Tag Archives: public speaking

Easily Banish Public Speaking Fear For Good

If you’ve ever been called up to give a speech, either on the spot, or maybe you’ve been given a few weeks preparation time, you know how incredibly terrifying it can be. I’ve had to give a few best man speeches, and although having a few drinks beforehand helps a little bit, it takes more than a few shots of whiskey to kill public speaking anxiety.

One of the reasons people get so nervous when speaking in public is because it’s easy to imagine that you are being “judged” somehow by all those people sitting there watching you. But I had a startling revelation once when I took a public speaking class at a community college.

We had to draw straws to see who spoke first, and I picked the short one. And halfway through my speech, I noticed something interesting. If you’ve ever given a speech maybe you’ve noticed that after you started speaking, you might have calmed down a little bit after you realized nobody was going to throw tomatoes at you.

That’s what happened to me. I was about a minute into my speech, and I started to get a little relaxed, to the point of being able to actually pay attention to the facial expressions of the rest of the class. What I saw was interesting, to say the least. Every single student in the class had a look of utter fear and terror on their faces. They were no doubt petrified about their upcoming turn to speak. That’s when it really hit me. Everybody in the class was so far into their heads that I could have been speaking Portuguese and they likely wouldn’t have noticed.

The following week I decided to try my “experiment” again. Only this time I went about halfway through. I noticed something a little different, but still extremely helpful. The half of the class that had yet to give their speeches were still paralyzed with fear. The other half, who had already gone, had looks of complete peace and relaxation on their faces. For them, the worst was over.

For those still waiting to speak, I could have been speaking Klingon, and they wouldn’t have noticed. To those had already gone, I could have been speaking about the impending destruction of the Earth, and they wouldn’t have been fazed.

So when you get up to give your speech, whatever the situation, people are likely thinking about a million different things that the quality or content of your speech. So long as you don’t vomit on the front row, or start shouting obscenities, you’ll likely be fine. Especially if it is a situation where many other people will also be speaking. Half will be looking to their turn in dread, the other half will be so relaxed the will applaud your speech no matter what you say.

When you take this consideration into mind, you can relax and give the message you intend to give. One thing that really draws people’s positive attention is a relaxed and confident speaker. When people listen to somebody that is relaxed and confident, they are much more likely to see the person as an authority figure and take what they are saying as truth.

And of course, the more you practice, the easier this will get. Which is why I really recommend joining a local Toastmasters group. It will really boost your self-confidence and speaking ability, and you’ll be surprised to notice your new charisma showing up in other parts of your life as well.

Remove Public Speaking Fear

If you’ve ever had to give a speech, you know how terrifying it can be. Giving a speech has long been known to be a bigger fear among North Americans than dying. People would rather face death than a polite audience. I could understand if it was like in the old days, where people would throw tomatoes and rotten eggs if they didn’t like what you were talking about, but people really don’t do that kind of stuff anymore.

So why are people so afraid of public speaking?

Child development experts tell us we spend the first two years of our lives learning how to walk and talk, with fantastic encouragement from all the adults around us. Then the rest of our lives, society as a whole (our parents, teachers, religious leaders) tells us to sit down and be quiet. Is it any wonder we sometimes feel an incredible rush of anxiety when we stand to talk in front of many people?

One idea that can give you enough motivation to move past this irrational fear is that people that can regularly and comfortably speak in front of others generally make a lot more money. The best speakers can command six figures for one speech. If you’ve ever seen somebody give a speech, and then sell a bunch of products in the back of the room (e.g. backroom sales) you’ve probably already figured out that just in selling those products alone they can easily make another six figures. That’s just for one afternoons work.

Of course, not everybody wants to become the next Tony Robbins, but wouldn’t it feel good to feel as confident making a speech in public as it would to ask a stranger for the time on the street?

Luckily, there are many ways around this. One way is creative visualization. The reason many people get scared when giving a speech is that they imagine the worse possible thing coming true. (Those tomatoes and stuff.) So naturally, when you think about giving a speech, and all you can imagine is getting booed and laughed at, and maybe getting hit in the face with a couple rotten eggs, getting nervous is a natural response.

