For anyone who has taken our Consultative Sales Personality Test, you know that unless you’re an extravert (Charmer) or even a Strategic, public speaking or presenting to an existing or prospective client can cause massive anxiety, sweaty palms and frustration.
I see this quite frequently with millennial advisors just starting out in the industry. They know how to use social media and digital methods to get a meeting, put together the “deck” using great animation strategies and typography, and use the latest devices to show charts and figures. Yet their biggest fear is how to show their expertise to a client or prospect who is in his or her 50’s, 60’s or older, and being able to do it with ease and poise.
As our Introversion Coach, Heidi Brown, writes in this article, there are physical, emotional and mental ways to make deeper human connections with our audience, be ourselves, and stop “faking it til we make it”.
Here’re snippets of Heidi’s advice
First, it is important to give ourselves permission to reject the soundbite messages to simply overprepare, overpractice, fake it and view our nervousness as the world’s greatest motivator. While that advice certainly might work for some folks, for others, those simplistic slogans are just not viable long-term solutions. Instead, to amplify our advocacy voices, we must invest in both mental and physical reflection and then convert our enhanced self-knowledge into conscious action.
On the mental side, it was essential for me to identify and transcribe—verbatim—the toxic soundtrack that accompanied me into every performance-related professional scenario. The abusive self-talk was remarkable: They’re going to think you’re incompetent. You’re going to blush and turn red, and they are going to sense weakness.