The excess of emotion in acceptance speeches.

During an acceptance speech, a space is created where we are the center of attention at an event. It is consistent for us to show respect, gratitude and enthusiasm for receiving a tribute to our efforts.

Enjoying the moment and letting ourselves be carried away by the emotions and feelings we receive can be productive for our audience. However, there is a line to tread between getting excited and exaggerating our emotions. It is common that during award receptions, many public figures end up giving a performance that conveys a lack of honesty towards their audience.

Taking into account the importance of this issue, we will be analyzing below some of the basic recommendations you should keep in mind when it comes to maintaining a proper emotional state. This will allow you to make acceptance speeches that will have a positive impact on your audience.

Don't overreact: The main mistake in emotional exaggerations during a speech is to overreact. It is clear that no matter how natural we wish to appear, a public setting will always be an environment where our behavior will be molded in a certain way.

Avoid overreacting, don't exaggerate your emotions to appear happier or more enthusiastic than you are. Try to be mentally prepared before you start your speech, enjoy the scenery around you. Think of your award reception as a birthday party. This way you won't need to go out of your way to show that you are having a good time, since your feelings are sincere and will be perceived as such.

Maintain emotional self-control: Sometimes it seems that a certain public figure is acting out or exalting his or her emotions, when in fact he or she is being sincere. This happens because this person is not controlling his emotions well, therefore his reactions do not seem natural, since they are not coherent to what is happening around him. This type of behavior should be avoided at all times. Most of the crying or excessive euphoria during a presentation is caused by a strong lack of nervous control.

Nerves during the presentation will make you behave strangely. Small events can trigger in you an emotional state that is alien to your public image and not in accordance with what the audience is perceiving. To avoid this type of situation, you must be able to know yourself, know when you are nervous and stay calm in order to focus your attention on the facts and not on perceptions that will be biased by emotions.

Body language: The exaggeration of our emotions is not only transmitted by our verbal language. Body language is often the most affected. There are two very typical situations regarding this issue. Some speakers overact their verbal language but fail to coordinate it with their body language. This causes a dissonance between what the speaker expresses and what the audience perceives.

The second situation is the one in which the body language is controlled, but the emotional lack of control is expressed in the verbal language. In this case, the speech seems to be even more false, since the excessive enthusiasm in the words contrasts negatively with the calmness of the body.

Try to maintain a balance between your mind and your body. This can only be achieved by acting naturally and expressing ourselves from genuine feeling. Any emotional expression, which is not honestly felt, will generate in our brain a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is externalized in incoherent attitudes and behaviors that threaten the quality of our presentation and the general opinion of the audience.