A Story of Engaging Difference and Riding the Dragon
How to engage and inform, when your material is complex and the audience is looking at you blankly.
The Background
Gabriella was a senior business analyst and consultant working within supply chain strategy for a globally recognised food retailer.
In seeking support Gabriella wanted to examine three communication threads; she wanted to address challenges and investigate strategies around presenting, so that she could command her audience with impact and deliver with creativity; she wanted to explore cultural difference within communication styles, in order to ensure that she was flexible and responsive to a diversity of individual and team needs; and her final challenge was to address her nervousness around public speaking, and the very real personal and professional consequences of that fear.
The Sessions
When delivering a bespoke programme the sessions evolve over time, as the individual becomes more aware of their present skills and how they can go about growing, enhancing and strengthening them. The aim is to establish a conversation in which tools are explored, taken away and reviewed within subsequent sessions. A learning feedback loop.
As an analyst, Gabriella’s initial challenge was how to keep disparate interests listening through to the end of a presentation. While fascinated by complexity and detail Gabriella often found this wasn’t shared by the rest of the room.
What was developed was her ability to read and address the needs of the room, rather than those of her material. In working with both volume and silence, Gabriella started to appreciate and play with the power of your own voice. In working with the difference in spoken rhythms between her mother tongue and those of English she was able to offer the inexperienced listener an easy way into her most complex communications without compromising her authenticity.
Keeping an audience listening also means utilising a smorgasbord of language choices and lexical devices. If you’re too technical you lose the generalists, often the budget holder or ultimate decision maker. If you’re too general then the technical team have trouble translating the discussion into ideas and actions that represented what has been agreed.
But what do you do with Gabriella’s nervousness and the common and very real fear of speaking in public? Fight it? Flee from it? Stand very still and hope it doesn’t notice you? Public speaking triggers one of these responses in many people.
A Quick Aside – About a Dragon
It happened to me as an 11-year-old. The singing was finishing. I got out of my seat and walked toward the front. I climbed onto the platform. The music finished. I looked up. I saw a mass of people. Waiting.
My brain froze.
No sound. No movement. Panic.
Breathe. Make physical contact. Breathe. Make visual contact. Breathe. Focus on the familiar. Breathe. Allow the first sentence to form. Breathe. Speak it away. Breathe. Allow the next sentence to form. Breathe. Speak it away. Repeat.
Slowly your fear, or rather the energy that drives that fear comes withing your grasp. You take hold of it gently, kindly and then it is yours, to be used to deliver your message, with command and engagement.
I don’t think it’s so much to do with facing your dragons, but rather learning to ride them. They are magical and full of energy and entirely part of you. Why fight yourself, flee from yourself or freeze inside yourself?
There are no pills to take, well there are, but why anesthetise yourself to the possibilities of sharing information, connecting ideas, collaborating with other ways of thinking?
Part of this journey is developing a different narrative for this fear, growing a new mind-set, the other part is practical. At the heart of this is breathing.
And this is where Gabriella started.
Growing Forward
This programme gave Gabriella the opportunity to see and experience herself and her challenges in new ways. She was able to choose tools and techniques that would serve her and her style, a style of communicating with clarity of purpose and warmth of intention; a style always seeking engagement.
At the heart of what Gabriella took away was a more rounded and fuller sense of her own capacities as she grows forward into her own voice of authority and sharing.