Standing motionless behind a lectern creates a boring, static presentation. To command attention and keep an audience engaged, you must project energy physically. Move around the stage, use your hands and arms, and actively fill the screen or room. Your physical energy must be great enough for the entire audience.
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The make-or-break quality for a workshop facilitator is their energy level. A good rule of thumb is to be 30% more energetic than your normal state when leading a room. What feels exaggerated to you will come across as engaging and enthusiastic leadership to the participants.
Over-rehearsing to the point of perfection makes a speech feel robotic and disingenuous. The most engaging moments in a presentation are often the imperfect, unscripted ones. Practice until you're comfortable with the material and its flow, but don't polish away the human element that connects with an audience.
For his high-stakes live event, Alex Hormozi practiced not just his words, but the entire physical "flow" of his presentationâhand movements, signals, and stage positions. This is analogous to a musician learning to play an instrument while singing, making the mechanics second nature so he could focus entirely on delivery.
Rushing through words causes listeners to disengage. By speaking with a deliberate cadence and strategic pauses, as orators like Churchill did, you force your audience to listen. This gives them time to process your message and connect with its emotional weight, making you more persuasive.
The word "presentation" permits crutches like teleprompters. Viewing a talk as a "performance" acknowledges the audience, demands rigorous preparation, and shifts the goal toward being entertaining and engaging, not just informative.
Your physical energy is a key non-verbal signal of competence and reliability. Potential hires, investors, and partners subconsciously assess your energy to gauge if you can deliver on promises. Low energy can communicate untrustworthiness, causing you to lose high-caliber opportunities.
On video calls, avoid being a tiny person in the corner of the screen. Maximize your camera frame to take up as much space as possible. This conveys presence and confidence, showing the prospect you are actively engaged. Combine this with leaning in to listen to demonstrate active engagement visually.
Gesturing doesn't just help the audience; it measurably benefits the speaker. Studies show that using hand gestures while speaking lowers one's own cognitive load, resulting in fewer pauses, faster speech, and the use of more sophisticated vocabulary. Inhibiting gestures makes explaining complex topics harder.
Communication extends far beyond words. How you carry yourselfâyour posture, demeanor, and overall presenceâis a constant broadcast that communicates your value and influence. Citing WNBA icon Lisa Leslie, Chiney Ogwumike argues this "physical communication" is as critical to one's professional brand as their spoken words.
If you sense the audience is disengaged, don't just push through your script. The best move is to pivot by stopping and asking direct questions. This turns a monologue into a dialogue, shows you value their input, and allows you to recalibrate your message on the fly to address what truly matters to them.
