Latisha showed up for Transforming Your Presentation Skills in quite a state. She hates public speaking but her boss decided she has to do quite a bit of it now.
She was very self-conscious. No matter what I said, she kept asking me to coach her on her hand gestures and her words.
“Do you think this hand gesture is better than this one? I really like the way Jesse’s hand gestures work. I wasn’t sure if I should move around. Should I walk toward the audience? I don’t know whether to open with, ‘I’m really glad to see you’ or ‘Happy New Year!’, which one do you think is more professional? Do I have more presence if I put my hand on my hip like this?”
On and on.
It took Latisha all morning to realize I wasn’t going to coach her on any of that, and she was now looking at me with fixed disappointment. She still kept executing what I was telling her to do, although extremely skeptically.
Latisha was watching the other students in the workshop transform, but all she was noticing was their greatly improved physical poise, hand gestures, presence and great openings. She kept complementing them on these. She had no idea where they were coming from or how they were happening.
I had told her at the beginning of the workshop:
“I’m not going to coach you on what your body is doing. I coach at the level of thought, what your thoughts are doing. This is all reflected in your body.”
It went right over her head.
By the end of the first day Latisha was completely confused. She seemed to be improving. Even her hand gestures were better. She wasn’t exactly sure how because she wasn’t really noticing how I was coaching.
It was in the middle of the second day that suddenly the lightbulb went off.
“It’s not what my body is doing. It’s what I am doing.”
Bingo.
Then Latisha walked up to the front of the room, and, as herself, effortlessly connected with all of the other students before she even began to speak. She owned the room, she owned the audience and everything just flowed. Body language, gestures, movement, poise, presence, her words, all flowed effortlessly.
Students love the final part of the class when we play their “Before” and “After” videos and they can see the dramatic difference. Latisha ‘s jaw dropped when we played hers. Even the still-shot of her standing there in her final video before she began speaking was radiant. Her radiance spread through the room, washed over the other students and made them beam back at her. You could take that still-shot and put it on the cover of a magazine and it would sell every issue.
Her words flowed effortlessly. Her hands were graceful like those of a queen. Latisha had all the physical grace of royalty. A body language that is impossible to teach. A language spoken from her true self.
I was sitting next to Latisha as she was watching her final video. I was silently watching her face. The joy I saw in her face lifted me to an inexpressible joy. After her video finished playing, Latisha turned to look at me. There are no words to capture that moment of pure joy and understanding that passed between us. The pure stillness and beauty of the moment.
In that moment, Latisha knew everything she would ever need to know to communicate purely, as her real self, beyond the physical and into a realm of thought that transcends and transports both speaker and the audience.
One of our highest capabilities is thought. It’s what distinguishes us from all else.
When you begin to discover what thoughts you’re capable of, you begin to discover the heights that your thought can reach. And when you discover that, your audience experiences the truly extraordinary you that you are.
Be the cause!