Charisma

How well do you move hearts and change minds when you speak?

Most presenters forget that their job is not simply to explain something, it’s to transmit a feeling to their audience. Often, for business audiences, they feel nor face nothing much that is positive. They are under pressure, have too much to do, and don’t have much time to spare on you and your message; so it’s a good idea if you accept that part of your job as a presenter is to earn the right to be listened to.

Earning the right is often about leaving an audience feeling more positive as they leave the room, than they were as they walked in. To inspire them. To make the world, so full of dead ends, false starts and hopes, seem like a place where a happy ending just might be in their sights.

It’s really simple to understand how to inspire an audience, and only a little more difficult to do it:  Martin Luther King pointed towards a distant mountain top in his ‘Dream’ speech, and inspired a generation. Barack Obama turned a children’s TV catchphrase into a political campaign, when the whole world (bar the GOP) wanted to believe ‘Yes. we can’. So what do you have to do in your way to bring energy and impetus to your organisation? Simple –

Verbally

  1. Represent the hopes, dreams and fears of the audience
  2. Be positive in all you do and say, even if there’s bad news, that’s not the end of the story, it’s your job to offer hope after disaster.
  3. Use metaphor, contrast and lists to show the possibility of moving from where you are now to where you’d all like to be.
  4. Treat the audience as, at least, your equals and set standards that are high for you and them to aspire to.

Non-verbally

  1. Be physically expressive.
  2. Be vocally expressive and emphatic.
  3. Be certain in tone.

People actually want to be inspired. It’s the better than average speaker who realises this and does it deliberately, every time they stand up to speak.

This article is based upon credible psychological research done by Professor Chris Antonakis at the University of Lausanne, where they sought to test whether charisma could be taught.  The answer was a resounding ‘YES’.

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