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How should you dominate the stage when giving a presentation?

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

This question comes from Joe, one of our online students from the Udemy platform. From Joe Cietti. He writes in DJ when we're on stage, how should we dominate the stage and how should we use each and every inch of it? Joe's stage presence is important. The worst I'm glad to see that you're even thinking about using the whole stage. The biggest problem of course is most people, if they're up on a stage or in front of a room full of people, they stand in one spot. That's the worst possible thing you can do because it's boring. Now I'm standing in one spot here for those of you watching on any of the video platforms because I don't have a camera person following me around. I'm in a small studio. But when you're giving a presentation, that's different. So first of all, I want to applaud you dramatically for even thinking about using the whole stage. Because so many people just stand their feet firmly planted. In fact, there is an old myth out there that a professional speaker or someone who is a highly skilled professional needs to stand with their feet firmly planted. No horrible advice. I'll tell you more in just a moment on what you should be doing when it comes to using the stage.

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So let me pick apart Joe's question in a little more detail. The first part is how should we dominate the stage? I will take issue with your premise there. I don't believe you should actually dominate the stage for a couple of reasons. For starters, when you even use language like that, you, you lose a lot of the audience. I have found women in particular don't really like this phrase dominant. It sounds like militaristic. It sounds very macho. It's not particularly effective. But I find whether you're a man or a woman, it's not really helpful to think of dominating the stage and bringing the stage to submission, bringing the audience to the submission. Practically, I don't think that should be the goal. The goal is how can you be as interesting, as engaging as Memorable. As useful as you can be to all of the audience, if those are your goals, then I think it lends itself to walking around the stage, moving around the stage a great deal. There are a lot of different techniques. I saw Zig Ziglar speak, oh, more than 10 years ago, and he was a master of the stage. He would use every inch of it for the most part. He would use every level. He'd get on down on bended knee. At one point he would stretch to his full heights. And another, very theatrical. It worked for him. I don't think everyone has to do that. The biggest thing you need to think about is to move in a natural way. Now, if you're sitting down talking to one friend, then you're sitting down. It's natural to only move from the waist up. But if you're in front of a large group of people and you are on a stage, then it is natural to move around. It's not that you have to be a Broadway star or you have to be Hamlet, but if you do go to a Broadway show, you don't see the actors just standing in one place reciting their lines. It would be boring. It would be uninteresting. So much of the challenge of any speaker, of any presenter is how do you keep your audience from being so bored they zone out and they start reading their email? Well, movement on stage is one of those things to just make it more interesting. So what I recommend is it's not that you have to use every inch, but you need to try to walk around the stage so you can be as close as possible to the widest number of people. I just mentioned Zig Ziglar a moment ago. When I saw him, he was in a gigantic continental arena in New Jersey, surrounded on all sides. So it was an elevated stage, almost like the size of a boxing ring without the rope around it. So he used all of that stage because different people were looking at him from different directions. That is a challenging environment. In a more traditional auditorium style, your audience is just going to be in front of you. I wouldn't worry about going to the very back, left or right or right quadrant if your audience is entirely in front of you. But I would want to go all the way to the left and all the way to the right occasionally, so that those people on the left and right, feel included, feel like you are addressing them. It creates more variety in what they're looking at. It changes the volume, too, because when you get really close to people, it sounds different than when you are Further away. So all of those things help create more variety. And that's really the goal. Not about the stage presence. And I don't mean to sound like I'm knocking it, but what I have found is if you just walk around and you don't seem like you're pacing, you'll be better than 99% of the speakers out there. So if you can just do a little bit and distinguish yourself automatically, elevate yourself to the top 1%, then why not focus on that? That's the easy part. Now the next premise in your question, how should we use each and every inch of it? I'll go into that in more detail in just a moment.

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So, Joe, I do want to simplify things for you, make life easier and just. And let you off the hook, essentially. You don't have to use each and every inch of a stage if you are a presenter. It kind of reminds me back in, I don't know if it was second or third grade, the teachers I had at Starmount Elementary School in Charlotte, North Carolina. Some of them were good, but some of them had this annoying tendency for art. Our art class or the art segment of the day. They would tell me and all the other little students that. And they said, timmy, which is what I went by back then. Timmy, you've got to cover every single inch of the paper. If it's a sky, you have to shade everything in blue. If it's the land, you've got to shade it in. You have to have every scrap of your paper covered by the crayon or the paint or whatever it was, whatever medium we were using. And I remember I couldn't stand that. Now, I'm not saying I'd be a great world class artist if I had different teachers. I don't know that I really have any talent in that area. Plus I'm colorblind. But I do know that it took the fun out of it. It made the whole process of creating artwork tedious. Having to go in and shade every bit of the sky blue. And that's not what I want to have happen to you. When you're giving a presentation, I don't want you to be up in front of people, whether it's 10 people, 100 or a thousand, really focusing on great ideas and then thinking, oh, there's four square feet in the back of this stage that I haven't touched yet. Let Me figure out how I can get back there and then take your mind off of interesting things you're saying. So now I want to caution you, don't do that. Instead, just think of it as walking around, being conversational, stopping occasionally. Whatever you do when you're talking in front of people, if it's something really important, pause, stop walking, stop moving, stop talking, deliver your incredibly important point, pause again, and then walk somewhere. If you want to indicate a transition, walk. If you want to indicate you're through with one subject and you're going to another, walk around the stage a little. Now, the real skill does come when you're acting out your stories. And that is what separates the great world class speakers presenters from the more mundane ones. So, for example, I often tell the story of my worst presentation opportunity ever when a host pulled a gun on me. Talk radio host pulled a gun on me in the middle of an interview. So I don't just describe it standing straight up. I will act out how I was sitting down. I'll act out how the host reached under the table, pulled out a gun and pointed it at me. And I will act out how my knees were shaking together. So it's not brilliant acting. It's not the most dramatic. It doesn't require any physical skills or gymnastic skills, but it is different from just standing there in a businesslike way. And that's part of what makes it more interesting to people and more memorable. So that's where you want to think about using the greater range of movement. Now, if you are talking about a story where you're chased through the woods by a bear, well, by all means you can run across the stage, but you don't have to be that dramatic. You can simply act out sitting or standing at a conference room when good or bad news came. The main thing is try to use your body in a way that seems genuine and real and not phony and not like you're acting. Most people in the world have a good sense of good acting and bad acting because people have watched tens of thousands of hours of TV shows and movies. So whatever you do, it does need to seem genuine. It shouldn't seem overly stagey. I do remember the worst public speaker I've ever seen, and I've seen him a couple of times, Peter Lowe of the now defunct public speaking series Success Seminars. And he would have this way of bringing up his arms very dramatically and everything seemed phony and contrived and disingenuous. That's not what you want. Your hand motions, your body motions should seem in sync with what you're doing, what you're talking about. Do that and you will be in great shape. Joe, thanks so much for writing your questions and all others are always welcome here. I'm TJ Walker. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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