Strike A Pose - Boston, MA

Art: Zenos Frudakis

One of our best units during the ReacHIRE training course was in public speaking. Yes, it was also one of the most painful. According to popular lore, people rank public speaking fear as a close second to fear of death. I used to feel this way but I have to say that Toastmasters in the early 1990s and a whole lot of no-choice-but-to-get-up-there in my corporate career makes me rank this fear as somewhere after losing my children, after being overcome by a large wave, and slightly before spiders. I don't lose sleep over it anymore. 

Which isn't to say that I am a good public speaker.  Nerves get anyone, I suppose, and I get hives probably noticeable from space, and yes, I generally forget about 20% of what I was going to say but as far as I know I have yet to make people fall asleep. Perhaps they are fascinated that anyone can talk so fast and turn so red that they forget to yawn. Whatever it is, I do not love public speaking but I think I do okay. 

In preparation for our public speaking session, we all watched a TED Talk by Amy Cuddy. She is amazing--fought back from a life-threatening car accident, tamed an inner critic that fiercely protested against her going to college, and tells us all to believe in ourselves. That is a terrible summary of a very fine talk. 

One of the fun parts of her talk is the Power Pose. There are certain poses that show we are in charge--arms lifted in victory, leaning powerfully forward over a desk, etc--and we all need to practice them before taking on new challenges--in our case, public speaking. You can see one sculpture demonstrating this pose at the top of this blog post. 

Image credit: thesun.co.uk

The bottom line is that you need to go troop into the bathroom before your talk, get into a stall or in front of the mirror and visualize crossing the finish line--victory!! And all your little bitty brain pieces (I am good at science) will buy into this. 

Or, to paraphrase from her biography: "Amy Cuddy’s research on body language reveals that we can change other people’s perceptions — and even our own body chemistry — simply by changing body positions." Yes, our body chemistry. Sounds better than bitty brain pieces. 

This is fascinating stuff. Take time to watch the Ted talk here: 

So we all watched this presentation before class, and then arrived at our host company to meet Charlotte, our  public speaking trainer. And she built on this confidence and gave us tools to make our presentations better now that our body chemistry had changed. One of the tools for this is what she called the Starting Five (as opposed to the Big Five which all live in Africa and you had better be scared of them. Meeting them would change your body chemistry in a different way--as in maybe RUN!). The starting five are:

1. Posture
2. Connection
3. Gestures
4. Voice
5. Pace

And I think you know what goes along with each of these five points, at least intuitively. Posture is all about owning your body, standing straight and tall and not crossing your legs and hunching inwards like you're about to get tackled by my insane dog. Might be good to practice that though if you come to visit. 

Connection is also a challenge. Trying to connect with each person in your audience is tough. Usually I find one or two friendly audience members (let's be frank, all the ReacHIRE women are friendly) and stay mostly with them. But in our training exercise, we had to maintain eye contact with each of the four watching for five seconds. Five seconds is a really long time. Yes, Usain Bolt can run between Boston and New York in that time but you try talking about something staring into someone's eyes for five seconds. Someone you don't know very well. Someone you don't want to creep out.

Gestures. First of all, no arm flapping. I love this admonishment--it's like we're all try to fly our way out of there. No hands in pockets, no arms crossed. It's tough. I can now understand why all our presidential candidates use the same gestures all the time. I want to use different gestures towards some of these self-same candidates, but that is not the point here. Nor polite, really. You want gestures that go along with what you're saying and without looking like a crane. The birdy kind.

Voice. If they can't hear you, well, what's the point really? And you don't want to end every sentence with a question mark? Because that is annoying? And what teenagers do? Get me? 

Pace. Ah, here it is. My waterloo. I tend to zoomy zoom through the beginning of presentation because I'm still getting the butterflies out, right? Those question marks at the end of sentences are addictive right?  So yes. I did finish my 5 minute presentation in 3 minutes and 50 seconds. And I wonder where my child gets his impatience. From me.

We also talked about the pyramid principle. This is where you get to the point first, support with three arguments, then share your call to action. I like this principle as it is similar to one I learned in consulting engagements--always with the three arguments. In consulting you use three bullet points. In this case, Charlotte hates bullet points. How can you hate bullet point? Bullet points are your friends. This is not an advert for the NRA. 

So our presentations. Two days ago was our final class including five-minute presentations by each of us. We could choose our topic as long as it included some data research. I chose to speak about Setting Up for Success--what to expect in a meeting in Brazil. Everyone pretended to be new sales guys on their way to Brazil to sell medical devices. 

I think it went fine. I made mistakes. I forgot to say stuff. I had chosen to go first (I always choose to go first if allowed) and had forgotten that the hand-up signal from one person meant 2 1/2 minutes left, not one minute, so I roared to an end at 3 minutes and 50 seconds. We spent the last minute staring at each other and power posing. Just kidding. Pace needs help, but it was fine. Friendly audience, topic that I love. 

All ten of us presented--topics ranging from social media to computer languages to small talk to boxing. All of them were good. Great. Excellent. And none of us were totally happy with how they turned out, but as most of us said "at least they're done" or when asked what went well, the answer came "well, at least I didn't faint!"  

I am so proud of my group from ReacHIRE and I am glad they've got my back as we all go out into the great big world. We plan to meet up every month--maybe we should start the meeting with a power pose. And a behavioral interview question. And end it with a tootsie roll pop. Why not? Make your own rules.