Process: Deal With The Room You Have

Most of us know to prepare for meetings, trainings, and presentations. It helps manage your charge, or physiological responses, and lets you be more confident and clear.

I have also noticed that many people focus on an element that is not helpful. Preparation is not a requirement that you practice every possible response that can happen in the room. Including preparing to combat any negative response that may arise. That is a recipe for a stressful entry and a tortured process.

My best advice for being prepared is to work on what you can control. That includes your knowledge, your equipment, your materials, and your delivery. You can, and should, work with your body to make sure you have the resources in breath, tone, physical ease, and neurological impulse. Preparing for the people who will be there and how they tend to receive information. And, you can even know what they need to hear in order to do what you need them to do. What you cannot successfully do is practice another human’s reactions for a moment in the future.

You can control your things and then you must deal with the room you have. Be so prepared and so in your body that you can respond with agility and authority because you are in control of the only things you can control. It is amazing how poised we can be, even in the most hostile of rooms, when we understand where our power lies and respond only to what exists in the room.

Gina Razón is the Founder and CEO at GROW Voice LLC, a full-service verbal communication studio in Boston’s Back Bay.  She has over two decades of experience as a teacher of voice and speech, is a communication and change facilitator, and is a voraciously curious voice user.  Gina has worked professionally as a classical singer for over a decade and more recently as a professional public speaker.  For more information on the studio or to book Gina visit www.growvoice.com.