But when you practice imagining a different outcome, things slowly change. When you consciously practice imagining giving a speech with a great ending, you will slowly become less and less nervous over time. This does take effort, because your brain naturally gravitates to worse case scenarios, it’s just a leftover aspect from evolution. Running from tigers and stuff like that.

But just like eating the right foods, and exercise overtime can shape your body into a much more attractive, right thought and practiced visualization will just as readily change your automatic feelings when it comes to making a speech.

While there is no magic bullet, consistent practice will yield inevitable results. And pretty soon you’ll not only be looking forward to giving speeches, but also people will be looking forward to hearing you.

Express Yourself and Increase Self Confidence and Self Esteem

The other day I had the opportunity to visit an author in a local bookstore. He wasn’t that famous of an author, which was good for me, and the rest of the people that went to see him, but probably not particularly good for him. Nevertheless, he was really outgoing and friendly, and took the time to sign everybody’s books, and answer any and all questions that people had, in a lot of detail.

I asked him what made him decide to write a book on his chosen subject. It’s is not really a particularly popular subject, I would classify it as a kind of self-help or self-development. He seemed really enthusiastic about answering, and lot of other people became interested as well.

He said it all started with a teacher he had in Junior High School. This teacher was kind of different from the rest, sort of like a rebel. He didn’t last very long, because he was always getting into disagreements with the administration on the proper teaching methods. It seems that is the case more often than not. You’ll get a really good teacher, like this one, and he’ll really have an impact on you, but because these methods are not “proper” or “accepted,” the administration doesn’t really like them very much, so they fire him.

I remember a teacher like that I had in elementary school. He was really interested in each student, and made sure that each individual student was taken care of, as far as being able to not only understand the stuff we were supposed to be learning, but be able to understand everyday stuff as well. One of things he had us do was a lot of oral reports, or show and tell, or mini-plays. Anything to get us talking in front of class. I guess he figured that being able to express yourself in front of a group was a skill they didn’t teach much in public schools.

But unfortunately, despite how much the kids liked him and how much our self-esteem was raised through experience, he didn’t stick to the “proper” curriculum, and was let go only after one year.

That was what this author’s teacher taught him as well. He said that everybody has something important that they need to share with other people, no matter how unimportant you think it is. And when you find that, and figure out a way to share that with others in a congruent way, not only will you benefit many other people, but also you can really increase your self-confidence to the point where you can discover all other kinds of cool stuff.

And this guy kept answering questions and talking to people well after the bookstore closed. The manager of the bookstore was nice enough to let us hang around. And he even gave everybody his own personal email in case we had other questions that came up.

I think I was really lucky to meet this person. When you find somebody like this, you can really feel good knowing that this is an example of all the good things that can happen when you open up yourself to others.

Powerful Memories to Increase Public Speaking Skills and Obliterate Fear

I was talking to a friend the other day; actually I interrupted my friend the other day is a more accurate way of putting it. He was reading a book about public speaking, and how to overcome the fear of public speaking. He had recently been promoted at his work, and he was going to have to do a lot of traveling to other divisions, and meet with large groups of potential clients. He was going to have to speak in front of some very large groups, so he was a bit worried about overcome his fear of public speaking. He actually had a stack of books he was working on. It seems he was kind of worried that his new promotion would take him places that he wasn’t quite ready to go.

I can recall another friend from a few years ago that was in a similar situation. He was always getting promoted at work, and he was always learning new skills. From public speaking, to sales, to negotiation, he was always making himself more valuable to the company. He would always invest at least twenty percent of his salary in himself, from books to seminars to self-improvement programs. And he always reaped fantastic rewards. He was telling me about a particular useful tool that he used, which was a memory-improving product.

He explained to me about emotional memory, and how the history of any human is so incredibly rich and powerful and so completely overstuffed with memories that we can choose anything we want to create in the future, and look back into the past to find an appropriate memory. The cool thing about the human brain is that it can apply almost any memory to any situation. Memories don’t really have any particular meaning except the meaning that we give to them. And the cool thing is that we can give the same memory different meanings depending on how you’d like to project yourself into the future.

