So how can you establish presence when you first come on stage? I think it's really important to try to be present as quickly as you can rather than to warm up to it. And the way I do this is that when I come on stage, I make sure that I look at the audience within the first few seconds. Make sure I feel like I've made that connection with them. I like to come on and say hello, especially to the place I'm in Hello Birmingham, and smile at them. You know, people love to be smile that they love someone who's open and energetic, that to them will help increase your presence.

Now, if you study at Toastmasters, which is a speaking club where they teach you the craft of speaking a great place to go by the way if you want to practice, they will tell you to come on stage, plant your feet and wait and look at the audience. I'm not a total fan of this technique. And that's only because I've seen it done a lot. And therefore it can look a little bit formulaic. However, the essence of it is absolutely right. If you can come on and think about perhaps casting a net over the audience, a kind of magical veil that establishes the performance, then that's a really good thing to do.

I practice this myself a lot. And a lot of it comes with the breathing and planting the feet. So make sure you've got both feet on the ground, as I've said before, and look around you take in the auditorium, breathe in the space, get a sense of the size of it, especially if you haven't had your feet on that stage before. Just try not to look like you're counting. This is where I've seen it look a bit formulaic is when people come on, and I think they're going to train three excetra Yeah, we don't want to see the lips moving wanted to make this look nice and natural. So just come on and try and take everybody in the best you can.

If you haven't landed that magical net on everybody, then they will not feel connected with you. So whatever it takes, try to include everybody in your presence, using your body by keeping it open, using the breath to breathe in the space and using your eyes to land on everybody. And then they will think wow, this person has got presence.