88. Delivering The Perfect Pitch: Eye Contact, Stage Presence & Professionalism (Part 1)

This week, lead UpSkiller Michel Shah shares strategies to boost your presence to deliver powerful pitch presentations, both online or on a stage. 

This is part 1 of 2 in part B) Delivery, in the three-step series of perfecting your pitch: A) preparation, B) delivery, and C) refinement. 

Michel provides practical tips to help you captivate any audience:

• Maintaining professionalism
• Exuding confidence in yourself and your message
• Showcasing genuine passion and enthusiasm
• Using physical space and gestures
• Being authentic and conversational
• Engaging the entire audience, whether live or virtual
• Establishing credibility and building connections

Whether you're speaking on a stage or through a screen, we share how to maximize your presence and deliver memorable presentations. 

Stay tuned for part two next week!

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Transcript

Michel Shah: 0:00

This is episode 88 of Upskill Talks. In the previous episodes, we covered the first step in the three step process to get your perfect pitch preparation, delivery, refinement. We've covered preparation. In this episode, we shift to how we effectively deliver your pitch, presentation, recommendation, or other value proposition. I'm going to introduce the five Ps. To delivering a perfect pitch, presence, purpose, persuasion, and proof personalization, pacing, pausing, and projecting. This episode will focus on presence. Powerful presentations begin with preparation. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, the difference between whether or not your presentation lands will be in its delivery.

1:02

Welcome to Upskill Talks, I'm your host, Michelle Shaw, lead Upskill at Upskill Community. Upskill Talks is a podcast for leaders, leaders who are actively seeking innovative and creative ways to interact. Lead themselves and others in every episode through real life stories and enlightening conversations, we will explore the challenges and opportunities real leaders face in today's everchanging workplace. We will present you with real strategies. For you to leverage your soft skills and produce transformative results. Thank you for joining me on this journey. Let us begin.