For example, I’m sure as you sit there, reading this, you can bring to mind some memories from the past. Maybe from yesterday, or maybe from a year ago. And some of those memories that you are remembering now can be helpful, while others will cause a certain amount of anxiety. And if you can just take all those memories that cause some anxiety, and put them aside, you can free your mind up to bring to bear all the memories that give you feelings of pleasure and happiness.

Like that one time, a while ago, where that one thing happened that was particularly pleasant. Maybe you were planning on it happening, maybe it happened spontaneously. Either way, as you bring it to mind now, you can start to see what happens when you project it into the future. And whether or not you can close your eyes and think of that is not really important. What’s important I that you can begin to realize that you can recall any memory from your past that you want, and deliver it to your future, so when you get there, it will be waiting for you.

But emotional memory wasn’t even the main gist of the program my friend had so successfully used. It was more of a technical memory program that taught how to easily remember complex sets of facts and information, so when you needed to present them to a large group of people, you would not only be able to feel extremely comfortable giving a speech in public, but you would be persuasive as well, which could naturally increase your ability to sell and make lots of money.

How to Remove Public Speaking Fear and Skyrocket Your Sales Skills

If you are in sales, any kind of sales, there is one skill you can learn that will have a powerful effect on all your other skills for selling. And when you realize in almost every interaction you have with others, you are selling something at some level. An idea, your point of view, a behavior that you want others to perform. Whether you are going to convince that gorgeous woman to come over to your place for dinner, or persuade your kids to finish their homework before watching TV, you are selling something.

And there is one powerful skill that can dramatically help you in all aspects of this. That, of course, is public speaking. I’m sure you know that public speaking is the number one fear of people today. Almost everybody dreads the idea of being called up to speak. If you’ve ever had to give a toast, or even introduce somebody to large group of people, you know how nerve wracking it can be. Overcoming public speaking fear can be the singularly most beneficial decision you can make. It will increase your self-confidence, increase your self-esteem, and give you much more clarity of thought when choosing your words during normal, every day conversations.

And if you are in an honest to goodness sales job, where you have to put yourself in front of people day in and day out, overcoming the anxiety of public speaking can do wonders for your closing ratio. It’s a well-known fact that giving talks on a regular basis, regardless of what business you are in can do wonders for your income.

So how does one go about reducing public speaking fears? How can you banish public speaking anxiety once and for all? There are two ways to approach this. One is through various forms of mental imagery and visualization, training your brain to think of speaking in a different way, so it doesn’t cause you the anxiety that it might have before. These can be a wonderful way to make it feel easy and natural to not only feel comfortable giving public speeches, but to look forward to doing them as well.

One way to do this is to imagine the feeling you will get when you finish your speech, and you can hear the applause of the audience. Really get a good picture in your mind of what that looks like, sounds like, and feels like. Practice imagining that on a regular basis, until that thought becomes second nature, and not whatever thought you used to think that gave you the problems.

Another mental trick is to imagine the benefit the audience will receive from your speech. How will it help them? How can they use the information? When you think in terms of this, you will be less likely to imagine them judging and scrutinizing you, and more likely to imagine them thankful to you for doing them favor by sharing your unique information with them.

The second way of extinguishing your public speaking anxiety once and for all is to simply speak as often as possible. Every time you think of speaking, and grow anxious, and then get out of speaking, it reinforces the thought that public speaking is dangerous. When you begin to speak in public as often as possible, anywhere were there are people within earshot that don’t know you, you will gain confidence. Anywhere you can do this will work. Talking to strangers in line at the supermarket, making an announcement at the dinner table at home, if you have a large family, volunteering at your church. Toastmaster is a great place to practice these skills in a friendly, supportive environment.

When you combine the mental tricks outlined above, and the habit of speaking as often as possible, any fear or anxiety you have associated with public speaking will quickly vanish, and your skills of selling and persuading will skyrocket, not to mention your self-confidence and self-esteem. Learning to feel comfortable while speaking in public can very well be one of the greatest, and cheapest, self improvement and self-development programs at your disposal.

