Without passion, you don’t have energy;
without energy, you have nothing.
Nothing great in the world
has been accomplished without passion.
—DONALD TRUMP
Have you ever had a friend begin to tell you about a funny weekend escapade and start laughing while telling the tale? Their amusement in setting the scene brings a smile to your face before you actually understand the crux of what happened. You’re laughing along with them before they even get to the punch line of their story. In other words, it’s their amusement—as much as their story—that creates your entertainment.
In much the same way, your passion about an idea or topic generates interest in others. You often hear it said of others, “She has a zest for life.” “He has a passion for life that’s contagious. You can’t help but feel upbeat when you are around him.” Passion refers to an intense feeling, a palpable thing. You can be passionately angry or passionately happy or passionately in love.
On the other hand, have you ever walked into someone’s home and felt tension—as if everyone was “on edge” for some unknown reason? Then later, a family member explained that they’d just had an argument before your visit. As the saying goes, the tension was so thick, you could cut it with the proverbial knife. Maybe you’ve even sat through similar meetings at work.
Likewise, those around you can sense your passion in your presence. It oozes through the pores of your skin and flows out in your body language.
Those who control their passion and make it work for them have presence. Those who fail to control their passion look like excited, nervous teenagers. Those who have no passion at all have no presence.
Certainly, school children are familiar with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and public speaking classes use it as a model for many reasons. But for our purposes, consider these lines for Dr. King’s passion:
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Sir Ken Robinson delivered the following lines with passion (and with far less eloquence) as he spoke about his belief that schools kill kids’ creativity:
They [kids] have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.8
But you don’t have to hear the words to imagine the difference in their impact and import. Three key differences mark the degree of passion on display in our presence:
• Walk with purpose.
• Add color to your stories.
• Feel the gestures.
Contrary to the title of Maya Angelou’s classic book, people don’t know why the caged bird sings—or walks. And it distracts them. So skip the nervous pacing, wandering, and foot shuffling. Some people unconsciously pace from laptop to screen to front row, to screen to front row and back repeatedly during a presentation. Others start out behind a lectern, walk to the side and rest an elbow on the edge for thirty seconds and then drop it, and return to stand behind the lectern—only to repeat the process again and again throughout their talk. Others wander from one side of the room to the opposite in an arc and then retrace their steps repeatedly for the length of their lecture.
If you asked any of these presenters why they pace, they would be unaware of their movement around the room. They do the caged pace in much the same way as other people wring their hands or clear their throat repeatedly.
Yet the pacing and foot shuffling sends a loud message to onlookers: “I am on automatic pilot. I am not present with you.” Literally, while moving absentmindedly, you have lost your presence.
To increase the audience’s sense of your presence, move purposefully. Stand still to deliver a powerful point. On the transition, walk intentionally to a new spot. Plant your feet and make your next point. Position on a platform is to a presentation what paragraphing is to a page. Your audience will feel that you are present in the moment making that point.
Tell stories with gusto; put your listeners in the moment by creating scenes.
Families have their funny stories that they enjoy year after year at the expense of good-natured relatives—particularly the practical jokes played by Uncle Jerry or Grandpa Max. In our family, one of those stories centers around my mom’s custom of elaborate centerpieces on the table for holiday meals.
The first year my husband and I were married, about eighteen family members gathered at my parents’ home for Thanksgiving dinner. The typical compliments flowed my mother’s way regarding the meal and the centerpiece, bordered by the usual tiny pieces of orange and yellow candy corn to commemorate the season.
Kevin, my practical-joker brother-in-law, said to my new husband as we sat down to dinner, “Not only does it look good; that candy tastes good, too.”
Wanting to make a good impression on his mother-in-law, my husband picked up a piece of the candy corn and popped it in his mouth—and promptly broke a tooth.
The candy was plastic.
Even though it’s a very brief story, did you see that happen? Did you hear the laughter (from everyone but my husband, that is)? Year after year, that story gets retold with the same amusement.
Movie directors understand the importance of setting to story—the backdrop, the costumes, the sound effects. In that same way, when you speak to a group consider your actual delivery paramount to the point. It’s hard to be “larger than life” in a football stadium. By the same token, it’s hard to project a calm, in-control voice while you’re shouting over your cell phone from a noisy airplane.
The president spends time deciding whether to deliver a speech from the Rose Garden or the steps of an elementary school because he knows that the scene with all its detail is significant. Consider your passionate telling of a story—in scene, with details and dialogue—essential to add richness and texture to your message.
Have you ever tried to learn a foreign language? If so, you understand the difference between those who speak a second language so fluently that they think in that language and those who have to think in their first language and then “translate” into the second language before they can speak it. Big difference. For the most part, I fall into the latter group with my second language. When I travel to South America, it takes a full week before I start to “think” in Spanish. For the first few days, it’s a slow process for me to hear Spanish, translate to English, think of the English response, and then translate back and deliver the Spanish response.
People who go through that same process with gestures inevitably have a presence problem.
People who say they don’t gesture when speaking have simply stifled themselves and become unnatural. In other words, they’re going through a “translation” process from “natural” to unnatural. They’ve stripped away all the natural gestures that help convey their message. Once aware of how they’re stifling or “translating” themselves for a “business” topic or setting, they understand the vast difference in the passion and energy levels between their natural self and their “unnatural” self.
Gestures are not add-ons. Gestures convey your message at the same time and with the same impact as your words. They should be part of your silent but strong vocabulary.
People with presence feel what they say. And that feeling comes through in their body language. How do others sense that passion?
• The speaker’s face “connects” to the words—smiling, concerned, distraught, surprised, excited, disappointed, whatever.
• The speaker’s posture is alert, ready to move into action, ready to respond to questions, add other information, confront, move on to other areas of interest. The speaker stands in the “ready-go” position, with weight balanced on the balls of his/her feet.
• Gestures are intentional and meaningful. The speaker gets his or her hands “out of the box.” Rather than small gestures directly in front of the trunk of the body (see Figure 1), passionate gestures are sweeping: big, up, out, firm (see Figure 2). Lifting your arms from the shoulders creates a more powerful and inclusive gesture than from the elbows or wrists. In general, the bigger the room, the bigger the gesture needs to be. Gestures should not be choreographed; they happen naturally when you feel passionate about your message.
Figure 1. Small, in-the-box gestures have little impact.
Figure 2. Large, intentional gestures have strong impact.
So where’s your next important conversation? An elevator? Deskside? A conference room? An airplane seat? A teleconference? A webinar screen? A hallway? An auditorium? Your enthusiastic delivery of an idea in any of these situations increases your chance to captivate others. In short, passion produces presence.
