When each of these women hit the stage, they do not resemble nor sound like their audiences, but they have found powerful ways to connect.

As you walk on to the stage you sense that the audience is surprised and uneasy. You quickly look down to confirm you are zipped up and free of toilet paper. You are dressed appropriately; you have the necessary expertise in the topic; so why is the audience acting this way?

You don't look like what they expected to see. This is a distraction which also reduces your credibility. One solution is to leverage your body language to create a physical presence that realigns with the audience's expectations.

Vanna, president of Speak to Persuade TM, trains others to make persuasive presentations. She emphasizes gestures not just to animate stories but to literally change your shape in front of your audience

Vanna frequently trains construction industry supervisors who are not expecting their expert on persuasive speaking to be a petite Asian American woman. She deliberately alters her gestures, stance, and use of space to meet the audience's expectations of big and powerful. In doing so, she builds rapport, establishes her status and confirms her expertise. Here are concepts I learned by watching Vanna:

Use your Body

People tighten up when they are scared and nervous so show your confience with good posture, a confident stride and by using open, expansive gestures, primarily moving yourupper arms outside of your body frame.

Hold your Ground

Use the "power stance" (feet shoulder length apart with weight evenly distributed) to deliver your most important points. Psychologically it shows you are "sure footed."

Mark your Territory

Determine the zones which are rapport building, general information and key message zones of your stage. Delivering the appropriate material in the appropriate zone subtly enhances your message by non-verbally cuing your audience to interact, take notes or get ready for an important point.

Maximize your presence by combining all three techniques.

Making an important point, from the key message zone, using a power stance and strong gestures will have much more impact than any one of the techniques alone.

Remember: Use your body, hold your ground and mark your territory.

Kristin takes a different tact for connecting with her audiences, emphasizing the power of language.

Looking through your registration forms for your public seminar on leadership training, you see no commonalities in your attendees. Geography, industry, and job positions are all across the board; the most diverse group you will have had. Unfortunately your client reduced your time from 4 hours to 3 hours. How will you make your concepts clear to such a diverse audience with regional differences, varied job descriptions and lingo?

Connecting with a non-industry specific, non-role specific audience takes more time to communicate since people have different backgrounds.. How can you be thorough given a limited time getting through to everyone?

Kristin uses efficient language to directed at people's interests, speaking to them, in their lingo.

Kristin, president of Quality Process Consults, Inc., specializes in facilitating and building high performance, extraordinary teams. The combination of the discipline of military training, certifications, affiliations, education, sports competition, motherhood, and gourmet cooking have given Kristin the insights to develop skills for strong connectivity with her audiences.

As I interviewed Kristin , I was impressed with her efficient use of language to connect with a variety of people in a blink of an eye. She starts out with a simple statement, then clarifies with a metaphor, and confirms with an example. She has a remarkable way of weaving distinctly different threads into a tactile, textured, seamless fabric of information. This fabric of knowledge wraps around you with multiple points of contact, no matter your shape or size.

The following steps I derived from listening to Kristin:

1. First, identify your audience's main interests (educated guess ). For example cooking, gardening, and playing with your dog . You will have a better chance of finding commonalities through their hobbies then through their industries or roles.
2. Pick a verb phrase that aligns with the hobby: recipe for team success
3. Step into the world of the interests Be the chef."
4. Translate the literal statement into the corresponding vocabulary ie. Teams are made up of different ingredients that, when mixed together, produce a wonderful combination of flavors.
5. Simplify the wording and roll the literal statement and metaphors into a sentence. As you assemble your team, start with the right combination of ingredients: skills, talent and motivation so they can be an extraordinary team! When you have mastered this, splice several examples together into one powerful sentence.

Use this exercise to increase your connection with diverse audiences. People would rather be thinking of their hobbies then work anyway, so give them what they want.

In your upcoming speeches this month how will you interact? Use techniques to adapt to your circumstances. Watch videos of your presentation with the sound off to be more aware of your physical presence, map out your speech for full impact. Tie in the audiences hobbies into carefully crafted sentences to reach more people with clarity.

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Contact: Jolene at 425-489-1073 Jo@FunSpecialist.com