How to Speak with Powerful Authority

You stand up, ready to speak. You pause. Slowly you turn your head, calmly scanning the crowd. You notice the look of attention and fascination on the faces of the crowd. Because you are such a powerful speaker, whatever conversations people had been engrossed in have automatically taken a backseat to their high expectations of your coming words. You are a powerful speaker. You speak with authority. When you speak, you command the room.

Ok, maybe not, but you’ll be more than halfway there after you finish reading this article, because I’m going to show you three quick and easy to learn techniques that will make your words more captivating than you’ve ever imagined. Some of the other techniques I write about on my blog can help as well. But before you go and read that, make sure to finish reading this, because despite these tips being incredibly easy, they are just as incredibly powerful. And the coolest thing about these techniques is you can use them anytime you are speaking to anybody about anything. Job interview, date, toastmasters speech. Ready? Let’s go.

Technique Number One.

Speak with authority. Ok that sounds a little vague. Speak in downward tones. You can end your sentences in three tones. Up, neutral, or down. You want neutral, but down is much better. If your sentences end on upward tone, you’ll sound unsure and without any authority. If you want a fantastic example of this, after you check out my blog, go over to Youtube and watch any clip you can find of President Obama. He has this technique down. (Down, get it?) When he speaks, he sounds as if he not only knows what he is talking about, but he believes it as well. And when you know what you are talking about, and you speak with belief and sincerity, you will easily captivate people.

Technique Number Two.

Create tension. Or a more technical name for this is create response potential. Sounds technical, but its simple. Simply pause in the middle of a sentence. If you can, say the following sentences out loud with the pauses where they are written:

I went to the store. (pause.) I bought an apple. (pause.) The apple tasted good.

Sounds pretty boring, right? Right. Now say it with different pauses, like this:

I went to the …(pause) store. I bought an..(pause) apple. The apple tasted…(pause) good.

Can you hear the difference? The more you practice, the easier it will get. When you master this technique, people will be hanging on your every word.

Technique Number Three.

The head tilt. Simply tilt your head back, just slightly. (Unless you are standing and talking to somebody who is much shorter than you.) Maybe about a centimeter. This will add to your aura of authority. And combined with the first two techniques, you’ll be amazed at how powerful your word will become. And the incredible thing is, people will have no idea that you are using these techniques. They’ll just know that they are totally captivated by your words. As they should, because your words are your power. And the more you cultivate your power, the more powerful you’ll become.

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Feel Your Feelings Free Your Power

There is a guy who lives in my apartment building that I saw a few times when I first moved in.  I’d only seen him a couple of times as he was either entering or exiting his apartment, so I never really got a glimpse of his face. I’d only seen the back of him. And being as how I only recently moved in, I was a little wary of making sure to meet the neighbors under the right circumstances. And sneaking up behind somebody as they were coming home from a long days work isn’t the best way to meet somebody. And from I saw about this guy, I wanted to be careful. They way he was dressed, and the way his hair was cut, and the long single earring he had dangling from his left ear made me slightly cautious. I wanted to be sure and make a good first impression.

First impressions are extremely important. I remember once in a communications class I took in college. They said that a first impression of somebody is made within the first ten seconds of meeting them. One of the reasons they are incredibly important is because not only does it take a huge amount of willpower to overcome a first impression, but most of the time we aren’t even aware of the basic impressions we hold about other people. For the most part, they operate outside of our conscious awareness. We just kind of get a ‘feeling’ when we see a person. We’re not even aware that our incredibly fast brains routinely make hundreds of calculations in a few seconds to summarize all the data around us to give us that ‘feeling.’

