Identifying Your Speaking Style

Do you struggle with fear, doubt, and worry in your public speaking? Do you find it difficult to connect with your audience and deliver presentations that leave a lasting, positive, unforgettable impact? If yes, then let's dive in the world of public speaking and presentation skills with your host, Eric Edmeads. Welcome to the Unforgettable Podcast.

Cultivate a personal speaking style. This has got to be important, right? Wrong. Don't do it. Do not cultivate a speaking style that is inauthentic. What you want to do is work on identifying your natural, authentic speaking style. This is one of the most important principles that we work on constantly here at Speaker Nation, because what we are not aiming to do, like many speaking organizations do, is produce a bunch of robotic people that speak in exactly the same formulaic way. I've gone to conferences, seen speakers on stage, and I can tell you where they learn to speak. My goal, and our goal as an organization is to help you become the authentic version of you in the best possible expression of you that you can. That is your speaking style. And it's not something you have to cultivate. It's something you need to release. So I want to explain it to you a little bit like this. When you first start encountering other human beings, you know, as you're growing up, you begin to get positive or negative feedback for the way you communicate. So somebody might say to you, indoor voice only, or think before you speak, or children should be seen and not heard and so on. And all of these various things, some of them that are positively reinforcing and some of them that are negatively reinforcing, cause you to build basically an ego suit, a human suit, a suit of what's acceptable to your behavior. And so now what happens is what we get to our 30s and 40s and beyond, and we're living inside that constrained suit. When is the one time people release that suit? Well, there's more than one time. One time is when they're with their closest friends, then they can let their hair down, then they can let their guard down. You know the expressions, right? But another time that people let go of their human suit is after a couple of drinks. Isn't it true for many people? Haven't you seen people that are not particularly good storytellers, but once they've had that second glass of wine, suddenly they're using voice modulation and they're exaggerating their stories and they're using their hands and. Because what's happened in that moment is they've released the human skin. Now, I don't advocate for alcohol as a great way of releasing that human skin, but I advocate for using that as an example that it can be done. And our goal at speaker nation is to help everybody release that skin, release that ego protection, and allow you to be authentically yourself. And I want you to hear something so very important. Human beings have an instinct, and that instinct is to be attracted to authenticity. It's so strong that you would rather be locked in a room with an authentic enemy than an inauthentic friend. You see, the problem with an inauthentic friend is they get real close to you. You don't know what's going on with them. They're unpredictable. An authentic enemy. I mean, look, at least you know, you know what's going on. They're authentically your enemy. We want authenticity. We want that. And here's the thing. If somebody walks on stage with a cultivated speaking style and that is inherently inauthentic, you just want to be you. Be you, and they will love you.

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