Your Stage Presence - Part 1 of 2

Once you have planned and prepared your talk, it’s time to present it. Your delivery style speaks to your “stage presence” and is a combination of your gestures, your facial expressions, your voice, your eye contact, etc. Good speakers find, and then take advantage of, their own unique style. To find and enhance your natural speaking style, take the following steps:

• Know who you are. Assess yourself by placing an “X” where you feel you naturally fall along the following personality dimensions.

Dramatic ........................................Subtle
Informal .........................................Formal
Spontaneous ....................................Prepared
Emotional .......................................Logical
Fast-paced ......................................Slow-paced
Humorous .......................................Serious
Warm ............................................Cool
Down-to-earth...................................Intellectual
Anecdotal ........................................Factual

• Let who you are become your primary style. While you are giving a presentation is not the time to adopt a new personality!

• Choose characteristics that come naturally to you and amplify them. Work on one characteristic at a time.

• Be aware that you might need to make your style more interesting and varied by purposefully developing more characteristics that balance your strengths.

• Ultimately, you want the flexibility to be able to incorporate many aspects of style depending on your topic and the audience.

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