Lessons

Lesson Info

Perfect Elevator Pitch

People decide if they like us in the 1st 30 seconds and it is mostly based on our nonverbal the first step to your first impression. So when you get on stage or you meet someone at a networking event, your step one is to do power aiming. Power aiming is when we aim our torso and our toes towards the person that we're speaking with. And if it's in a group that's okay, you want to aim it towards the center of the group, right? So if you're in a circle of networking event or for an audience, you want to aim it towards the center. This is incredibly important because it shows the other person's brain that you are engaged with them. It is a non verbal sign of respect. So here are the three reasons why power aiming is so important. Again, it's toes to torso T. N. T. That's what you want to make sure you're aiming right towards the person you're speaking with first, it shows your connectedness. So we talked a little about warmth and friendliness. This is the first non verbal way that when you...

walk into a room or you're walking up to someone, you immediately point your body towards them. It shows I am connected with you and I want to be connected with you second, it engages their brain. So someone in the chat room yesterday asked a fabulous question about how do I keep them engaged? How do I make sure they're not bored with me? This is one of the ways that you do it. When you power aimed towards them, you're telling their brain, pay attention, stay awake, I'm here for you. So it helps them stay awake and pay attention to what you're saying, third, it speeds up report so warmth, I heard a lot of warmth and connectivity, doing this helps them connect with you faster because they can literally feel and see that you're on the same page, this seems maybe a little obvious, that's why it's step one, but if you go to a networking event and one of my challenges over the next few days is to go out to networking event and just be a professional people watcher or be a creeper, just sit in the corner and just watch, right. Um and you will see people don't do this, they will walk up to someone and they'll aim their body slightly away and then talk like this. Um, so that we actually don't always do this naturally to sort of swing forward. That's why with your launch chance yesterday, we got really comfortable with aiming our toes and making sure that our torso was aligned because I wanted to set you up for power aiming, that's why it's so important And this is our 10th law of body language. So in your free bonus materials, you have your laws of body language hand out. If you could bring that out, this is your 10th law, it is the law of engagement. The law of engagement says to show we are nonverbally engaged, we have to aim our torso and toes towards the person. That's a lot of teas, torso, torso and toes towards the person. TNT. That's what I think of as your step number one, when you walk into a room, that makes sense. I know you guys have and the reason why, by the way, I ask you to write it down is because studies have shown that when you write down something it's much easier for you to remember it. Um that's physical handwriting is even stronger than typing, but either way, if you can write it down, it helps you code that into memory so that you can get into muscle memory and then it becomes really natural. All right, So step two after power aiming is to use your launch stance, right? So once you walk in the room you've aimed your torso and toes towards the person you're speaking with and you want to get into that launch dance. All right, step number three we are speeding forward and I love it because this is my favorite section. Uh step three is vocal power Using our voice to show authority, credibility, warmth and competence. That is exactly what we want to do. This is our law number 11. So if you pull out your body language laws the law vocal power, we can use our voice to increase trust, connection and report. So if you remember yesterday we talked about how much communication is nonverbal and we said a third of our communication is the words we use. A third of our communication is our body and our face and a third of our communication is our vocal power. So let's pick apart exactly what we learn. There's four different things that make up vocal power that you can use when you're doing your elevator pitch your first impression and when you're on the phone or your in person first using a low tone using an authoritative voice tone. So our voices come in a natural range of pitches. Right? So when I am with my girlfriends, I tend to talk a lot higher. I am a little bit more giggly. I go up my voice tone that is natural for me. That's just the highest, natural end of my voice tone. When we are in business, we have to train our voices to go into the natural lowest level of our voice tone. You can do this with the power of breath. So when we go high and this is for both men and women, we get nervous and we get out of breath and our vocal cords tense. And so we end up kind of talking like this. Um I actually was called cold called someone a few weeks ago. This was horrible hate cold calling, but it's really good practice if you're in sales. So I cold called them and I was really nervous and I went, hello because my voice, my vocal cords have been sitting there tents and I made a mistake. I was in my seat. I had not power posed. I was sitting like this as I was calling. And so my cortisol levels were pumping and it came out. I sounded like a little girl and that is because it was the highest of the high. So what I want you to practice doing yeah, is taking a breath and using the lowest natural end up your voice tones. So before you get on a call, before you launch in your