The Unforgettable Podcast Speaking Academy

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 Edmies. Welcome to the unforgettable podcast.

Speaking Academy is. It's something I'm really proud of. And it was an accident. It was an accident because I was teaching business as I've done all over the world. And one day, in a random conversation about marketing, I offered a throwaway comment to the audience and it derailed the event. And what happened was I was talking about the various mechanisms of marketing, you know, traditional media, Internet marketing, direct mail, telemarketing, one to one meetings, all the different types of marketing there were. And then somebody in the audience asked me, what's the most effective of all these? And I said, well, that's clear. I don't care what opinions say about that. The science is clear that the way to create the longest lasting, deepest connection with a human being through marketing is through a face to face interaction. Nothing else can do the same. And of course, immediately that raises the objection of, well, like, how many meetings can I have? Look, if you live in England, you can drive around and meet quite a few people. You live in Canada and you live in Toronto. How are you going to meet people in Vancouver on a regular basis? So, okay, maybe by zoom or something. But people were all, with these objections about, I can only meet people one on one. Even, even if, even if they all come to me, how many can I have? 5 a day, 6 a day? And I said, yeah, well, I mean, if you learn how to do it in front of an audience, then you can do it to a thousand people at a time. And all of a sudden the audience rebelled and they said, what, what did you just say? And they started asking all these questions about public speaking. So after about an hour, and I'm now an hour behind on the whole material, after about an hour I said, stop, I will not answer any more questions about public speaking. We have to get back on track. We're here to learn about entrepreneurship. And somebody raised their hand and I go, is this about speaking? And he goes, not specifically. And I go, go ahead. And he goes, what would have to happen for you to come back here to Sweden to teach us a five day program on public speaking? And I was never planning ever to teach public speaking, but when he asked me the question like that, I just threw back an impossible answer. I my way of saying no instead of saying no was, well, you would need to have, you know, roughly 20 to 30 people ready to go. It would cost this much money, right? You'd have to have all that money raised. You'd have to book a hotel. And by the way, you'd have to have all this done before I leave Sweden in two days because I'm not doing this over the phone. So I just, I made it impossible, you know, I didn't want to do it. And then they came up to me at lunchtime on the last day of the workshop and they had the list of 25 names, they had the hotel venue that they tentatively reserved, they had the AV equipment that they, they'd done it. Like they, and I was like, I kind of left shell shocked. And I went home and I was talking to a business mentor of mine and I said like I have to go and do a public speaking training. And he said, wait a second, you're a business teacher. Like you have to stay in your lane. You teach business at a world class level. People go, people with MBAs come and spend five days with me and tell me I learned more in five days than I did in my MBA program. No, no harm to an MBA program. I'm not teaching that. I'm teach teaching business ownership. And he's like, stick with that. And I go, they made me do it. And he says, okay, can you do it at the same level? And I said, this is what I think will happen. There'll be 25 people there. I said, five of them will have life altering transformations at a deep personal level and they will become phenomenal world class presenters. Another five at the other end will have a good time, they'll get good value, they'll be happy they came, but it might not be the greatest thing in their life. And in the middle, all of them will become better presenters and better speakers. He goes, if you can really pull that off, I'm behind this. But I don't think you can do that. That's not the numbers from the industry. So with a yellow light, if not exactly a green light, I went back to Stockholm and delivered the program. And we came out of the program and we had, out of 25 people, we had 20 life altering transformations, 20, 20 and then five who were raving fans. And I would say they the only reason they didn't have life altering presentations, they were already pretty damn good presenters before they came. They also up leveled in a big way. So I realized that we had to make it a regular fixture. And it's become by far and away our most like, talked about program in our culture. And it's. And it's one of the funnest things that I get to do because the truth is to walk around in your life feeling unexpressed is a horrible, horrible form of slow suffering. And most people are doing that. Most people walk out of a meeting and they go, I wish I had said this and I wish I had said that. Or they sit in a meeting and they don't raise their hand because they're afraid to be heard. Or they're sitting at a dinner and they won't cut into the conversation. And most people are feeling that all the time. And that's a. It's a slow death. And not only that, it's a selfish, slow death. Because the truth is that very often the people that are most willing to speak have the least important things to say. And the people that are holding themselves back have mic drop truth bombs and they're trapped inside them. And there are two tragedies about that. The one is the tragedy, that is the loss to society that those truth bombs didn't get dropped. The people at the table didn't get to hear that. And the people at the workshop, the meeting, whatever it is. But the other tragedy is that the person who's trapped that truth bomb inside them knows they've done that. And that's a special kind of pain. And it's a cumulative pain. And then the more of it you have, the more of it you control and the more of it you constrain. So what I've seen over the last 10 years of helping people come out of their shell and be heard is that it is the single best personality upgrade anybody can have is to become self expressed.

So that's it for today's episod episode of unforgettable. Head on over to itunes or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week who posts a review on itunes will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a private $25,000 VIP day with Eric Edmeads himself. Be sure to head on over to unforgettable show and pick up a free copy of Eric's gift and join us on the next episod.

Sam.