What Lincoln showed me…

I recently travelled to Washington DC to drop my eldest child off at Georgetown University. At Regan airport I was surrounded by photos of the iconic statue of Abraham Lincoln, pictured above.

Now there’s man who could write a speech. Could he deliver one too? Let’s assume so, although of course, he was long before the era of Zoom and Google Meets.

You might expect this great orator to inspire me to write about pacing, or sentence structure – but on the contrary, surrounded by these images of the great man, I was struck by how well they illustrate how not to appear physically.

Abraham Lincoln’s statue bears down on us like a deity. He is intimidating and demands reverence. He towers above the viewer so that we can only look up. He looks down on us physically and metaphorically.

I would like to use this example to show how not to position yourself to your laptop when presenting. A physical pose conveys so much.

If you want to appear approachable and be liked, you must not look down on your subjects.

This example is exaggerated of course but it neatly demonstrates just how powerful pose and positioning of the viewer in relation to you can be.

Raise that camera up at all costs so you meet your audience on a level.