Working with clients, I spend a lot of time coaching them on delivery skills as well as, of course, helping them write great speeches.  We get the whole range of ability, from brilliant to considerably less than brilliant, and I’m often in the position of conducting triage with a speaker who was trained (or learned his speaking habits) in the Cro-Magnon era.  I’m talking about the type who has 60 Power Point slides for a 30 minute talk, wants to stand behind a podium to read those slides in a monotone, and begins every speech with, “What I’m going to talk about today has seven parts.  The first part….”

Where do you start?

It’s always a battle to wean the speaker off the slides, but it’s worth fighting.  Once you persuade the client that there really is no reason to show the audience his speaker notes, you’re off and running. 

But issues like lack of expressiveness are much harder to combat.  They may be ingrained habits acquired over a lifetime.  And you may not have enough time to work with the client in the depth that it takes to free up the charismatic speaker lurking within.  Deep within.

So, when I’m performing triage, I often turn to a simple, easy way to increase your impact and charisma as a speaker:  get out from behind the podium.  Because we tend to trust people, broadly speaking, who move closer to us (excluding psychos and other scary folks), if you move toward the audience on your key points, finish the point standing near an audience member, and then move to another quadrant of the audience for your next main point, you will instantly increase your effectiveness. 

There are other reasons why this works, based in neurology, but this is quick version for a quick fix.  I go into this in much more detail in my book, Trust Me:  Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma, but this is enough to get you started.