We all seek to find spaces where our voice is welcomed, celebrated, and valued.
You matter and what God has given you to say is important. It has never been more crucial to listen to what he is telling you and step into your calling as a leader. With that in mind, as you step into leadership, there are a few things that I would like to share with you from my experience coaching pastors as a Certified Movement Analyst.
First, claiming your space as a female leader or as someone just beginning their journey as a leader is not just about what you are saying (the content), but how you are saying what God has given you to say with your whole self.
It is mission critical to match your words, voice, body, and use the speaking space to be authentically connected. Female leaders and young leaders have fewer opportunities to practice their communication skills. When the opportunities to speak show up, we might feel like there are things we should know, but haven’t had the training we need for effective communication. So we panic: we watch videos of speakers we like, emulate communicators that we connect with, and generally try to act like we know what we are doing. We might borrow a gesture from someone we respect or try something they do to make our talk more engaging. There is a danger in this strategy, however.
If you do not fully understand who you are in authentic voice and body, you end up putting on a mask of someone else’s gestures or style of communication that isn’t authentic to who you are. By doing this, a facade will develop and our ability to be authentic and “in the moment” will be lost, leaving us unsure of who we are as leaders. To begin claiming your space in leadership, I would encourage you to own who God created you to be in voice and body. Knowing who you are will embolden you and give you a leadership voice in the spaces you are invited to inhabit.
Another thing we may do is seek feedback from other people, to help us get better in the craft of communication. This is not all bad. But without clarity about the kind of feedback you’re looking for, the feedback may have nothing to do with the elements of communication that you were working on, leading you to potentially trying to fix something that isn’t broken. What’s more, often our colleagues, through no fault of their own, are giving feedback based on their own biases and on what they prefer to see in communicators. So if we are emulating our favorite speakers and those giving us feedback are doing so based on their own preferences, we get further and further away from who God called us to be.
There must be another way to authentically claim the space as a leader/pastor based on who God created YOU to be. I believe that there is.
To discover the real you that God created you to be, you must be connected in mind, body, and spirit. This connection is essential if you hope to connect with the people you are leading. Developing this connection begins with preparation, having written your content well in advance, practicing that content on your feet at least three times before presenting, warming up vocally and physically, and connecting to your breath before you communicate what God has given you to say.
To be a leader claiming your space with authority and presence, you must also understand that all movement has meaning. You must choose to use your movement when leading or you risk losing the opportunity to use it. The foundation of authentically embodying your content is practice.
If you don’t intentionally consider your movement and use of stage space in an on-your-feet practice session, you will fall back on your unconscious habits and the way you use the space. Nervous energy will take over. So, make sure you mindfully choose where and how you move in the space when you are leading. If you don’t choose your movement, you will miss out on an opportunity to allow your God-given content to have the maximum impact.
Depending on what study you look at regarding communication, anywhere from 70 percent to 93 percent of communication is non-verbal. That means only 30 percent to 7 percent of communication is the actual content.
What you say is very important. But make sure to use your whole self to deliver that content. If you fall into a habitual gesture, “um” your way through the teaching, or have no sense of the space you are taking up, you are only allowing God to use a portion of you.
Focus on the manuscript is important, waiting on and hearing from God is extremely important, and allowing the Holy Spirit to use you is of utmost importance. However, if you want the Holy Spirit to use all of you while you communicate, you must prepare all of you! The content, the part that we usually focus on, is heady and internal. But for a fuller picture, we need to express our content in an external, authentically-embodied way.
If you neglect to prepare your movement choices, nervous energy can cause you to default into habit and patterns that will distract and could potentially take away from the way the content lands.
When you communicate, lead, present, preach, have meetings with your colleagues, etc., are you considering more than just your verbal content?
Here are somethings to start consider when claiming your space as a leader:
- Warm up physically, vocally, and connect to the breath of God.
- Practice your presentation on your feet, if possible in the space where you communicate, making yourself aware of the equipment you will be using so there aren’t surprises on the day.
- Choose how you will use the space, intentional gesture, shaping in the space, in order to mindfully support your content. Do this during practice so these choices live in your body. Then muscle memory can take over in the moment.
- Know your content extremely well so that you are able to step away from your notes to tell personal stories.
- Do what God has called you to do: Lead!
Build into your rhythm of preparation focusing on mind, body, and spirit. Then, when the opportunity for you to step into leadership presents itself, you will be ready to lead with your whole authentic self. You can do this!
