Becoming One of the Top Speakers in the World with Dr. Sean Stephenson and Joe Polish - Genius Network Episode #160

I tell people all the time, just go learn how to be a better public speaker because all kinds of aspects of your life are going to improve. And there are many people that have a ton of stuff to teach, but because they have this fear that they can't do it or they won't take steps to do it, they limit not only their ability to help themselves, but to help others.

This week we are revisiting the episode where Joe Polish and Dr. Shawn Stevenson shared how to overcome obstacles in order to become a great speaker. Here are some of those mindset shifts. If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to www.gienstruitnetwork.com.

Let'S talk about that business then. The whole business of public speaking. And why do people need to learn about public speaking? I mean, you know, business, you know, it's more than just go out and turn it into a career, but your ability to persuade and move audiences. And, you know, people are definitely afraid of it at times. Some people don't know how to think about it. So let's just start from the beginning.

I want you to name three great leaders throughout history that come to mind. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Martin Luther King. John F. Kennedy.

Steve Jobs. Mother Teresa.

Yeah.

Yeah. The people that you mentioned are incredible orators. Totally. And I'm a big believer that you don't need to speak well if you're going to play small in life, but if you want to make an impact, you're going to need to speak well.

Yeah.

And you're going to need to not necessarily make an impact on the masses, but on the impact of your children or your spouse or your employees or your friends or your community, whatever group you are a part of. Your ability to communicate your ideas, your ability to influence them through the spoken word, that will always have a positive impact if you can really hone the skill. I've never met somebody that said, you know, I got really good at speaking and my life just went miserable. You know, when you get really good at commanding a presence and impacting a crowd, you can take it off in so many different directions. It helps you with sales, it helps you in influencing a cause, a movement. My big thing in getting people to get comfortable with speaking is to see, as we'll talk more depth later, is that it's not about you, it's about the impact that you can have on those around you. So I really think it's important to be a phenomenal communicator and order so that you can spread messages that you think are important.

Why are people so scared to speak?

Well, I think there's a couple reasons. One, we'll just take on from the biological. So for a very long time now, this is only for the people that believe in science, okay? But for those of you that do believe a little bit in science, we went a very long time as a species in tribes, in groups that we survived in these tribes, and we. We roamed the earth together. And if you got thrown out of the tribe, that was not a good thing. And so we have millions of years of our brain saying, hey, let's not do anything to screw up. So let's not do anything to stand out. Let's not do anything that will have us be judged, because that won't go well. And I see how much fear grips people when it comes to public speak. So that's biological. Now let's talk personal. Personally, I think the fear of public speaking is just being addicted to yourself, being so concerned about, what do you look like? What are they going to think about you? What if you make a mistake? You, you, you. It's the. It's, you know, the me, me, me, all. All about me. But I do this activity in my live event where I teach people about speaking. And I don't know if you've seen this part. You've spoken at this event few times. But what I will do, and I'll get somebody out of the audience who is deathly afraid of speaking. And just having them come up on stage, they're shaking, they're sweating. And I'll say, so tell me what's going on in your body. And then we will list on the whiteboard all the things that are going on, and they're, like, just filled with all this fear. And then I say, okay, would you like me to get rid of that for you? They're like, oh, God, that would be amazing. Yeah, absolutely. I'm like, all right, I'm going to need you to go into this corner of the. The stage. I'm gonna go talk to the audience. And then what I do is I roll to the edge of the stage and I talk to the audience and I say, I need 10 people to volunteer for this activity. If you're going through some kind of pain right now in your life, not just a small pain, but like, major pain, maybe you just lost your husband to cancer, your child hasn't spoken to you in years, you just found out your business is crumbling, and you're gonna probably have to file Bankruptcy, you're being evicted. Whatever is going on, I want you to 10 people to go to the mic and I want you to just share with this person that's scared, what are you going through? And then just finish with, I need your help. So the 10 people get up, they go to the microphone, I go back over to the person that's scared, and I'm like, all I ask you to do is just look at this person as they're talking to you, then look at the next person. And these 10 people share and tears well up. They say, you know, I just held my wife's hand in the hospital last week and she's gone now, and I need your help. And then the next person, you know, my son was killed by a drunk driver seven years ago, and I got to say, I haven't gotten over it, and it's now affected my marriage and I'm probably going to get divorced because I can't get my life together and I need your help. The next person comes up and says, you know, I made a massive mistake as a stockbroker and I lost millions of dollars from my clients, and a of them were my friends. And now I feel horrible that I lost this money and my friends don't trust me, I need your help. And it just goes on and on and on. And I just watched the physiology of this person that claimed they were afraid of public speaking change. And I then asked the person at the end, how do you feel standing up here on the stage now? You know what they say, Joe? They say, I'm calm, I'm. I'm grounded. I. I feel so empathetic. And I'm like, oh, but what, what about all that fear? You were just trembling up here about 10 minutes ago. They're like, I stopped thinking about myself. And so I think that when people say they have a fear of public speaking, somewhat is biological and that's fine. But, you know, biologically, we can't fly, but we invented airplanes, right? And so the other is the personal is to realize you're not on that stage to just flap your lips. You're on that stage because people are in pain and you're able to help them.