Not that feelings aren’t important. They are incredibly important. If you don’t notice your feeings, you can scarcely make a rational decision. If that sounds like a contradiction, consider some experiments done recently on a poor fellow who had the emotional centers of his brain temporarily disabled due to a unique surgical procedure. He was completely unable to make a decision. You’d think with those pesky feelings out of the way, we would all think like Spock-like bulletproof logic, but it just isn’t so. Without feelings, we can’t feel desire, or notice what you want, and use these feelings to make a decision. Just because we aren’t aware of the thousands of incredibly fast circuits in our brain doesn’t mean they aren’t there, or aren’t important. The big secret is to accept all your feelings. Because when you accept and appreciate your feelings, you give yourself permission to access all the wonderful portions of your brain. You get to use your entire intelligence. Imagine what you could do if you could use your whole brain. What could you create?

Of course, the best part of the communications class was the incredible self confidence I was able to develop. It’s amazing what a public speaking class at a community college will do for you. Public speaking is one of the things that I recommend that anyone and everyone learn how to do. It will dramatically change your life for the better.

I did finally meet my neighbor, with his girlfriend, at the local grocery store. He really is a nice guy, who has an innocent smile that never quits. I’m glad I was able to hold back before I made any snap decisions about him.

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Overcome Shyness Through Friendly Conversation

I ran into a friend the other day on the train. I didn’t notice her at first, because she looked different. You know when you see somebody you are pretty sure that you know, but it takes a few moments for you to remember exactly where you know them from? This was one of those times. She was sitting directly across from me, and was reading some book. It didn’t look like a novel, rather it looked like some kind of trade paperback or something. It was actually her that recognized me, as I was craning my neck around to try and see the title she was reading.

She said my name, and could tell by my expression that I couldn’t remember exactly who she was. I think it is fascinating that women are much better at this kind of thing that men are. I played a game once with a group of people called ‘liars.’ People got into groups of three, and then decided amongst themselves which one would tell a true story, and which would tell a lie. There was always one liar and two truth tellers. The game was to keep asking questions until you could catch the liar in a lie. The women are almost always better at this than men.

I read an interesting book once that I think explained it. It said that this was a leftover trait of our hunter/gatherer past. Men would generally go out and look for things to kill (hunt) and women would stay home at the caves, and take care of the kids and collect fruit and stuff (gather.) And this book was saying that women were able to develop a skill that allowed them to really be able to read peoples emotions a lot better than men. I guess this is a lot easier when you can understand your own emotions. And since women are much better at this than men, they are better at being able to read facial expressions much better.

And as it turns out, my friend was reading the classic book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. She said that she was enrolled in a public speaking class through her company, and the book was required reading. She said that she decided to read this book a long time ago, and did, but since she forgot a lot of the important stuff, she made the decision to read this again. She told me that when you find something that is of value, it’s important to read this over and over to make sure you can squeeze every useful thing out of it.

And it turns out that is why I didn’t recognize her. She used to be a really shy person. When she walked, she never really was ever able to make eye contact with people, and usually had her shoulders slumped. You had to get to know her before she was comfortable in expressing herself. It was only then that you could discover what a great person she was. Now she is really enthusiastic about public speaking. She says that when you don’t express your true self to others, you really are doing yourself and others a disservice. Because when you can really feel comfortable to be able to express yourself without any fear or anxiety, people can have a chance to get to know you for who you really are. Which is likely a pretty cool person when you think of all the good stuff you’ve done in your life.

Come to think of it, she’s always been a pretty supportive person. And now she’s happy that she doesn’t have to wade through her shyness to let people discover her. Kind of cool when you think about it.

Unfortunately, she was getting off at the next stop, and I had a few stops to go. But it was good that I saw her. We’ll have to get together sometime in the future.

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Remember to Forget for Fun and Happiness

I remember once I was watching my niece in a dance club performance. They were all doing some pre practiced dance moves that was choreographed to a popular musical number. In case they forgot their steps, their was a giant dancing bear on stage to follow for guidance. They were three and four years old, and the dancing bear, or the person dressed in the dancing bear costume, was eleven.

They had these ornamental neck wrap necklace things. I’m sure here is a technical name for it, but since I’m not that into three year old dance fashion, I’m not really sure what it is. It is kind of a long, frilly decorative thing that you loosely wrap around your neck, and it is supposed to enhance your dancing movies by trailing from behind.

