Ep 120 Does Posture Matter in Public Speaking April 29, 2016

Does your posture matter when giving a public speech?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life Speaking with TJ Walker.

This is a question that was posed by Nick Morgan the other day over on his great website publicwords.com I'd urge you to check that out, but I wanted to weigh in on this as well because it is a question that frequently comes up with my training clients. Yes, of course posture does matter, but not in the way people most commonly associate it. Here's the problem. When people think, oh, I need to improve posture, they think about standing up perfectly straight. They see video of themselves perhaps hunched down, shoulders rolled over. That's not a good look. But to counter it by holding your shoulders completely back, perfectly straight, ramrod posture can make you look stiff and uncomfortable and nervous. I want to give you some tips in just a moment on how to have good posture throughout, but more important, it's about how to come across completely comfortable, confident, relaxed and authoritative. When you're speaking, you want people to feel good about who you are. You don't want them commenting on wow, didn't he or she have great posture?

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Of course, there are certain posture no nos when it comes to public speaking. If you are, for example, hunched over a lectern in reading, well, that's the worst of all possible scenarios. It puts people to sleep. You seem uncomfortable, nervous, unprofessional, harder for people to hear you. They can't see your eyes. There's no eye contact. You're all slumped over. You're not using your hands because they're grabbing the lectern. Worst of all possible world. And most people know that and yet they still do it. Next, the issue quite often is sort of standing up and shoulders rounded, leaning forward. Now, in my experience, leaning into your audience can actually be perceived in a positive way. Sometimes people see a video of themselves giving a speech and they may be leaning into their audience and the audience perceives that as fantastic. The speaker thinks, oh, that's bad posture. What would my mother think? That's not the way you really want to look at this whole posture thing. To me the issue is, are you moving in a way that's Completely natural, as you've heard me say before, those of you who are regular listeners and viewers, I believe a good speaker should be moving most of the time, not all the time. You can certainly stand still to dramatize a point or to underline a point, or to let a certain point sink in. But most of the time when you're speaking, you do need to be moving. You don't necessarily have to be walking around the stage. You might be seated, but your body should move, your face should move, your hands should move, your eyebrows should move. Because that's what people do all day long when they're having a conversation and they're comfortable with the person they're speaking to. Good speeches, good presentations should in fact be in many ways like good conversations. So if you are standing up at the water cooler or at the lunch room talking to a bunch of colleagues about last night's football game or ice skating competition, you typically aren't standing with perfect posture. Shoulders back where a book would balance on the top of your head. You lean into the person you're talking to. You're making a point, you're gesturing, you lean in, you sometimes go down, you bend your knees. You may go up on your toes to make a point. There's constant variation in how high and how low you are when you lean forward, when you lean back. Now, there are classic keynote speakers, motivational speakers like Zig Ziglar. Many of you may have seen him, if not in person, then on video. And he takes things to extreme of, you know, he gets down on bended knee, recreating moments where he proposed to his wife and things like that. I'm not saying you have to have that much of a range in your body language, but in general, the more range you have, the better. Now, of course, is it possible to pace around nervously on stage and give people the impression that you're uncomfortable? Sure. Do some people just constantly move and they seem like nervous energy and they never stay put? Sure, that can be a problem, but that's a pretty rare problem in my experience working with clients all over the world. A far bigger problem is people are static. They're frozen. And whether they're leaned a little bit forward or perfectly straight, the problem isn't their posture. The problem is it's too boring because it's just too frozen. There's not enough movement. And that, in fact, is the real problem. I'll give you a few more solutions in a moment.

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There is a moment when you have been introduced. You're walking out, people are judging you, people are looking at you. They might not even be aware of it, but it's their first impression. I do believe that when you walk up or stand up in front of people, you do want to have good posture. It doesn't have to be stiff, but you certainly don't want to have your shoulders hunched where you look scared or uncomfortable. The second an audience member smells that you're uncomfortable, then they are going to take you down several notches in their mind when it comes to your believability, your credibility, and how much confidence you have. So certainly when you're walking out, I'm a big believer. Not that your shoulders are pushed back, but that you're holding your rib cage in. You're holding yourself as tall as possible. Not necessarily ramrod straight, but as tall as possible, looking up, walking out, and you're coming across completely at ease. I do believe that is the best way to start a presentation. And again, if you have a lectern, or what many people call a podium, even though a podium is what you stand on, don't touch the lectern. The second you touch a lectern, you are in fact, going to be hunched over. You are, in fact, going to rob your body of your body language. That's a big problem. Now, I want to go over one tip to help you with your posture before you start. This was a tip shown to me by one of my acting buddies who has done some training for me before. But it's a technique I use from time to time before a speech, before a training. What you do is you go up to a wall and you put your feet together. You put your back to the wall, and you put your feet one foot out from the wall. You then lean against the wall where nothing is touching but the back of your head. So you're forming basically a triangle. And what you do is you let your arms go limp and you hold that pose for 60 seconds. And what that does is it completely realigns your body. Because we're used to hunching over all day long. We all hunch over our cell phones, we're hunching over laptops. So unfortunately, and I'm guilty of this too, friends, our posture tends to get warped, curving over. By using this technique of leaning backwards a foot for just one minute, it completely realigns your body. When you then start to walk, you feel 10ft tall. It realigns your spine. It doesn't hurt anything. You're not exerting any tremendous energy, you're not sweating and you're just filled with confidence. I have used this before, this technique from time to time. I still do occasionally. I've used this with clients and it does make people feel dramatically better. Now, something else, and this is something that's gotten a lot of attention in the media. I've talked about her from time to time. I won't rehash disagreements I have with her. But Amy Cuddy, the Harvard psychologist, advocates that you stand up perfectly straight, have your feet shoulder width apart and then stand with your hands on your hips, your fist on your hips in the so called Wonder Woman pose and do this for a few seconds and that will fill you with confidence. I of course think that there are a lot of other things you can do to feel even more confident. Namely have a great speech, but is something you want to do when no one else is looking right before you go on stage. If it helps align your body, get you standing up straight, breathing fully well, then I'm all in favor of it. So keep those tips in mind when it comes to your posture before you speak and when you're speaking, be aware of what you're doing. It's not about being perfectly straight all the time. The main thing is you want to a full range of motion. I'm TJ Walker. May all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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