Lead Yourself First Before You Lead A Team: Presentation Skills

Introduction

Presenting is a critical skill whether you are an entrepreneur, intrapreneur, or career professional. When done right, presenting will help you get noticed, get promoted, and get your ideas implemented. This is crucial for those who aspire to lead and manage teams.

Presenting is also inherently vulnerable. It’s a deliberate choice to put yourself in a potentially uncomfortable situation, showcase your ideas, and be subject to judgment, questions, and criticism. Therefore, it is crucial to develop the right set of skills and mindset to become an effective presenter.

In this article, I share practical insights, tools, and frameworks that will help you lead yourself and empower you to develop the skills to present confidently.

THE THREE ELEMENTS OF PRESENATIONAL LEADERSHIP

These three elements are foundational to presenting effectively, especially when you’re looking to lead and manage teams. These elements are:

Presence

Storytelling

Persuasion

Presence: How To Show Up & Shine

Introduction To Presence

Presence is the first and most foundational element of presenational leadership. It’s that magical quality that makes people want to listen to you, pay attention to what you’re saying, and admire how you carry yourself.

In the context of presentation skills, presence refers to how you appear to others and how you manage your emotions while you speak. So it’s not just what you say, but also how you say it, and how you manage your emotions during the process.

Your presence is critical in establishing your credibility and influencing others. It showcases your confidence, passion, and empathy. Initially, presence is mostly developed through intentional behaviors, which over time turn into habits.

Techniques To Cultivate Presence

These techniques will help you cultivate presence:

Manage Your Emotions & Be Authentic

Emotions are the currency of presence. Authenticity refers to being true to your values and beliefs and showing up as such. If you’re passionate about your topic, project, or mission, let that shine through! Be mindful of the emotions you project. If you appear overly confident, people may perceive you as arrogant. If you’re overly nervous, people may think you lack confidence.

Know Your Audience And Adapt

If you want to be perceived as a leader, you’ve got to show people that you care about their needs, challenges, and goals. This means doing your due diligence in understanding your audience before you present. You must adapt your content, tone, and examples to fit the audience. This is particularly important when you manage a team of diverse backgrounds, experiences, and even cultures.

Non-Verbal Communication

Practice conscious awareness of your non-verbal communication. This refers to how you hold yourself, how you gesture, your facial expressions, and even your breathing. Here’s a quick exercise to raise your awareness of your non-verbal communication. Take a selfie video of yourself presenting. Watch it without sound and focus on your facial expressions and gestures. Write down three things you love about your non-verbal communication and three things you’d like to improve.

Dress The Part

How you dress is an important element of presence. It’s not just about looking the part, but also about feeling the part. When you’re dressed professionally or appropriately for the context, you feel different than when you’re wearing casual or inappropriate attire. When you feel good about yourself, it shows in your posture, confidence, and voice.

Manage Your Voice & Speech

Your voice is a powerful instrument that affects the impression you make on your audience. Think about the last time you heard a speaker on a podcast, on stage, or during a presentation. Chances are that you were influenced by their voice. Whether it be its tone, pace, or pronunciation, these aspects of your voice are entirely within your control and deserve your attention.

A couple of vocal techniques to improve your speech and voice include:

Breathing exercises to calm your nerves, slow down your speech, and project your voice.
Warm up your vocal cords by practicing vocal exercises such as tongue trills, lip buzz, and glissando.

Handle Fear & Anxiety

Fear and anxiety are parts of the presenting process, especially when you put yourself out there. The key is to recognize when these feelings arise and equip yourself with techniques to manage them. Implementing mindfulness and breathing practices every day can help you manage anxiety and increase your resilience in the face of fear.

Another valuable technique when you’re in the thick of anxiety is to focus on your breathing. When you’re anxious, your breath is typically shallow. You can ease your anxiety by breathing slowly and purposefully.

Bring Energy & Vulnerability

Energy is a crucial component to commanding presence. It’s contagious. When you show up energized, your audience is more likely to be engaged. This does not mean you need to be loud and over the top. It does mean that you need to be intentional about how you channel your energy. When you bring vulnerability to the table, you create a safe space for others to share their ideas and contribute.

Manage Your Time & Pacing

Nothing erodes presence (and credibility) more than someone who runs out of time or rushes through their presentation. Structure your presentation according to the available time, and stick to your time limits throughout the presentation.

Conclusion: Presence

Presence is within your control. It’s a culmination of dozens of micro-behaviors that you can learn, practice, and repeat to make you a more confident and influential presenter. Start small, perhaps with one or two behaviors, and build on it until these presenting habits become your default.

Storytelling: How To Craft A Compelling Story

Introduction To Storytelling

Storytelling is the secret weapon of great presenters. When you tell stories, you show up with confidence, passion, and empathy because you tap into the emotional part of the brain.

We are hardwired for stories. They are the most efficient and memorable way we share information and learn lessons. This is because stories have a beginning, middle, and end. They have a hero who overcomes challenges to achieve a goal. When we hear stories that reflect our challenges, we emotionally connect with the hero and identify with their struggle.

