10. Animation
To engage others when you speak at meetings you need to be animated. One of the problems for many people is that feeling nervous or even overawed at high-stakes meetings, or in front of powerful people, inhibits their communication. As a result, you may find your voice dropping in volume and sometimes variety. Instead of looking around the room and addressing people, you focus on the table. And your all-round expressivity diminishes.
Instead it’s important to maintain your energy levels and commit yourself to your message. If you seem unconvinced by what you are saying, you cannot expect others to buy into it.
Eye contact
Become conscious of making eye contact. Look round at people. Talk to them. Many people have a tendency to speak only to the person running the meeting or to a few friendly faces or those people they see as the most important. But you must include everyone with your eyes. It can be particularly difficult to remember to look at those sitting immediately to the side of you but they are just as important as those people opposite. You are seeking to convince others and you won’t succeed if you don’t connect with them on an individual basis.
Voice
Keep your voice energised. Sitting up and leaning in will help make sure air flows easily through your vocal cords but it may also need conscious effort to keep your volume up and sustain a good variety of pitch, tone and pace. Many people fear sounding silly so restrict their vocal expression but actually if you believe in what you are saying it’s highly unlikely. Use pauses to allow things to land. Don’t be afraid of silence as long as it’s clear you have not finished. (I’ll address the question of how to deal with interruptions in the next blog).
Gesture
When you talk, use your hands. Or rather allow your hands to do what they do naturally which is gesture. Gesturing is an intrinsic part of communicating and is driven by the connection between thought, feelings and body. When you talk to your friends or your family in a relaxed state you will use your hands without thinking about it. When you speak on the phone, you probably gesture automatically even though the other person cannot see you.
The impulse to speak with your hands is always likely to be there, especially when you are engaged or animated, but many people squash this impulse when communicating in a formal business setting. Don't. I'm not suggesting you wave your hands around just for the sake of it. This will read as purposeless and will be distracting. But it's perfectly possible to turn up the energy dial slightly, consciously, and engage your hands.
Another word of warning here – if you set out to use your hands more at your next meeting, it may feel a little odd. Especially if you habitually keep your gestures minimal, you may suddenly find yourself very conscious about these things on the ends of your arms! People on presentation skills workshops often ask “what do I do with my hands?" And it can take some time before they are able to follow the advice to “forget about them". So rather than forcing your hands to behave unnaturally, what I'm suggesting is that you stop preventing them from communicating.
Urgency
A good way to access animation is to focus on why what you are saying matters. What do you want people to do or think as a result of your intervention? Why is it important that they hear you? A strong purpose will help you commit to your message and this commitment will manifest itself in your body and your voice. And if it doesn’t really matter, then question why you are speaking. If it’s just to get your voice heard, others will probably sense this and your stock will actually fall as they start to see you as someone who takes up airtime unnecessarily. And this will not make you less, not more, influential.
But if you are clear about your purpose for speaking and why it’s important you are much more likely to communicate that. Remember: courage is not the absence of fear, it’s the decision that something else is more important than the fear.