elevator pitch, you want to take a deep breath and then go into your launch. Right? So low voice tone. Next avoiding the question inflection. So we picked up on this right away. I think that was the arena's first comment. Isn't that first elevator pitch? We use the question inflection here is the question of reflection. It's when you say a statement that sounds like you're adding a question mark to the end, it looks like this. My name is Vanessa, right is my name. Vanessa. Um, when you add that question mark and unfortunately movies like clueless made the question inflection cool. For a whole generation of women. Um, that's how Valley girls, I'm not sure. But we should go. Do you think we should write? They always add that. Um uh, it's so hard with teen girls. I do a lot of work in high school high schools pro bono and that is like my number one thing that I work on with girls because they are so used to adding that because they think it's feminine. Cool. Right? So not using the question Inflection in sales. We're gonna talk about this later. The biggest non verbal mistake I see is they use the question inflection on their price. Right? So they say so how much you charge? And they say I charge $500. You are begging someone to negotiate with you. If you use the question inflection, you're literally saying, I'm not sure if I believe this either, right? You're telling them to not believe you. That's why it's so important to avoid using the question of election. You want to say it. You don't want to ask it. Um when we're gonna bring you up in a little bit to practice your elevator pitch is and what we're gonna do is we're gonna nicely non judgmentally help each other. If we hear the question reflection, we just nicely say use the question of election your name. Women typically use it on their name and men typically use it on their business name. I don't know why. Women will often use a question. My name is Vanessa and then we'll say I work at Science of people. Um I don't know why, but that's typically where they fall. So we're gonna listen for that when we're when we're doing elevator pitches. Number two, Number three vocal variants. So this is about adding a varied pace, cadence and tempo when we talk about engaging the other person's brain. Remember our brains are hungry toddlers, they're very demanding, they like lots of attention. So if you have a script or a pitch that sounds the same, even if it's very authoritative and it's very low, the brain will go to sleep on you, they'll think you're very credible but they won't hear what you said. So adding in that vocal variance, that expressiveness, it is what keeps them awake and it adds in the warmth factor, that's where warmth comes from is vocal variants and vocal expressiveness and that's adding in different pacing. So someone said they heard her paws, you know more the second time. That is a way of adding vocal variants, also hitting different, emphasizing different words. So I think she said um are my company is catering to you, right catering to you or you could say my company, my company is catering to you or my company is catering to you, Right? I'm saying the same thing, but I'm saying it three different ways, that is local variants. So my challenge to you um at home, especially cause you're by yourself is to read your elevator pitch at least 10 different ways even if you have to add an accent to it, add an accent to it because that will get your brain in the habit of saying different different words with different emphasis and that adds warmth to your elevator pitch. Last emotionality. Okay, so this is where that authenticity comes in. So I want you to look through your elevator pitch and I want you to think of where you feel most emotion. That can be passion for your business. That can be um connection to the person you're speaking with, that can be excitement for what they should do next. That can be um Wonderment or awe. Where can you add in genuine emotion that you actually feel to show the emotion with your voice? So, um you're wanting to put emotional emphasis on your words. So I want you to hear the difference. So, um my name is Vanessa Van Edwards and I run the Science of people. Okay, so that's one way of saying it. If I want to add emotionality to that, here's how I can add emotionality with my tone. My name is Vanessa Van Edwards and I run the Science of people. Right? It shows that I am more excited, I am. I love my company. It took forever to start it and I'm so excited about it. So, for me, I'm adding a genuine genuine excitement and everyone is a little different right excitement for you might sound different, but I want you to tap into the true emotion behind the words and don't be afraid to use it to put it into your elevator pitch. Does that make sense? All right, So I'm not gonna let us practice out just yet because what I want you to do is think about how you want to add it into your pitch first. I want to explain non verbal explanation. So this is step four, Step four is adding in body language or nonverbal expressions and explanations to your elevator pitch. So when people are listening to your elevator pitch, if it's 10-30 seconds, that's actually a lot of time. It's a lot of time to be listening to someone, especially when they have no context for what you do. One way that you can help increase their comprehension and their understanding of what you do is to non verbally explain what you do. So this is a very very different way of thinking about elevator pitches and it's the secret sauce to making a really really sexy elevator pitch. This also increases the use of the law of hands. So I'm gonna teach you how you can use your hands to explain concepts, remind me what the law of hands was and remember what that was yesterday that