Arm yourself with positive thoughts for a great presentation

Think about where you have succeeded, your role models, and how they would go to war and win. PHOTO | FILE 

By SCOTT BELLOWS

In Summary

• Doubts are normal. Even Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, Michael Joseph, and Jomo Kenyatta entertained self doubts.

Continuing with the case of Kimbio pitching his business concept to NaiLab that we discussed in last week’s Business Talk, he lacked the confidence to stand before the investors and financiers to pitch his business idea.

In high stakes scenarios, positive self-talk can boost the brain’s confidence. More confidence leads to self-efficacy. Famed Stanford University researcher Bandura developed the concept of self-efficacy that refers to an individual’s belief in his or her capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance achievements.

Self-efficacy reflects someone’s confidence in their ability to exert control over his or her own motivation, behaviour, and social environment. Someone’s self-perceptions influence all manner of our human experience, including our goals, amount of energy used toward goal attainment, and likelihood of reaching particular heights of behavioural performance.

Syracuse University psychologists Carey and Forsyth even state that self-efficacy can be effectively used to improve even considerably more complicated life problems than presentations such as self-management of chronic disease, smoking cessation, alcohol intake reduction or elimination, controlled eating, pain mitigation, and exercise motivation for obese individuals.

So how can Kimbio harness the power of enhanced self-efficacy in order to perform during his presentation at NaiLab? First, he must remember intentionality. He must actually work towards it, but not in simplistic terms.

He should not just practise and practise it over and over again haphazardly. Ideally, Kimbio would benefit from specific steps towards self-efficacy.

Angie LeVan of the University of Pennsylvania delineated a seven-step towards increased self-efficacy that leads to higher performance. First, imagine your past successes throughout your life. Actively ruminate on times when you succeeded at completing when you had initially not thought you could do so. Ponder those times intentionally.

Spend 20 minutes regularly thinking about those moments. What was it that you accomplished? How could you glean aspects from those successes into your future aspirations? Do those achievements point to a reality whereby you can achieve, succeed, and thrive?

Second, build your repertoire of successes. If you desire to achieve a large success, like Kimbio pitching in front of many investors, then you must build smaller successes.

First pick a small element, like good eye contact, a verbal tone of confidence, hand movements, not reading your slides, among others.

Then practice them intentionally in different settings with feedback from others. Build the successes through the practice or actual business use of the changes. Small successes build self-efficacy to make bigger changes. Achieve changes step by step over time.

Third, think of someone you admire. You may know them personally or know a lot about them through the media. It should be someone with whom you identify. If you do, then you are more keen to believe that you, too, can achieve what they have achieved.

You can vicariously, as Angie LeVan states, bolster your sense of self-efficacy by imagining your success as possible like your role models.

The fourth step sounds slightly insane. Solid sturdy business professionals may initially balk at the idea. However, remember that a disconnect exists between what science knows and what businesses actually do. So, fourth, practice mental imagery.

Mentally practice executing a particular task. Visualise successfully completing that task.