I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m doing five hours of lectures today. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a long, long bash in one day and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m anxious about the three hours in the afternoon, particularly, because the room is stepped (very steeply indeed, if my memory of it is accurate). That means that (if I’m not careful about my posture) to look people in the eyes I have to tip my head back for those who decide to sit at the back of the room….<\/p>\n
…and sit at the back they will, Murphy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Law being what it is.<\/p>\n
Tipping your head back like that, of course, stretches your neck and tightens muscles around your vocal folds unless you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re very careful. That, in turn, will make your voice somewhat more harsh – you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll sound more aggressive and your voice will tire (even possibly damage over a three hour session) much more quickly.<\/p>\n
So, given that presentation skills trainers like me are always telling everyone to keep face-to-face contact how do you square the circle? Essentially there are three approaches you can take<\/p>\n
use your back: literally bend over backwards for your audience to protect the position of your neck – but that brings with it its own problems and so isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a good idea;
\nraise your eyes: keep your head and neck as they should be and make a point of lifting your eyes – it works but you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got to have a degree of faith to pull it off;
\nask your audience to move: typically, if your audience in large auditoria are like mine, they will tend to fill in from the middle to the back, leaving the front few rows completely empty – plenty of room to bring ’em forwards.<\/p>\n
There is, of course, an added extra advantage to bringing your audience to you and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all to do with something called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153proxemics\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Scientists have identified a range of distances that people can be apart with such names as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Intimate Distance\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Social Distance\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Formal Public Distance\u00e2\u20ac\u009d which tells you pretty much the whole of what you need to know. Crudely speaking (all other things being equal, of course) the closer people are to you, the less formal they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll be and the less formal they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll expect you to be.<\/p>\n
Of course, if you enjoy working really hard to deliver formal lectures and presentations, then your audience can be as far away as you like but if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve prepared an informal, intimate presentation then you need to get your audience to sit the appropriate distance away. If they sit to far off, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll subconsciously expect you to be formal and will be un-impressed at you when you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not…<\/p>\n
…even if you weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ever supposed to be formal in the first place!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m doing five hours of lectures today. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a long, long bash in one day and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m anxious about the three hours in the afternoon, particularly, because the room is stepped (very steeply indeed, if […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}