Will someone please tell me, convincingly, how intelligent, successful business speakers can continue to believe the myth that only 7% of the impact of your presentation comes from your words or content? Can you imagine that body language and vocal quality would overcome the horrible content in a speech that sounds like this:
"Our company provides federal agencies the solutions and expertise to improve customer service and maintain high levels of customer satisfaction throughout the agency. By focusing on standards-based processes and tools, we help federal clients meet their mission objectives, sustain mission-critical functions, and transform mission-sensitive infrastructure. The company's professional services span the IT life cycle, focusing on network engineering, program support, systems management, operations and maintenance, information assurance, help desk administration, and mobile computing implementation and support."
I didn't think so. And that is what presentation "experts" who preach the value of this myth will have you believe and ask you to pay them for.
I agree that most business presenters would benefit from better non-verbal presentation qualities. Those who cling to lecterns/podiums, or who stand facing and speaking towards their slides are obvious examples of people needing to improve the use of their body and voice. If you mumble, follow every other word with 'uh' or 'um', fail to ever make eye contact with anyone in the audience, read word for word from a script or note cards, wring your hands or hold them in the fig leaf position--you need to improve your body language and voice qualities. But to say that these distractions account for 93% of the message is out of proportion to reality.
You don't help your cause by dismissing the heavy importance of content.
- It's content that spells out the direction your company is going.
- It's content that asks people to join you on the journey to the future.
- It's content that tells people what to do next.
- It's content that lets your industry know about your thought leadership.
- It's content that makes your body language and voice qualities have importance, not the other way around.
In the next post I'll write about content. I'm always interested to hear from speakers who've found that the right content has helped them go where they want to go. Post your thoughts in our comment link.
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