Speaking Tip Of The Day: Improving Your Posture

How you look when you speak determines to a large degree whether or not your audience believes and trusts you. A stooped, slumped posture will affect everything about your presentation: your energy, the opening of your windpipe and vocal chords, your ability to breathe, your level of tension and stressóeven your credibility. From a nonverbal standpoint, a slumped posture can give the audience the impression that you are bored with your subject or that you have low self-esteem.

Instead, stand in an open, elongated position when you deliver your speech. An elongated posture is very powerful. Not only does it tell your audience that you are confident and relaxed, but it will also improve every other aspect of your speech when you speak from this position.

Here is a simple exercise for finding your most open and elongated posture:

• Imagine that you are relaxed and sitting in a movie theatre waiting for a movie to begin. A rather tall person sits down in front of you. If you sit up and stare straight ahead, you are looking at the back of this personís head and it partially blocks your view of the screen.
• The sensation of posture elongation is if you were to stretch and elongate your head and body just tall enough, you are able to easily see the movie screen just over this tall personís head in front of you.
• Seated in your chair, try to imagine this scenario several times in your mind and elongate your body upwards each time.
• Next, try the same sequence standing. Lift and elongate your head as you stand, imagining a string pulling your head up and elongating the back of your neck. Don’t forget to drop your shoulders!

Ideally, you will stand in this open, elongated position when you deliver your speech.