Top tips for personal impact
Our Personal Impact courses have been carefully designed to provide women with a deeper understanding of how we all show up in the World and how our personal style can affect the impact we have on other people and our ability to be heard, influence and persuade.
Our experience of coaching senior executives for over 20 years has shown us that behind the most confident facade; so many of us are prevented from speaking up because of beliefs around how we look, sound, or even doubts that we have the right to be heard.
Our suite of workshops ranges from straight forward presentation skills training through to empowering women to take to the stage and draw on psychological, theatrical and onscreen coaching to take their performances to the next level. All of our coaching is underpinned by examining the key elements of: two way communication, handling internal triggers, presentation, assertiveness, confidence building and influencing.
Over 80% of delegates tell us that they avoid speaking up/presenting/appearing on video due to concerns about how they come across.
Supporting delegates to ease out of their comfort zone and explore different ways of communicating can be a great first step and confidence builder. Here are some things you can try at home:
Practice reading Shakespeare, or your favourite piece of poetry.
One block to great performance is nerves. These cause all kinds of bad reactions in the body - closing your throat up so your voice has limited pitch, to blocking our real personalities and emotions as we recoil and try and protect ourselves. Like everything in life practice makes perfect and one great way of starting to think about voice and emotion is to read out loud. Shakespeare’s text All The Worlds a Stage from As You Like it is a great starting point. Read the text first a few times and really understand and get into the narrative. Now try reading aloud feeling the sense of each word as you articulate it. Next try in a mirror and maybe even add a few actions to support the words. Get really bold and have fun. Next get your family and friends to listen to your performance and maybe get them to read it with you. All the time you’re training the body, the mind and the voice to think about communicating a story - which is all we are ever trying to do in life.
Stand in front of a full-length mirror and look hard at your posture.
Our posture tells people so much - research tells us our body language sends out way more powerful messages than the words we speak. The fear of on camera communications is often centred in seeing yourself back through a lens. It is much more intense than looking in the mirror as the camera acts as a microscope and picks up little “tells” of uncertainty or nervousness.
A good place to start building confidence in this area is to comfortable in our bodies. This may sound obvious but so many people are not comfortable. Look at how a dancer moves, who has practiced for years and years in getting to know how their body moves. Outside of this many people’s bodies hold the tension, knocks and challenges that life has thrown at them - and it shows. The good news is that we can all work to be more comfortable in our bodies. A great place to start is in front of the mirror. Open up your chest, rotate the shoulders in clockwise direction, tuck your tailbone under, soften the knees slightly, dip your chin just a fraction. Take the feet hip distance apart, take the awareness into the feet and feel all four corners of the feet pushing down into the ground. The idea is to feel really grounded and stable in the bottom of the body and open and flexible at the top.
Keep working on this each day - especially before a big event or a presentation. Stance is everything in communications - it provides the right foundations to use your body, your voice and your emotion. It really is worth the effort of working on this before anything else. Oh and most importantly ditch any negative talk - this will not serve you well and is very probably completely untrue!
Then look around you and watch how other people are conveying/leaking emotions through their stance. It’s a fascinating area.
Take time to understand your own psychology
Actors and performers spend years understanding how their own psychology impacts on their performance. Remember that beliefs are simply that - your beliefs. They are not necessarily the truth or reflect what other people are thinking. One of the biggest barriers to using our voice is the erroneous belief that we don’t have a right to stand up and be heard. Taking time to analyse and challenge one’s beliefs can be a great step towards more confidence and impact