When I first did my first public presentation, I was scared shitless. I was sweating bullets. People said, after three to five minutes, you'll calm down. And the entire day I was just like a nervous wreck. And it's kind of interesting how I got into it because I had created a marketing program using strategies when I was a dead broke carpet cleaner living off credit cards. I learned marketing because I needed to survive. That's my whole story sort of thing in the early days. And I knew stuff that worked, but I had never communicated it live to an audience before. And I'd created a course that I had sold through direct mail because the Internet didn't even exist back then. And I started going to Toastmasters and doing things to try to get over the fear because I was very introverted growing up and I was very shy. And I mean, talking to one person was difficult for me, let alone groups of people. I mean, it was a giant fear. And I wrote a sales letter to do an all day seminar to carpet cleaners. And 52 people showed up for this thing. And I literally had no guest speakers. It was me all day and I sold this thing. And I was like, by the time I wasn't sleeping the night before. So not only was I scared, but I was exhausted at the same time. And so I literally gave this whole presentation, like all day just talking about the stuff and I had no idea if it was landing. I was just like, just, you know, I was in my early 20s and or mid-20s actually, and I was just kind of scared. And at the end though, I offered to sell a marketing program and I sold $12,000 worth of a marketing course. I was selling a $497 version called a basic package and a 597 version called gold package.

12,000 cleared that public speaking fee right out.

No, here's what it did. Like I was like, you know, I got to learn how to do this. So you know what? The next speech was very scary and the third one, but I was like, you know, I realize a saying that whatever you fear and don't face controls you. Whatever you fear and face, you can control it. Or at least you start taking steps to get better at. Not that. And to this day, I've never gotten rid of the nervousness. I mean, there were even estimates like, you know, the late Johnny Carson would throw up once a week before every, you know, the Tonight show, at least once a week. His whole career. Like, he never got over it. But you know what? He showed up and he did it. And you know, not only did it give me the ability to make money, but I realized that, you know, this whole time is money sort of thing. I mean, I understand what people mean when they say that, but relationships are money. And if you're going to go out and talk to people and communicate with people, you are so much more effective if you can do it. In groups than just even one on one. And even if someone that's watching this or listening to us right now is like, well, I'm never going to do a public presentation. Actually, you are. If you ever want to make an impact in anything, it may be a webinar, it may be a podcast, it may be, you know, any sort of speaking that you do that's going to make you more effective, more clear, more persuasive, the ability to enroll people. You know, I tell people all the time, just go learn how to be a better public speaker, because all kinds of aspects of your life are going to improve. And there are many people that have a ton of stuff to teach, but because they have this fear that they can't do it or they won't take steps to do it, they limit not only their ability to help themselves, but to help others. I had to gut my way through it, but thank God I did because it opened up a world of opportunities. And then within the first year of doing that, I ended up selling a quarter million dollars worth of marketing courses. And by the second year, it was half a million. By the third year, it was doing over a million a year. And the year that I did a million in sales, $250,000 of those sales in 1997, that was actually came from speaking on stage at maybe like six or seven events. What mistakes do people make from stage that they need to be aware of?

