Dotty Scott talks with a guest about communication skills for entrepreneurs. They cover nonverbal communication, keeping pitches to 1-3 minutes, and the "Speak with Your Body" approach for solopreneurs to connect better with clients.
As entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, small business owners, why is this important to us? Because we're not speakers, we're service providers. We're experts at whatever it is that we do.
I did a little research and found a statistic that came from Project.co. It's, they said 96% of people think the businesses they deal with could improve when it comes to communication and project management. Okay. 96% of people think businesses they deal with could improve when it comes to communication and project management. Clearly, this kind of communication where you're talking is just one part of that. There's also the emails, the texting, all the different ways in which we communicate with our clients. If we are better with our nonverbal communication skills. What we say will land in our potential client's ears as well as our current clients. If it's a potential client, if you're more interesting to listen to when you're explaining what your service or products are, they're gonna— they're more likely going to listen to you. And if you're paying attention to their nonverbals, you'll more likely stop yourself from doing a throw up on them and ask them questions, right?
I just had an aha moment with you. So when we were talking about doing this and getting you on the show and everything, and your focus is speakers teaching people how to speak more vibrantly And as a service provider of technology, I mean, you can't get more boring than that. For me, it was like, well, I'm not a speaker. I'm not in front of, you know, hundreds of people on stages. I'm not, and I have zero desire to ever do that, you know? So how it's, is it really important to me? And what I just heard you say was it doesn't matter if you are a speaker. You always speak to your potential clients, even if it's on the phone. And this is where getting better at this can help. So you don't have to be a speaker per se to take advantage of what you're teaching us.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that being said, for the most part, we all need to be able to speak for a minute to 3 minutes about what we do.
Of course. And we want to get better at what we do and actually survive and thrive and make money.
Exactly. So even if you don't want to be the best speaker you could possibly be, and I know there's lots of people like you, Dotty. In fact, I used to feel that way. I used to feel like, why? Here's something that used to happen to me. I, I get in visions that pop into my head. No, I'm not crazy, they just come into my head. And for years I got the vision of me speaking on a big stage with a few hundred people in the room. And every time for years I said no thank you. I pushed that away because like you, I was like I don't want to go through all that work. It takes work to be a good speaker. I don't want to do all that. Well, I have subsequently decided that I was getting that vision for a reason. So I— and I— maybe it's so that I could teach this work, the Speak with Your Body process, and how to break free from the conditioning that has us not be the fullest expression of ourselves. But back to you and this I work with entrepreneurs more than I work with speakers, and I think all entrepreneurs need to be good at speaking. And the more we can be authentically vibrant and allow our vibrancy to come through when we're talking about what we do in networking events— not, I mean, certainly on big stages, but in networking events— then people are going to pay attention more.
