Here’s a very short blog for you with some very simple tips that you can introduce to your board preparation straight away. Loads of bang for you buck here.
1. Make Eye Contact
Sounds really obvious right, but it’s often not done well by officers.
A little bit of eye contact, whether face to face or over Zoom goes a long way to making you look confident. You don’t even need to maintain the eye contact all of the time, sometimes you may break away and come back to the assessors – that’s fine as it helps you look more natural or in bselected language makes you “be more normal”!
2. Smile
Smile as much as you can… if there is a lack of congruence in what you say and how you say it, they assessors won’t believe you!
If you say in your presentation that “you can’t wait to get stuck into the new role” or that “you are excited by the prospects of the opportunities a new rank brings”, but you look miserable and with a face like thunder as you say it – it just doesn’t match up and can have a detrimental effect on your board outcome.
Smiling makes you look like you want to be there and will make the assessors glad that you are!
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Pause
Maybe the most impactful of all of these points is to… pause. Look at really confident speakers on the TV or TED talks etc. and you will see that really confident speakers pause, a lot.
They speak very slowly and very steadily which gives them so much gravitas and presence. They look and feel and sound that they are meant to be there.
You need to be more deliberate, and you achieve this by pausing. Add in pauses to you preparation. They may feel uncomfortable to you, and you may think that they are lasting an eternity, but in reality they will be seconds.
Be brave and you will reap the rewards.
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