They get in their head. They don't have a clear set of bullet points of, like, an outline. They think that, oh, I'm just gonna go up there and speak from my heart. Well, sometimes that works, but a lot of times it turns into a ramble. So I tell people, what if you could have some bullet points? You don't need to have your speech written out and read it word for word. What if you could have bullet points that you could look down at or maybe have on a sheet of paper off in the audience that you could just jog your memory and go from one idea to the next? They don't do the rehearsal work ahead of time. Not having practice can make a big impact negatively.

What puts people to sleep that bad speakers do?

They don't modulate their voice. When a speaker gets up on stage and they tell their whole speech like this. Joe, I'm really grateful that you're having me in this interview. I think that what you're doing for the planet is so amazing, and I just wanted to thank you for your contribution. And I am so excited to be here that will put any of us to sleep. So you could have the best information, but you have to be able to modulate your voice because it's also bad to be talking like this the entire time because it's like, holy crap, take a chill pill, relax. You have to be able to understand how to take people on a wave. You know, Les Brown, one of my mentors, he said you sometimes need to go on a run when you're on stage where you get into your moment and you are talking passionately and you have that plan for about three minutes you're gonna go off and then you stop and you make them digest that run. And when you can change the, the rhythm, the cadence, the modulation of your voice, it keeps us engaged.

What is the process that you use to create your content, your speech content?

So I call it the pull method. P U L. Whenever I'm giving a presentation, it doesn't matter if it's a 10 minute talk or a two day long seminar, I will use this method. The P stands for personal. When you get up on stage, people want to hear your personal story. And that personal story is what makes you unique. It's what separates you from the crowd. Maybe you were a dead broke carpet cleaner living off of credit cards. You know, I have your speech memorized now. And when you get up there, most of us aren't dead broke carpet cleaners in our past. We don't know what that's like. But we then have you transition from that personal to the you, which is the universal. So this was my personal story. Now let me talk about the universal experience of it. Who in here has ever been in a financial challenge? Raise your hand, everybody's hands go up. You know that feeling like where you have more month than money, all the hands go up? Yeah. Well, when you're a dead broke carpet cleaner and you're in an industry that's not really sexy to convince people to get their carpets clean, it's tough to kind of let them know that you, you have something important for them. And so you take this personal story and you universal, you give the universal message to it. What connects us between that? You know, when you can take your personal story and then make it universal, and then the last part is the L, which is need to have incredible lessons. Because when somebody listens to that personal story of yours and then you're able to make it universal so they can relate to it, then they don't want to just walk away and go, wow, I feel connected to that guy. And that be the end of it. They want a lesson, they want a takeaway. They want to know, like, what did you learn at that age? What was something that you went through that I can now use where I'm at in my life? If they have lessons on how to handle unfair moments and who among us haven't had unfair moments, then they can go out to their car in the parking lot and head home and go, God, I now have these takeaways. I now know I have to ask myself, what's funny about this? And a great lesson is something that is so simple that people could go home and retell it to their children. The purpose of a speech is to transfer ideas, shift emotions, and get people to rethink their life. You want to transfer an idea so you have something that maybe they don't even know exists, right? And you share that idea with them. So then the light bulb moment goes off. But you also have to shift their emotion so that they have an experience in their body, not just in their brain. Because when you have an experience in your body, not just your brain, your body will connect those two and will go into long term memory. And so if you can shift emotion at the same time as introducing and transferring that idea, then you can have that moment where a person goes and rethinks their life. So you gotta be clear. Your message has to pull them through the experience.

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