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Tracey Vincent, PhD in Electrical Engineering
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How
do you communicate highly technical information to an audience without
losing them altogether, and without letting your attempt to explain the
intricate details overpower your enthusiasm for the subject?
That has been an ongoing challenge for Tracey S. Vincent, an electrical engineer who recently earned her Ph.D. from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a dissertation focusing on transmission line features and their influence on GHz conductor loss.
"The problem with being extremely technical is you think you're going to lose everybody," Tracey says. "You have to have the confidence to make your concepts very plain, and to bring a fresh perspective so you can explain it in a way that other people can understand."
For Tracey, the answer wasn't to organize her information better or spend more time practicing her presentations. Instead, the key was something entirely unexpected: she had to learn how to speak from her feet.
Shifting the attention from her head (and everything inside it) to being present in her body made all the difference.
"When you pretend you're speaking from your feet, you change your whole body language," Tracey says. "Your feet are planted on the ground, you don't slouch. You're focused on what you're saying but you're also more focused on what the audience is hearing."
As a doctoral candidate and part-time instructor at WPI, Tracey had been addressing groups of up to 100 people at professional conferences—giving presentations, chairing sessions, and introducing speakers. In 2007, she came to Carla in hopes of finding ways to manage her fear of public speaking.
Carla's SpeakingPresence sessions and weekend workshops helped Tracey cultivate presence and tune in to her audience, and she gradually became more confident and relaxed.
"She made me realize how important eye contact is and how, when I made eye contact, I felt much more engaged with the audience and got better feedback," Tracey says. "Practicing speaking off the cuff in the SpeakingPresence groups made me comfortable with silences and pauses."
When she began preparing to defend her dissertation, Tracey set up a one-on-one session with Carla, as she had done twice before to prepare for a conference and a seminar. Carla helped her develop an opening for the presentation that zeroed in on what excited Tracey most about her material. "To draw people in and get their interest, the opening has to be interesting and engaging," says Tracey, who successfully defended her dissertation on May 21.
Tracey plans to do postdoctoral work in Israel, where she hopes to continue presenting at conferences and seminars—speaking from her feet, of course. "Initially it was all about managing fear," she says of the process. "Now it's about honing my skill, and Carla's given me the tools to do that."
You can follow Tracey's professional progress by connecting with her
through LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/traceyvincent.
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Travel time from:
Albany, NY — 2.75 hours
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Hartford, CT — 2.5 hours
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