If you want to be a leader, whether in your startup or corporate career, storytelling is indispensable. It’s the secret sauce to being memorable, relatable, and engaging.

Why Storytelling Is So Powerful

As humans, we rely on stories to make sense of the world. Stories are powerful because:

They’re memorable

They evoke emotions

They help us relate to common themes

They explain the unknown

They encourage us to take action

As you can see, the power of storytelling goes beyond presenting. It’s a way to communicate ideas, inspire others, and drive change.

A Framework For Storytelling

There are many storytelling frameworks available, but my favorite is the Hero’s Journey framework.

The Hero’s Journey is a universal story structure that resonates with your audience because it taps into stories we know and love, from movies to real-life anecdotes.

According to the Hero’s Journey framework, every story follows a similar journey. A journey that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A journey where the hero faces a problem, overcomes it, and returns back changed.

As you craft your presentation, think about how you can structure it using the following elements of the Hero’s Journey:

1. The Ordinary World

Set the scene and establish the hero (your audience) in their ordinary world. Introduce the problem or challenge they face and clarify why it needs to be resolved.

2. The Call To Adventure

Introduce the conflict that necessitates the hero’s journey. This call to adventure will motivate your audience to listen with curiosity and empathy as you proceed.

3. Refusing The Call

Explain the obstacles and fears that prevent the hero from embarking on the journey. This is where you can empathize with your audience’s pain points and resistance to change.

4. Meeting The Mentor

Introduce your mentor figure (could be you or someone else) who offers guidance to the hero and provides them with tools, skills, or knowledge to help them succeed.

5. Crossing The First Threshold

This is the point where the hero commits to the journey and leaves the ordinary world behind. This is when the audience is engaged, and you, as the presenter, have established trust and accountability.

6. Tests, Allies, And Enemies

This is where the hero encounters allies and enemies and faces tests (challenges) along the journey. This is the meat of your presentation where you share relevant examples, case studies, and solutions to demonstrate your expertise and credibility.

7. The Approach

This is where the hero puts the mentor’s guidance into practice and begins to see tangible results. It’s where you showcase your process and how it leads to success.

8. The Ordeal

This is the climax of the story where the hero overcomes the biggest challenge and has a moment of self-discovery, and the audience feels the most tension.

9. The Reward (Or “Truth”)

Here you reveal the reward or “truth” that comes from the journey. It’s where you share the insights, lessons, and conclusions.

10. The Road Back

This is the point where the hero returns to the ordinary world, but is no longer the same person they were before the journey. They return changed and with a newfound appreciation for the ordinary world. This is where you recap your key learnings and give your audience a clear and actionable call to action.

11. Resurrection

This is a bonus phase where you give your audience a final memorable message that reinforces the main points of your story and inspires them to take action.

Conclusion: Storytelling

When you tell stories, you don’t just share information. You showcase your authenticity, passion, and expertise. You build trust, empathy, and credibility. You inspire and motivate people to think differently and take action.

If there’s only one thing you take away from this article, it’s the importance of storytelling. It is the secret weapon of great presenters, leaders, and influencers.

Persuasion: How To Influence & Sell Your Ideas

Introduction To Persuasion

Persuasion is the final piece of the presentational leadership puzzle. When you combine presence, storytelling, and persuasion, you become a force to be reckoned with because you inspire others to action.

Persuasion is the art of influencing and convincing your audience to accept your point of view. It’s about getting others to embrace your ideas, buy into your vision, or take action.

As a leader, you’ll often need to persuade and convince others of your ideas and strategies. Whether you’re pitching a new project, advocating for a change in process, or securing buy-in for your ideas, you’ll rely on the art of persuasion.

Understanding Persuasion

Persuasion is about influencing behavior and securing buy-in. As such, your words, along with tonality and non-verbal communication, are critical to persuading others.

You can use Dr. Robert Cialdini’s six principles of persuasion to influence and convince your audience:

Reciprocation: This is the urge to repay what someone has done for you.

Commitment & Consistency: Most people have a strong desire to be and appear consistent.

Social Proof: We look to what others are doing, through trends and peer pressure, to determine how we should behave.

Liking: We are more easily persuaded by those we like.

Authority: We are more likely to be persuaded by those in a position of authority.

Scarcity: We want items that we believe are in short supply.

These six principles are powerful tools to help you become a better persuader, and therefore, a more influential presenter.

Conclusion: Persuasion

Conclusion

Presenational leadership is about showing up confidently, sharing your ideas with storytelling, and influencing action through persuasion.

These three elements of presenational leadership will help you get noticed, get promoted, and get your ideas implemented. This is crucial for those who aspire to lead and manage teams.

In this article, I shared practical insights, tools, and frameworks that will help you lead yourself and empower you to develop the skills to present confidently.

I hope you’ve found it useful, and if you want to continue learning, I’ve added some further reading recommendations on the topic of presenational leadership below.

With that, I wish you the best of luck on your presentational leadership journey!