CAI-NJ Dec. 2018 (w)

FEAR... from page 13.

Your Body Your nonverbal communication is just as important as your verbal communication. Give special attention to your personal appearance; wrinkled shirts or something in your teeth can be distracting. Use movement and natural gestures to keep the audience’s attention. Have good posture and don’t fidget. If you are going to move in the space around you, do not turn your back on any of the audience members. It is also important to make eye contact with the audience. Remember to scan the whole audience when answering questions; do not focus your response at the person who asked the question. Your Content You should know your subject and know your audience. Preparation goes a long way. The Q&A time after a pre- sentation or during an interview can throw you some curve balls; try to think of questions that may come up and the appropriate responses before your presentation or meeting. This will help you appear to be an expert on the subject and may prevent stumbling to come up with an answer. CONT I NU E S ON PAGE 17

“Confident” and “competent” deserve the most focus because, in my opinion, when you master these two C’s, the other five are not as hard to achieve. During a speech, presentation, meeting, interview, etc. you should be confi- dent in both your verbal and nonverbal communication by focusing on the following. Your Voice We all can recall being in a presentation with a mono- tone speaker, but probably cannot recall what he or she was discussing. Use volume, pitch, rate and pauses to keep your discussion interesting and hold the listener’s attention. Avoid using “vocal fillers”, such as um, uh, like and so. These fillers become distracting to the audience; they will be too busy counting the number of times you’ve said um instead of absorbing to the valuable information you are trying to deliver. Practicing your presentation and slowing down your rate of speech can help to eliminate these vocal fillers.

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