Transcript
So even if you’re making a five minute pitch, you have to remember that people retain information best when they’re either doing, and/or imagining, so engagement happens when people are doing something and/or imagining something. So considering the fact that people have an attention span of eight seconds today in comparison with twelve seconds in the year 2000, five minutes is a long time. So we’d better engage our audience to help them retain information. And one of the key ways of engaging your audience is to make sure that you are not ranting, that you are not on a monologue, that you’re in a dialogue. But a dialogue has to happen within finesse, which means that it shouldn’t feel awkward for your audience. The dialogue should be not too much, it should be just right, it should be minimal. But when your audience is engaged through dialogue, it should feel right. It should feel not imposed, but feel natural.
A smile denotes what’s inside of you. I think it’s the shortest, sweetest way of conveying to other people without saying a word that you have your wife figured out. So important. When you smile to your audience without saying a word, without uttering anything whatsoever, you’re telling them that you’re enthused and passionate about what you’re doing. And if you’re not smiling, which means that you wouldn’t be enthused and passionate about your message, why should I be enthused about it?
I’m going to demonstrate this with four ways of saying the same sentence, ‘Why did he do that?’ So, one: ‘Why did he do that?’, ‘Why did he do that?’, ‘Why did he do that?’, ‘Why did he do that?’ And actually number five,’ Why did he do that?’ So if you pay attention to your own emotions as you hear each and every one of those five sentences, they’re different from one another. And it’s simply because of a switch on intonation and the stress of each word. So it’s extremely important how you’re stressing your words and what your intonation is, because it conveys an emotion. It has a meaning with it. So I’ve made this mistake before and not once or twice, several times, actually, when my intonation or the stresses that I gave certain words caused my message to come off as differently than I was intending for it to, because you want to make sure that your audience is receiving the right emotion that you intend to convey and not an emotion that you absolutely do not intend to convey. So you want to make sure your audience is not getting ‘why did he do that?’ when you actually mean ‘what did he do that?’
Exercises to help you overcome nervousness before pitching
Pitching can seem intimidating, we understand! It requires your energy and focus to really knock it out. Hence, we’ve listed down some effective exercises you can try before your big pitch to get rid of the nerves and fear you may be feeling:
- Adapt a power posture. A power pose is basically the act of taking a posture of confidence, even when you don’t feel so confident! As they say, fake it till you make it. When you’re not feeling so good, chin up and stand up straight. Let the confidence come to you!
- Feel your feet firmly on the ground. Grounding is a great technique to make you feel more composed and unafraid.
- Set positive intentions and speak positive affirmations to yourself. This will help you calm down and know that you got this!
- Imagine the worst case scenario. If you imagine the worst, then you put yourself in a position to be prepared for absolutely anything and not feel disappointed should things go wrong. You’ll know exactly how to handle it!
- Just breathe. Try some throat-chakra exercises, meditate or listen to some music to help you prepare and loosen the nerves.
