{"id":168,"date":"2008-09-18T09:18:35","date_gmt":"2008-09-18T08:18:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=168"},"modified":"2008-09-18T09:18:35","modified_gmt":"2008-09-18T08:18:35","slug":"best-foot-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/best-foot-forward\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Foot Forward"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>After lots of reflective posts recently, here&#8217;s a simple article on making presentations yourself&#8230;..  :)<\/p>\n<p>Shoes, like bras, are often bought for the wrong reasons!  Often they&#8217;re bought knowing that they don&#8217;t fit quite right&#8230; or at least not knowing that they fit perfectly.  That&#8217;s a shame, because both can have quite a significant impact on your presentations and how you appear to other people generally.  (I&#8217;m going to discreetly stop talking about bras here and concentrate on shoes but the same principles apply!)<\/p>\n<p>You can&#8217;t make an outstanding presentation if you&#8217;re not standing right.  Posture is critical.  With a poor posture you&#8217;ll not only not look as good as you should\/could do but your voice will sound strained and thinner &#8211; which means you&#8217;ll not sound as credible and confident.  That could make all the difference to the sale, or whatever you&#8217;re trying to achieve!<\/p>\n<p>We often do our basic exercises barefoot on our training courses, to get a stronger sense of our balance and how we&#8217;re standing.  That&#8217;s great for courses of course, where everyone is there to work and is enjoying themselves, but you can&#8217;t give business presentations barefoot (well, not easily).  So please, the next time you buy yourself a pair of shoes that you&#8217;re going to where for work (or anywhere else you make presentations), think about it for a moment; it might look good but does it affect your balance?<\/p>\n<p>Really?<\/p>\n<p>Are you sure?<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a difference between not affecting you and affecting you in the way you&#8217;re used to (so you don&#8217;t notice it).  Take another look.  Go for a walk.  Run a little.  Bounce up and down.  If your shoes get in the way of you doing any of those things they&#8217;re not right and you need to think hard about whether to wear something different.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a trade-off, of course, between feeling good and looking good.  If you feel confident in one particular pair of shoes you might consider wearing them even though they don&#8217;t feel right: of course in the long term you should also consider whether you should be getting your confidence from a pair of shoes!  In an idea world, you&#8217;d wear shoes which looked great and which didn&#8217;t inhibit you in any way.<\/p>\n<p>Shoe makers take note &#8211; is that so much to ask?!?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After lots of reflective posts recently, here&#8217;s a simple article on making presentations yourself&#8230;.. :) Shoes, like bras, are often bought for the wrong reasons! Often they&#8217;re bought knowing that they don&#8217;t fit quite right&#8230; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,9,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-presentation-tips","category-voice-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168","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=168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}