What happened was that this girl stepped on her trailing frilly thing, and in the process knocked her stool over. Of course she naturally bent down, picked her stool up, and re wrapped the frilly thing back around her neck so that it wouldn’t happen again. And looked around at her friends, and once or twice at the dancing bear, and she was back in sync again with all the rest of the kids.

And then a thought struck me. She hadn’t yet learned that you are supposed to be nervous on stage. She hadn’t yet learned that you are supposed to be self conscious, and dream up a bazillion terrible things that can happen whenever you are standing up and talking or performing for other people. She hadn’t learned yet that there is many more important things in life than to simply have fun and express yourself. She hadn’t learned that mistakes are cues from nature to feel guilty and embarrassed. She was somehow under the impression that a mistake was something that you just lean over, grab and re arrange and then look around to see how everybody else is doing and then do your own thing.

And then I wondered about how I used to believe in Santa Clause, and now I don’t. And there was a time that I didn’t even know what a Santa Clause was, let alone worry about whether or not he was a concocted fantasy. I didn’t know who he was, then I was told about him and decided to believe in him, and later decided to discard this old belief. I began to wonder how it is possible to do the same thing with stage fright.

There was a time, obviously, when you didn’t know you were supposed to be afraid on stage. Then for some reason, some people learn to be afraid. What happens when you realize that fears are just a concocted myth, like Santa Clause, that you can easily learn to forget so that you can go back to being a kid again?

And that is when you can really start to find the cool stuff in life.

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Deliver a Powerfully Persuasive Speech

You stand up slowly, and turn to face the room. You face the spellbound crowd, waiting to hear your wisdom. You pause to collect your thoughts, imagining exactly how you want the crowd to respond to your call to action, knowing full well they will once they hear your irresistible message. You take a deep breath, not to calm your nerves, but to give your voice power and strength, enough to capture the attention and imagination of those sitting in the back row.

You can do this naturally and easily, because you have the learned the skill of persuasive oratory. You have learned to project your message so those that hear cannot help but to do what you say. In case you’ve forgotten this skill, here are a few pointers to help you remember:

Step One

Start with a powerful attention getter. Something that will yank thier minds away from their normal everyday thoughts and towards your incredibly moving message. Once I gave a speech to my local toastmasters group on fear, how to embrace fear and use fear to your advantage. My attention getter? I screamed at the top of my lungs as if I was terrified. Did it work? Absolutely!

Step Two

Pace your audience. Say things that they can’t help but agree with.

“Today’s economy is tough.”
(No matter how bad or good the economy is, people will agree with that statement.)

“You all want to get ahead in life.”
(Who doesn’t?)

“You’ve come here to improve yourself.”
 (Who hasn’t?)

Spend three or four mintues getting your audience comfortable with agreeing with what you are saying.

Step Three

Demonstrate that you know about what they need. Identify their pain. Show them that you understand what it is they want.

“You are having problems making ends meet.”
“You need to improve your skills so you can make more money.”
“You want to be able to increase your sales.”

You will need to tailor the above statements to meet the specific needs of the people you are speaking to. If you tell a book club they need to increase their life insurance, they might disagree with you. But if you tell a group of soon to be graduating college students they need to sharpen their resume building and interview skills, they’re more likely to agree with you. 

Step Four

Introduce the pain of non-action. Now, it might sound mean to purposely cause somebody pain, but if your purpose is to help them in the long run, and if you believe by doing what you say, it will benefit them, it’s ok.

“If you don’t get your resume as good as your competition, you won’t get the job you want.”
“If you don’t practice and sharpen your interview skills, the person sitting next to you will get hired instead of you.”

Step Five

A call to action. Review their needs, the pain of non action, and then give them a specific step to move in the direction that you want them to go. (Please note, if you tell them to go in a direction that will only benefit you and not them, then you should become friends with this guy.)  If you are truly giving advice that will help others, make sure you will benefit as well. Win win situations are the best.

The more you realize that simply because you have life experience that can benefit others, the more you will be able to not only help out people, but increase your skills and help yourself out as well.

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