Five Ways to be More Like Nate

You have a presentation to give. In fact, you have prepared a thorough, 20-minute deep-dive with lots of data, but the CEO has gone over time and you have to reduce your whole thing to two minutes. How do you do it? How do you make your presence felt and your voice heard when the stakes are high? Let’s start with the voice.

According to Albert Mehrabian, when you are speaking about what you care about, the audience get 38% from your tonality—how you say what you say. The sentences you speak, the way you say them, the way your voice goes up and down...it all matters. A lot. When I was coaching Microsoft last year they asked me to come up with a phrase that their 2,000 new hires could grasp. I came up with SET—sentences, energy and tone. If you have SET in your communications, you will always be heard. But doing it is tricky. So what did I give the most valuable company in the world? What was the secret they flew me out to Seattle to deliver? Buckle up, take a moment—because I am giving you this for free!

1. Stand tall
2. Breathe deep, quickly
3. Hum to connect your breath to your voice
4. Say your name so you know how it feels and sounds
5. Apply it to your presentation

So let’s break it down...

1. Stand tall
   Body language is 55% of what you present, so learning to stand tall is so important. You won’t always be able to stand in a meeting, but if you warm up by standing tall just before you get on camera or get in a physical meeting room, you will breathe better and look better. When you do speak, you will sound more confident. And in standing tall you can breathe better and if you breathe better you can connect to your voice and speak from a strong, supported place.
   
   How do you stand tall? Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart, pointing forwards, like they are on a tram line. Place your arms by your side and breathe in through your  nose. Then breathe out. Do this a few times until it feels normal. Then imagine you are a puppet being pulled up on a string. Lean onto your tiptoes and breathe in. Then slowly lower back down onto your heels. This is will stretch you and get rid of any slouching. And everyone slouches—tall people, short people and people in the middle.
   
   
2. Breathe deep, quickly
   Behind your stomach is the diaphragm, which is the power house of your voice. You need to use that when you breathe and speak. How do you do it? Well in his book, James Nestor proves that breathing through your nose is deeply important for a healthy life. I love this because I always tell my clients to breathe in through their nose, not their mouth. Try it now as you are doing this and imagine that as you are breathing in, your stomach is ballooning out. I say regularly, ‘let that pregnant belly out.’ As you breathe out, imagine you are blowing out a candle, gently. Your stomach will deflate a little bit. When that happens stay nice and tall. Do this for a minute and you will feel more grounded and connected with your body.
   
   
3. Hum
   So now it’s time to connect the breath with the voice. And the way you do that is by humming. At this point in a warmup I say to my clients, ‘This is the weirdest part. And just remember—$9 billion! That is how much people have gone on to raise after doing this.’ All you need to do is take a gentle breath in through your nose, and hum out. Close your mouth, choose a note and hum, imagining that you want to get your nose and lips tingling. The louder you can do it the clearer it will sound. This is warming up your voice ready to unleash the 38%. Do this for one minute.
   
   
4. Say your name
   You need to know how loud you can be and what a supported voice sounds like. Then you can choose, whatever meeting you are in, how you want to be heard. Now, you can’t walk into a room and just start humming. People will think you are weird. But you are ALWAYS using your name. So why not learn to say your name with real presence, just like Nate did with his one line, 'Backwards' in Matilda?
   
   This is what you do. Take a breath in, send a hum out, and as you are halfway through humming, just open your mouth, keep the ‘MMM’ sound and let it sound like this: ‘MMMMYYY name is Stew.’ This works in English obviously but might not in other languages. You will be surprised at the sound that comes out.
   
   
5. Apply it to a presentation
   Now you have said your name, you know what it feels like to be supported. Look at a presentation you have got coming up, go through this mini warmup again and after saying your name, present the first few lines. If you are doing this correctly you will sound very very engaging. That is you supported, that is you full of 55% good body language, 38% tonality, which makes the 7% content easy to hear.
   

Back to the question of, ‘Can you give us a short version?’ from your CEO. If you have prepared nothing, there will be panic. If you have prepared these five points, your body and voice will respond and will come out fighting!

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