was I think our fourth or fifth bala body language, remember what that was? I know it's hard, this is yeah, so absolutely right keeping them visible and making them expressive because they are our trust indicators. So the use of hands increases our trust and our honesty, right? That not honestly trust trustworthiness and credibility, right? So they are when people can see our hands, they're able to trust us more. So when you add in these natural explanations, you're also increasing that law and the power of that law of body language. So the three things that helps you with adding a number of explanations, I'm going to give you an example of what these are in a second comprehension. We have said our elevator pitch and what we do hundreds if not thousands of times we think it's so obvious. However people you're speaking with often are like totally lost, right? And if you just use words you're only using a third of your communication ability. So if you add in nonverbal you're using 60% at least and if we add in vocal power using 100% of your communication ability. So it helps increase comprehension of what you're saying second, it helps keep their attention so they don't fall asleep on you. Your nonverbally saying, wake up, this is exciting, I have lots of good things to give you and lastly it makes you more memorable. So I have practiced my elevator pitch thousands of times. I love going to conferences because I will try different versions of my pitch and rate the reactions that I got and I find that when I use non verbal explanations, people remember me the next day just that change their country, they're like oh yeah you're the one who runs that human behaviour lab right? But that doesn't happen as much when I don't have an honorable explanation. So there's something about it that makes that makes it more memorable. I personally think that's because most elevator pitches include no nonverbal explanation at all. So if you use that, it's like their brain goes something different. I'm going to remember this person. Alright, so here's a couple of ideas for how you can do it combining. So let me explain how this works. So if you have a concept in your elevator pitch, that's one thing combined with another. You can actually use that with your hands, Right? So when I work with entrepreneurs and they say, oh yeah, I have an app, it's kind of like a Yelp meets Airbnb, right? That would be a non verbal way to explain that. So, if you have something that you're combining or some forces that are working together, I work with nonprofits and businesses and I help them come together. That's a non right? If I don't use my hands, you're like, what? But this the brain gets oh, she brings things together. I get it. Right, And it gives them a hook to remember. All right, Another idea for you numbers. This is really easy if you have anything in your pitch that is a list of two or more. I want you to use your hands to show those numbers. That's because if you don't it sounds very memorized, right? So if you say um our website, we take orders, we send out deliveries and we love doing flowers. You don't have to say 12 or three, but that shows the brain, wow, look how much she does, right? You're actually showing the brain how much you do. So adding a number, see if there's something that you can list out in your pitch and again, I don't want to use all of these, right? I don't want to be like jazz hands, I'm showing you everything. We're trying to find the sweet spot. So what a couple of these should work for your elevator pitch, but these are just different ideas that you can use growth. Okay, so if you want to show not tell how successful you are, you can easily do this with your hands. Um for those of you have ever pitched venture capitalists, If you're an entrepreneur, you're raising money or you're trying to increase your sales, people love what's called the Hockey Stick chart, this is a chart that looks like this right now. That chart where all the numbers are going up, traffic is going up, sales are going up. You can actually show this nonverbally, right? So you can say, oh my God, it's been a great year. You can actually say that and your nonverbally saying to someone everything's going up for us, right? So you can honorably said, you can also do, that feels not naturally, you can say like it's just been great, right? Going up and pointing up that gets them to say, oh everything's increasing. It's an honorable way to say things are increasing. Fourth personal passions. So, if you have a pitch where you're talking about something very personal to you, like, let's say that your mom and you want to share that, your stay at home mom, you love your kids, you can show this kind of intimacy nonverbally, so you can say this is the nonverbal universal non verbal phrase for close to me, close to my heart, intimate. Um I actually saw during my expressive dance, they did you guys did for me this morning, I think you actually had something that was like close to me and uh that that is because that is an honorable gesture of it's close to my heart. So, if you have something that's very precious to you, I was working with someone who has a fabulous company, she does uh clothes that help you protect against skin cancer. So they have high SPF clothing, which I never even knew you had to do, um she's a skin cancer survivor. And so in her pit, that's very, very personal to her. So, during that journey, so it doesn't sound wrote like she said it 1000 times, we added in that emotionality by adding the nonverbal, So, for her, she says, I'm a skin cancer survivor myself, right? And she points to herself and she holds her because that is a very intimate experience for her. So, if you have that in your pitch, you can also add that in as well.