communication, but unwisely reserve it for when the stakes are really high and they are in front of an audience! Spaghetti speaking cannot move or influence any audience and is tedious and irritating to listen to.
Breathing
I had 6 training sessions with Lyndon Hughes and I can say with certainty that they changed my life, both professionally and personally. ... more
Breath is the first thing to go haywire when a speaker is nervous. It seems to shoot into the upper chest making it impossible to support the voice through to the end of a sentence. Sometimes the upper body, right up to the jaw, can become so tense that it feels impossible to gasp in any air at all. Nothing shouts ‘I’m in trouble here’ to an audience more than breathing that’s going awry. Conversely, breath that seems to go deep into the body can power up the voice as well as quell nerves. Breath is all we have and all we need to speak dynamically with easy control.
Posture and gesture
The way that we stand in front of the audience says so much about how we feel about ourselves and our audience. Stand well and you will look confident no matter what you are feeling and or what you are thinking. Stand poorly and your status will diminish and your power is ceded to your audience. A relaxed, upright position works best for breathing too and facilitates natural relaxed gestures that orchestrate the words. We are after the ‘look of confidence’ here, pure and simple. Not arrogance or pride, just looking comfortable in your own skin and at ease in front or your audience.
Audience connection
This is a vital piece of the puzzle. If you genuinely want to communicate, your audience will know it. Without a real desire to connect, you are sunk. Think of serving the audience with your words, not just talking at them. It is impossible to influence an audience if you are not in tune with what they want to get out of listening to you. This is equally true if you misjudge their mood or ignore their energy levels. True connection is when you constantly ‘take the temperature’ of the audience so you are with them moment by moment.
Status
Apologetic language in presentations is surprisingly common, ditto for body language. Sometimes an over eager attempt at courtesy translates as being ingratiating. I think of it as the ‘don’t mind me syndrome’. This is an unfitting demeanor for a senior person and can severely damage credibility (and halt promotion). And surprisingly, it is not unusual for senior executives to excel in every other aspect of their work, to have a keen awareness of their worth, yet blow it with a hit-and-miss, lacklustre performance when they speak to an audience. “Playing small” as a presenter is a high risk thing to do. It hands power over to the audience and gives them license to question your authority. And they will!
Energy
It’s all too easy to underestimate the amount of energy that is required to present well. Just being your normal self in front of an audience just doesn’t cut it (even if you have a microphone). What we work towards is finding the “you” when you are at your best and most engaging and then making you large enough for the space you are in to be read by your audience each and every time. Your message is fueled by energy and your audience craves it.
You in the space
It is critical that presenters understand how to use the performance space; to move with purpose and to sense when and where to move. Arbitrary movement is distracting and suggests an unfocused thinker, even hinting at a weakness of personality and resolve. It is that well-worn phrase of ‘owning your space’ that we are after; behaving as if, in the time allocated for you to speak, you have every right to be there. Getting in and out of the space with presence is crucial too. A decent presentation can be blown by a hurried exit.
Put it all together
What an excellent training day. Lyndon's unique ability to tailor the day to explore and cater for my particular needs in presenting was exceptional. It's not a course where you just sit down ... more
Armed with all the information that the video has given us, we are off. You’ll be up on your feet, experimenting with your energy, your ability to connect, your handling of your visuals. We may look at the enormous impact of words: their colour, their power to evoke emotion and action; to reveal or obscure the truth. We may look at dramatists, poets, the speeches of statesmen, inspirational CEO’s, military leaders for our examples or equally we may only work with your word patterns and your natural ability to touch people with your individual turn of phrase. We may concentrate more on pauses, recognizing that so often they are more eloquent than words. Or we may be thinking more about your personal ambition and potential and getting you up the corporate ladder.
Each and every intervention is different but the result is always the same. Getting you to a point where you can present with an impact that you didn’t think was possible for you!