Using spacial metaphors to reinforce your messages
Tonight, after the regular Toastmasters meeting, a few of us met in the pub for a pre-Christmas drink and an expected turn in the conversation led me to my topic of this post. It’s all about how you can use your presenting space as a metaphor for some of the concepts you are conveying verbally.
Imagine for a moment that in your speech you are going to be talking about three time frames. Let’s say that you are going to start talking about the past, when you will explain a little about the history of the project you are presenting on and how it got started. Then you will talk about the present day status of the project and what sort of results it is already delivering before finally talking about the future and the exciting new developments of this project just around the corner.
One way you could use your presenting space is to use three different areas of the ‘stage’ to talk about each of the three areas. Let’s say you you decided to stand at the left hand side when speaking about the past, the centre when talking present, and the right hand side when talking about the future. If you set up these spaces as triggers or anchors in your introduction, whenever you walk to that area of the floor, your audience will immediately and probably without being aware why, shift their focus and know the context of your words before you even start to speak.
There are lots more ways in which you can use this principle to great effect but I’ll keep those for another post. In the meantime here are a couple of ideas to help you understand this concept. Firstly, whenever you are looking at a professional speaker or presenter, look out for them using this technique and see how well it can work. Secondly, why not try it out yourself.
Have fun and keep on raising your game, your audiences will thank you for it and it’ll pay dividends for you in all sorts of ways.
Gavin
