Presentation Tip 4: Smile and Relax

From Wilder’s Presentations at: www.wilderpresentations.com

Well, not always. What type of talks do you give? About diseases? About laying people off? About problems in people's lives? If so, smiling is not what you want to be doing.

But most of us do not give those types of talks—yet many people never smile, as if their face would crack and fall off. Smiling is important if you want to reach your audience.

Don’t just break into an unhinged Alfred E. Neuman grin every time you get to the third point. Instead, look at your outline to see which topics and points lend themselves to a flicker of a smile. Your grin can show how excited, happy, or eager you are to share this point.

When?

You have been presenting some problems with the environment and calling your audience to action. Now you are sharing what has been done to reverse the damage. That's the time to smile.

You are giving a project update. Some of it is just statistics on what's been accomplished. Then comes the anecdote about someone on your team who figured out a way around a particularly difficult obstacle. Present the success that's occurred because of this breakthrough with a smile.

You are describing your goals for the future. They include higher sales margins, store reorganization, and other issues that you illustrate with charts and graphs. Look through those charts and see which numbers are going in the right direction. That's when to smile.

When you smile, you relax and appear more at ease. And when you are more at ease, your audience relaxes. They become more responsive to you and your content.

That leads to more creativity, more agreement, more enthusiasm, and a higher opinion of your capabilities.