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In this issue:
I can’t possibly hope to give you a complete presentation skills-course by email but there are two key techniques you can takeaway from here and use when you are working with groups.
(By the way if you ARE interested in presentation skills training, ours is called "Own The Stage", do get in touch.)
Which famous public speakers stick out in your mind? Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy, Winston Churchill or perhaps a modern day politician?
The problem is we don’t really know what they were like because very few of us have ever listened to their whole speech from beginning to end.Even today, the media only playback the highlights or bits of the speech that the audience responded to.
If you were to look and listen to all the speeches, you would discover a common pattern across them all:
They usually start fairly slowly, speaking in a calm measured way, then they get slightly louder and faster, finally ending with the rousing bits that you see on the news or replayed in a film clip.
This pattern of starting low and slow then building to an active ending is called the Charisma Pattern and all great speakers use it.
You can use it too as a way of taking your audience with you, particularly at the start.
A good way to remember it is K-->A-->V.
Start by speaking Kinaesthetically - low down in chest, slowly and carefully.Then move into Auditory pulling your voice up into mid chest and finally speed up and lift your voice tone into Visual. You can do this in less than a minute.
To make it really kick then use KAV words as well as you move through it:
"How are you today? Feeling OK? You all sound excited. Let’s look at the big picture…."
The second technique is even simpler and involves paying attention to your voice intonation.
Do you remember how your parents used to use your name? Spoken one way it meant everything was OK. Spoken another way and you knew it was time to hide.
In our culture, specific voice intonations have specific meanings. If you lift your voice at the end of sentence then you are asking a question.
If you keep your voice flat at the end of a sentence then you are making a statement.
If, however, you drop your voice down slightly and speak with more emphasis at the end of the sentence then you are giving a command.
Experiment with your voice and you’ll see (hear?) what I mean. When you want to underline something in a presentation to a group or when making a sale then drop your voice slightly to give an unconscious command.
Asking a question while using a command type voice intonation can be very effective, for example: "Would you like to b u y n o w?"
As always, there’s loads more to learn. A really fantastic book to help you learn this is Presenting Magically. I've got it and use it all the time. It’s well worth the cover price.
You may be wondering (and I get asked all the time), can I use the rapport techniques to attract the opposite sex?
In a word, No. Being a master at rapport will make you very good at finding new friends of both sexes and your new friends will like you a lot. But they won’t want to sleep with you!
The problem is that the process for attraction is different to the process for rapport. Rapport is built on similarity while attraction is built on difference but that’s a different course….
Here’s a summary of what we've covered in Rapport Secrets - GettingRapport With Anybody:
I’d love to hear about your experiences with rapport and have your comments, questions, advice or requests for information - drop me a line.
That’s it for Rapport Secrets. I’ll be in touch if I come across anything that I think might be useful and in the meantime…
Have fun building rapport!
All the best
Andrew
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