Normally, I’d say that keeping your head down isn’t a good idea as a presenter and public speaker – too much hiding your light under a bushel doesn’t get you very far sometimes…<\/p>\n
There is just one time though – and it’s pretty literal – when you should keep our head down though.<\/p>\n
We all have a tendency to raise our heads when we’re anxious\/nervous (and when we’re working in stepped auditoria) – we tip them backwards, raising our eyes. My hunch is that it’s something to do with wanting to see danger coming from as far away as possible but I can’t be sure. The advantage is that you get to see your audience’s eyes (always a good thing) but there is a huge downside – tipping your head back tightens your throat.<\/p>\n
…. and a tight throat means you sound stressed and anxious (even if you’re not). It’s important for your credibility to keep your head down. By that, I don’t mean that you should pull your head down into your shoulders – but instead you should keep it it tipped<\/strong> down\/forwards… lower your jaw so that you’re natural eye-line holds to hit the floor at about five or six metres away. If you’re like most people, that’ll probably feel very un-natural as we’re almost all conditioned to tip our heads up – it’s a natural stress response and we’re a pretty high-stressed society – but it’s worth the effort.<\/p>\n Other than it feeling odd, the hard part will be to keep your shoulders down and stay relaxed but with just a little practice you’ll find it can make a huge difference to how you sound when you’re presenting. Even if you’re not confident, you can sound it….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Normally, I’d say that keeping your head down isn’t a good idea as a presenter and public speaker – too much hiding your light under a bushel doesn’t get you very far sometimes… There is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}