A lot of speaking advice is about feeling good and looking good, e.g. how to feel more confident, how to use convincing body language, how to find more beautiful words or design stunning slides, etc.
While all of this certainly helps, it’s never the point when you’re looking to make change happen.
It’s not how good you look and how well you feel but how strong you resonate.
The main difference is that “feeling good and looking good” is concerned with the speaker while “resonating” is concerned with the audience and how it relates to the speaker.
In order to resonate strongly you need to empathize with how the audience feels. You need to understand what matters to the audience.
It’s about seeing and hearing your audience and caring for their struggles and desires.
It’s about doing the work of figuring out a path and lighting it so that your audience doesn’t have to.
Ironically, my clients tell me that this posture leads them to actually feel good on stage. By shifting the spotlight away from themselves and onto the people they seek to serve, they let go of the heavy weight of being the star of the show. They merely help their audience make change. And that feels good.
The best part is that adopting that shift ripples into everything you do because you can’t unsee the audience in anything you do.
