Jun 3 • General discussion
Can You Tell The Story? Barriers to delivering great presentations.
How Stories Change Lives...For the Better or Worse!
When business owners, employees, networkers, or friends use the words “Anxiety or Dread”, while they’re asked about speaking to a live audience…What’s the question you’re looking to ask? But, can’t.
On my podcast channel, ‘No Story Stagnates,’ I interview people whose life stories reveal the lessons they’ve learned. And that shaped their lives and their choices.
In the years before COVID, I had a small therapy room dedicated to my Shiatsu Practise. Clients came, often as a “Last resort”, for treatment of chronic pain, stress and anxiety.
Shiatsu has been a therapy I was using since I qualified in 2002. Shiatsu had provided me with the tools to work with people on chronic, long term physical and psychological trauma. COVID closed it down.
It was a different approach to western medicine and began with a consultation, a one-to-one session, in private, where the client's past medical history and life experiences were used to plan the first sessions of treatment. The sessions were designed to get a full picture of the client's past and included my ability to listen not only to the answers given, but also to what was not said.
This one client came to mind:
On her first visit, she displayed many of the blocks associated with trauma, where her answers were constrained to “Yes” or “No”, but this was an introductory session and not a full treatment, so I was careful with the methods I used.
The following day, she rang to say how well she had slept, and agreed to sign for a course of six treatments. The first one being a full consultation, in private (her friend sat outside the room as requested).
This is her Story: But first, 3 Questions for you:
Are you a business owner or an employee who has to speak to a live audience on a regular basis?
- Would you use the words 'Sleepless nights, Anxiety, or Dread to describe your emotions as your turn to speak approaches?
2. Are you frustrated by the barriers that words can prevent you from making the maximum impact on your audience, clients or sales force?
3. Wouldn't you just love to know, in plain language, how you can gain and maintain the know, like, and trust of the sales force you are speaking to…even if it's yourself you are selling?
If so, then you MUST read on!
Recently, I was asked to work with a woman who has been employed for her knowledge of a sector in the travel market. She has qualifications from university to guarantee that she knows her 'stuff', but has issues speaking in front of a live audience.
Born in Africa, her father was rarely home, and when he was, he was violent. Her mother tried hard to keep the family together until it eventually broke her. My guest was sent to live with her grandmother and the special man in her life, her grandfather.
The few years she spent with them were “happy years”, though she did say she was never sure just what “happiness was”.
Eventually, her mother remarried, and as her grandparents grew less mobile, she returned home. Unfortunately, her mother had married a man with the same instinct as her father, and the pattern was repeated.
It was the last straw. The lady left her home and her country and came to England to work, and work hard. Determined that her life would change.
Her first stop was with the family of one of her friends. She needed to pay rent, so she took jobs that paid money rather than assured a future. Bar work, and in a supermarket. She was resilient, and living with her friend meant she could fit in enough hours to earn rent and save for the future.
It was here that she picked up two skills she’d never thought she possessed. A natural talent for graphic design and, through meeting so many people who needed serving, her ability to connect with them on a personal level. People liked her before she’d spoken to them.
Over the course of two years, management came to appreciate those skills and gave her more responsibility and more marketing work. She thrived in both jobs.
Then the next bombshell fell.
In the course of building her reputation in the bar, she attracted a man with everything she could wish for at the time. He was a manager, he had a house, a car and a comfortable lifestyle. He paid her a lot of attention. They moved in together and started a life.
Eventually, they married and had a daughter. The birth had been difficult, and the baby, although healthy, needed extra attention. It was time her husband thought should be given to him.
The pattern of her life repeated. Her husband became physically and verbally abusive until she walked away from him.
In a foreign country, with a little girl and working two jobs, she was alone...not just alone physically, but also with her religious in-laws, who believed it was a sin to divorce, she was alone psychologically.
Through all of this, she needed to work and to make sure her daughter started school. The divorce meant she could buy a small flat near a school and keep the car. It also gave her the means to attend college, where she studied business. She was successful enough not only to secure work with a travel agent but also to achieve grades good enough for the Open University.
Over four years, she achieved a Diploma in Marketing and was promoted at work, where a colleague invited her out and set the stage for a relationship that has lasted to this day.
This was the story she told me as we explored the decades of her life and the lessons she had carried with her...
Only once in her life had she received the support of people she loved up until now. Tears flowed.
But from the tears, a new message came through...She had achieved so much against all the barriers; her life had been meandering and blocked so that she had had no direction...the Fire in her life had burned down to the ashes...and it had taken a long time physically and emotionally to settle.
Until the treatments, when the story of her life had been laid out, and she had clarity about the issues with her emotions, there had always been a block. Once that block had been removed, or at least worked around, her more natural self emerged.
What a story.
We ended the course of treatments with smiles and a new determination to work on a plan to take her new energy to the audience. We talked about my programme for presentations: 'How To Shiver Instead of Shine When You Face A Live Audience...or the camera!' and she worked hard between our meetings, used the templates, and practised her presentations. She was much more comfortable.
So:
1. Do you have emotional or physical blocks that stifle the “Clarity” in your message and the audience you are talking to?
2. Can you guarantee that your presentations entertain and educate the clients, workforce and decision-makers in the audience?
3. Can you craft and deliver your business and your life story so that you make the maximum impact with your presentations?
Comment and let me know.
I’ll send you a template that will allow you to bring Clarity to your presentations:
P.S. The question that often cannot be asked when business owners use the words “Anxiety and Dread” when they face a live audience is:
WHY!
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Can You Tell The Story? Barriers to delivering great presentations.
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