Coming Across as Believable: Many Executives Fall Short.
By James Bliwas

Whether you’re addressing colleagues in a conference room, industry leaders at a convention session, or a mass audience via a media interview, you want people to believe what you’re saying.

Yet, after years of helping people learn to communicate more effectively, I continue to be amazed at how many knowledgeable, authoritative and credible executives, managers and professionals can appear totally unbelievable at the very moment when they need to be most convincing.

Sharing Passion

Conveying a sense of passion about your subject is one sure-fire way to enhance your believability. Caring genuinely about what you’re saying makes it easier to do that, but it isn’t enough. You must also look and sound as if you care. That doesn’t mean getting mushy or pushy or shouting from the podium, but it does mean conveying a sense that what you’re taking about is important to you.

Recently an executive whose work often requires that he relocate gave a presentation filled with facts and figures related to how frequent relocating affects people around him. After his talk, as he chatted with conference participants, he spoke of how much it means to him that his kids have a real backyard to play in each time he moves. Those around him listened much more attentively than they had during his presentation because they could see how important that aspect of relocating was to him. Sharing his passion for easing the impact of a move on his children during his talk could have gone a long way towards enhancing his overall believability. His audience would have had a better sense that he was talking about a subject that was important to him and should be important to them, too. His passion could have become contagious.

Sharing your passion helps you build rapport with your listeners; it also gets them excited about what excites you. And when an audience of seven or 700 becomes engaged in your topic because they catch the excitement coming from the front of the room, they are far more likely to believe what you are saying.

Granted, some topics are harder to feel passionate about than others. An administrator reporting on how office supply expenses can be cut by 3% may have to put a little more effort into sounding passionate about that subject, but it can be done. Think, for example, about how excited you felt when you discovered an effective way to trim an everyday expense that flows straight to the bottom line, possibly helping improve profitability and maybe even saving a few jobs next year. You’ll definitely enhance your believability if you can convey that passion in the report you present to the management committee.

So, instead of starting with a typical recitation of budget line items, you might begin by saying something like, “You know, in a tough economy everyone worries about whether the company will have to cut jobs next year. I’ve found a way to use fasteners and copy paper to help hold together four jobs.” Your excitement about your report, and your audience’s interest in it, will take off from there.

Three Keys

But you’ll often need more than a passionate belief in what you’re saying to make your message sound believable. Here are three other keys to delivering a convincing presentation that you can draw on even when you’re not feeling all that passionate about your topic. They’re easy to learn, and they’re very effective.

1. Know What To Say

Usually your audience does not want to hear every single point that might be relevant to the topic, so you must be prepared to edit yourself, focusing on the genuinely important points. Some people have trouble doing this, especially if they have a particularly detailed understanding of a subject. But you’ll add to your believability if you stick to three or four main issues, provide a supporting example of each, and let the audience ask questions if they need more information.

2. Know What Listeners Want To Hear

In preparing your comments, imagine being on the receiving end of your message. Then ask yourself, “What would I need to know to make a decision?” In other words, focus on what the audience needs to hear. If you avoid becoming bogged down in detailed minutia, you’ll keep your audience interested and boost your believability.

3. Know How You Say It

Whether you are giving an “informal” five-minute explanation to a handful of colleagues or a keynote address at the annual meeting of your industry’s association, you need to prepare. Outline what you want to cover or, better still, write it out. Then deliver your presentation in front of a mirror or a camcorder. What do you notice? Do you speak too quickly or in a monotone? Have you a distracting nervous habit such as jingling your keys in your pocket? Do you look down at your notes too much? Doing these things reduces your believability. Work at eliminating them. Practise modulating your voice, using changes to highlight your main points. These and any other changes you make to improve how you deliver your message will return big believability dividends.

Remember, even if you’re the world’s greatest authority on your subject, your expertise could be wasted if you don’t take make an effort to come across to your audience as someone whose message is worth listening to and believing.