Michel Shah: 1:52

A well prepared presentation can land flat. With poor delivery and a mediocre presentation can have an incredible impact with outstanding delivery. Want to get a yes on your sale for an investment? Mine on your idea, whatever the outcome you want to get, you need to get good at delivering whatever you've delivery. And that's what we're going to cover in this episode, every presenter, every presentation has a common goal. It is to gain engagement and eventually a favorable consideration for your ideas, business, products, service, recommendations, business, products, whatever it is. Presence is essential to delivering you these results. So what is presence? What do you think presence is? How would you define presence? Presence refers to how you, the presenter, present yourself to your audience. Your visual. I'm going to focus on your visual impact in this episode, that's the ability to light up a stage and draw your audience in with your energy. It's how you demonstrate poise and self assurance. It's your charisma, appeal, confidence, and the energy you bring to that stage or platform when you're performing. Thank It's the level of comfort that you have on the stage. Your ability to connect with your audience and hold their attention. And how memorable you make the experience for them when it's over. It's the ability to relax and enjoy your audience in performance situations. It is the ability to make others feel connected emotionally to you, to yourself. It's the feeling of credibility that you convey to your audience so they feel that you have the authority to address them on this topic. It's your awareness of how you show up. It's how you actually show up in different spaces, in different places for different purposes, in different presentations. It's you recognizing your role as the presenter in the presentation. The presenter is critical to the presentation. Presence is the key to presenting with impact. This is not easy for everyone to do. Even when you have the best preparation, sometimes just showing up on the stage can derail everything. Many years ago I taught a student by the name of Max. And Max was one of the best writers in my course, Speaking with Confidence. Max had already submitted, which is a requirement, the speech and had received a great mark, top of the class. And so I had never heard Max speak. This was his first speech in class, and I was very excited to hear it based on what he had presented. A well prepared speech that hit all of the points. And when it was Max's turn to go up, Max came to the top of the classroom, and he... He shook so hard, his paper was shaking in his hand, he was visibly nervous, he started getting red, he was just so uncomfortable, rubbing his hair, fiddling, putting his hand in his pocket, leaning against the wall. He did all the things that took away from what I saw on paper as an outstanding preparation for this presentation. The preparation of the content was outstanding, but Max may not have spent any time to think about how do I prepare to present myself to have a powerful presence, to be able to take this content and make it come alive and deliver it powerfully to the audience. And that's why I'm going to provide you here 10 steps to a powerful presence. So that way you don't have to do like Max. Now, some of you are way ahead in your presentations and you're already doing very powerful presentations just to go through this list and see if there's one tip that you can take to enhance how you present. All of us can move our presentations forward and sometimes it's just. Hearing the same thing in a different way, that helps you to move your game forward. I know certainly that I have a lot that I can still be working on, that I am still working on. And I encourage you to think about this, because we're all a work in progress, that we're all working on our presence. And so here are the 10 steps that I'm going to offer for a more powerful presence. Number one is professionalism. Maintaining a professional demeanor and professional means different things in different contexts. And so make sure that professional is defined for the context that you are. Because appearance is important. Conduct is important. And certainly that helps you to establish credibility with your audience. Sometimes professionalism is. narrowly thought about as wearing a suit or wearing professional attire. But if you're going to speak at a golf course, for golfers, maybe a golf shirt is the right attire. If you're going to speak at a creative place, maybe you need an outfit that That shows that you understand and embrace that level of creativity. If you're going to sit and read on the floor with kindergarten students, you're probably don't need a suit for that. You need something more comfortable. And so professional attire needs to match the situation. But professional behavior also has to match the situation and your conduct is really important. Not just when you're on stage, but even the way you show up at the event, the way you navigate the spaces, engage with customer service staff, engage with other servers. Everything from the moment you hit the stage. From the moment you arrive at your venue, you are on stage. Be mindful of how you show up, because if you're rude to the receptionist, if you're rude to the person who is processing you, it will impact the organization's feeling of your professionalism. So it's understanding yourself as a professional through to the stage, not just on the stage. So that's number one, understand what it means to be professional in that environment and make sure that you show up as a professional in that environment. Certainly, something we should practice in our general life, but if as a minimum, at least for your performance, make sure it's professional. Number two, it's important that you bring confidence to Your presentation, this belief in yourself, the belief in your message, the belief that you're the right person to be delivering this confidence in your content will naturally enhance your stage presence, a lot of us struggle with imposter syndrome and perhaps show up in spaces where you wonder if you're the right person to be there, if they're more suitable people for you, if people will believe in you. We all struggle with that. You are not going to be alone with this. Try to pause that for the moment and step onto the stage realizing that this is your opportunity. You're going to do this and go ahead and give your best self. Whatever strategy you use to help boost your confidence, make sure you're thinking about that intentionally in your preparation for presenting yourself to others, being mindful of your presence and the confidence that you show. Number three is to showcase your passion. It's important that you demonstrate genuine enthusiasm. In the idea that you bring, what is it that you're going to do to inspire and captivate your audience to, to focus on you, to engage with you, to engage with your ideas. And because remember, ultimately you want a favorable consideration. When you are showing up, presenting yourself to your audience, it's really important that you're intentionally incorporating some physical aspects. Into what you do into your presence, whether those are hand gestures, whether that's walking, whatever that is, make sure you're doing something that you don't look like you're stiff and stuck, but that people feel that fluidity and that brings me to number four. Number four, use the space. If you're standing on a physical stage, be mindful of the size of the stage, where the audience is located relative to the stage, and address the whole audience. Not just the people directly in front of you, which is our temptation sometimes. But make sure to look left, to look right, and if there's an audience up and down, make sure that you're incorporating and considering the whole audience. During your preparation stage, you should be aware of the environment in which you will be presenting, and you should plan to engage the whole audience as part of your preparation. If you're using a virtual platform, be mindful of how you show up virtually on whatever platform you're using, making sure that you're zooming yourself right in so that people can see you, can see your eyes, can see your smile and can engage with you and sure that you're showing your best self. This is not the episode where I talk about. How to make sure the background is clear, what you should be wearing, and contrasting against the background, but be mindful of how you show up on the screen. What I want to flag up is that I've seen presenters on a screen whom I can see their forehead and maybe a piece of their eyes, but I can't see their lips. So I'm having a hard time hearing them. I can't see the full person so I can't connect with them. They need to make sure that within the screen people can see something that looks more like a passport photograph of you. Fully zoomed in, fully connected, right on screen. A good strategy is to make sure you record yourself. Just see how you're showing up. This makes a big difference. If you are doing a virtual presentation, that's number four. Number five is to be authentic, be yourself on stage. Authenticity builds trust and connection with the audience. Just be you. This is harder than it sounds, because particularly if you're not experienced in speaking, you almost bring a different speaking voice, a different speaking tone. In Speaking with Confidence courses, we talk about speaking extemporaneously. That means speaking the way you talk to each other conversationally. Bringing that realness to your message, to your conversation. It makes it easier for listening because people feel like they're having a conversation with you versus when it sounds more like very structured, more like they're reading something to you is harder. Make sure when you are thinking about and planning for your delivery, that you are showing up in a way that's authentic. Onstage authenticity really means showing up as your fun self. If you're a fun person, if you're a serious, go for it. If you're a, whatever it is that you do, if you like to, if you're a light, if you would run onto stage, if you have fun with it, if you have a lot of body movements, whatever it is, be you so that they can see who you are. The person that you are in front of your family and close friends. Try to be the closest, the professional version of that on stage. And if you think about how your friends and family adore you, then your audience can experience that version of you and really connect with you. And like I say, that's hard to do, but that is the goal. You take it one step at a time until you get there.

15:01

Next week, we present you with five more things that you need to consider to supercharge your pitch And create a presence that captivates your audience. See you next week on Upskill Talks Podcast. Thank you for listening to this episode of Upskill Talks. We bring you new episodes every Monday. Please take a moment to subscribe. Leave a five star rating and a written review at Apple Podcast or follow us on Spotify, Google podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Don't forget to share Upskill talks with other leaders like yourself, so they too may gain the skills and insights to produce amazing results. Please go to upskill community.com to review show notes, and learn how you can join a community of leaders from across the globe. Collaborating to lead in a more meaningful and impactful way. I'm your host, Michelle Shaw, and again, thank you for joining me on this episode of Upscale Talks.