Do you use silence in your presentations?
It can be your greatest strength or your greatest fear. Silence. It is valuable if you have posed a meaningful question to the audience. The space is filled with cracking brains that go over their own thoughts and experiences trying to find an answer. The speaker is then in his power. He directs your thoughts and takes you into his world.
Silence is a strong weapon
Silence can also provide space for the words that the speaker addressed to his audience to sink in. Barack Obama likes to follow short meaningful sentences with long silences. In this way he ensures that his words take on extra weight and reflect a philosophical content. It has the same effect as dots after a written text: 'Silences are like signposts on the journey inward...'
Silence can also be horror
But silences can also be a nightmare for a speaker or presenter. If you forget what you were planning on saying or if you lost the thread, your temperature rises and the looks feel like lightning bolts that descend mercilessly on you. You feel panic, the audience pity or vicarious shame. A situation that inspires great fear.
The cure
Forgetting your text or words is usually caused by badly rehearsed long texts. As a result, you have maneuvered yourself into a straitjacket with no room for maneuver. You've put pressure on yourself to stick to a protocol and you don't have a backup plan. You can prevent it by:
- To work with a simple and logical storyline
- Using cards with a maximum of 3 words per card
- To speak from your heart instead of your head.
- To choose to interact instead of just sending
- To choose quality instead of quantity. You don't have to be complete. Very interesting.
Want to know more? Please contact me. I take care of:
- 1 on 1 coaching - working on your strength as a presenter in a safe environment
- Pitching workshops - An accessible and playful environment to train elevator pitches
- In-Company training - these workshops last 3.5 hours and are given at your own location.
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