This is the first and most vital truth you need to accept. You are allowed to be yourself when presenting. In my experience, the speakers who affect me most strongly are those who are simply themselves and speak from the heart, as one person sharing what they have to say with other persons, whereas those who are obviously performing do not come across as authentic and leave me with a question mark.
Of course, it is easy to be yourself when you’re chatting to your friends. Standing up to present is an entirely different and infinitely more complex set of actions, often with more significant consequences!
The irony is that most people instinctively perform the actions necessary to present when involved in informal dialogue with others, but lose it when they find themselves in front of a “formal” audience. Take the office joker, for example: You’re at a social gathering. Harry’s in the mood and the subject is football, which he knows plenty about. Harry launches into an animated description of a match he watched of how a goalkeeper managed to miss a back pass, resulting in an embarrassing faux pax. Everyone roars with laughter. You see, Harry was telling a story of something that actually happened on a subject with which he was familiar. It was true to life, perhaps with a few embellishments, but it worked! The reward was the laugh he received. But put an untrained Harry in front of an audience with a brief to present his company’s product to a potential buyer and it’s as if you have an alien from another planet, someone very different from the confident, joking Harry having a beer with his friends.
Why? It’s quite simple really: speaking conversationally with friends is natural and feels familiar; because a presentation is staged it feels unnatural. So instead of being ourselves we try to be what we think we need to be, when being ourselves will usually do just fine, thanks!
Most people play themselves very well indeed, but only actors, and good ones at that, succeed in playing other people convincingly. So, either we need to learn to act, or we need to learn to be ourselves in unnatural situations.
This encapsulates the art of learning to present. We need to learn to be comfortable being ourselves “on stage”.
Paul du Toit, CSP - Author of “Even YOU Can Present with Confidence”
