Save this article
Use this article for free on your own website
Republish this article for free on your own website or blog. Or search or browse for more articles that your audience will appreciate. Huge choice available. Ideal for finding quality, free content. Read our publishers guide.
Coaching The Reluctant Speaker
Coaching on pressentation skills is one of the most popular and effective uses of coaching at work, but is it really possible that we can help people conquer their nerves?
There are few more common applications of a manager’s coaching skills than helping the nervous public speaker cope with the expereince.
I guess much depends on whether we’re going to be working with an individual over a period of time and develop them into an accomplished presenter or whether we’re working with someone standing trembling in front of us like a gibbering wreck with 5 minutes to go before they’re due on stage.
Let’s deal with the latter situation first. Conventional wisdom on developing presentation skills is going to be no use to us here. We may well feel that our coachee’s Powerpoint is overly busy, their notes a mess and their planned pyrotechnics to create a memorable ending doomed to failure, but it’s too late to do much about that now.
If you’ve read some of my other articles on coaching you’ll know that I reccomend the following acronym as a useful questioning framework:
A - Aims - What do you want
R - Reality - What’s happening now?
R - Reflection - What do you want?
O - Options - What could you do?
W - Way Forward - What will you do?
This ARROW sequence will prove useful to guide to our nervous presenter although we would not have the time to coach to any depth.
My advice is to concentrate on aims or goals. Let’s have our presenter utterly clear on what success in this presentation would be like. If it’s winning business from a sales proposition let’s help them focus on that, if it’s creating a relationship with a group of people they’re going to be working with again and again let’s help them focus on that. Of course, if the aim is pure survival then we can build an aim around that too! Two things are vitally important in doing this. Firstly we need to make sure that any aim or goal is within our coachee’s control. ‘My aim is to make sure they agree to do business with us’ is not but ‘My aim is to present our proposal in the most positive way@ is. Secondly any aim should be stated in the positive so ‘My aim is to present a compelling argument’ is better than ‘I don’t want to stammer and make a fool of myself’.
Where is only a short speace of time in advance of a presentation, creating a well-defined aim increases the chances of success and gives our reluctant presenter something useful on which to focus. I would argue that this is much more useful than criticizing their material or sending them on their way with a glib ‘I’m sure you’ll be OK’.
If our coaching intervention was over the longer term then after each presentation we could be making good use of the Reality stage by exploring what had happened, what had gone well, what had gone less well and so on. We could also employ the Options stage to really think through what changes presenters could make to bring about a different result.