What should you be thinking about during a speech in terms of your body language? There’s a lot to do — you have to stand straight, act energetic, focus on the audience, remember your speech, keep your finger out of your ear, and so on. What are the main points to pay attention to?
You need to know your speech cold, or you won’t be able to do anything but struggle through. The ability to do more than survive depends on knowing the speech so well that you have some extra RAM to devote to all the other things you and the audience are supposed to be doing.
If you do know your speech, then the first place to put your focus is on you. Is your body language consistent with your message? In other words, if you’re asking the assembled multitudes to work harder, stay later, and bring in more customers in order to meet a stretch goal for the 3rd Q, then do you look like someone who is already doing that? How is your posture? Is it straight and heart-oriented? If you’re slouching, don’t expect your audience to respond to your plea. You don’t look like you’re ready to, so why should they?
Then think about your body language in relation to the audience. Are you looking at them, more specifically, selected individuals within the audience in about 30-second bursts? Is your face animated, energetic, and interested? Once again, if you’re not having a fabulous time and showing it, don’t expect the audience to respond.
Then get in that audience and give a brief bit of your speech to one audience member, in the front right part of the audience. Once you’ve done that, go back left. Then front left, and then back right. Imagine you’re having a conversation with each one in turn. Audiences will take the invididual to be a proxy for the whole, and everyone will feel like (to a slightly lesser extent) they had an individual conversation with you. They’ll remember the speech as personal, engaging, real, authentic, and so on.
The way to give a memorable speech is to know it cold so that you can attend to the second conversation, the non-verbal one, that you’re having with the audience. That attention will bring your speech to life for the audience.
Nick,
Another great post on body language.
You are right, it is important to scale up the energy level! You will command more attention and project more confidence and charisma. I cannot stress this strongly enough. 80 – 90% of the presenters that I observe do not expend enough energy. Hence, they come across as uninvolved, uninteresting, and unenthusiastic.
This needs to be done through both the voice and the non-verbal cues of the body language.
Thanks