Richmond Dinh breaks down three obstacles to better speaking: perfectionism, lack of confidence, and ineffective practice. He offers concrete strategies to fix each one.
Chapters
Three reasons why you're not good at speaking, and more importantly, what to do about it. Reason number one, perfectionism. Perfectionism will kill all speakers. Why? Because when someone's trying to be perfect, they become robotic, they become scripted, and they lose the whole conversational aspect of speaking. And when you want to connect and relate to your audience, you have to be conversational. And to become conversational, you have to get out of that perfectionism mindset. So my number one tip to get out of perfectionism, be more conversational when you're doing a video is pretend like you're talking to your spouse or your best friend or someone that you've known for a very long time. Because when you're having dinner or when you're engaging with someone that you know for a very long time, you don't think about being perfect. You just relax and be comfortable and talk to them like they're your best friend. Now, the second reason why people may not be good at speaking is because they are not confident. And I know that sounds basic and boring. Yes, confidence is everything. And how do you build confidence in a very short amount of time? Or how do you fix that in a short amount of time? It's easy. Speak about what you know. You see, it's hard to be confident if you're trying to speak about something that you have no idea about, or you've never done it in your own life, or you're not congruent about. But when you speak about something you know, it's easy to speak about. You get excited about it, you're enthusiastic about it, and you become colorful about it as well, because you know it, you've spoken about it 10, 20, 30, 50 times. You've done it for a long time. It's really easy to be confident about speaking about something that you know. Now, the third reason why you may not be good at speaking is not what most people think. Most people say, just practice, practice, practice, and you'll become better at it. Which is true to a certain degree. However, if you're practicing and you're not getting better every time, then basically you're making the wrong mistakes every single time. And so you just become better at being bad, if that makes sense. You need to practice on being better. You need to focus on progressive mastery and have that growth mindset. And that means reviewing your videos, watching again, asking yourself the critical questions, how can I make this better? Getting a mentor to come in and give you some feedback on how you can make it better, or even getting some training and coaching around that on how you can become better. So, yes, you need to practice a lot of but you need to practice intentionally with the right feedback to get better. I mean, you just can't pick up a tennis racket and just hit the ball 100 times, a thousand times, a million times, every single day, every single week, and expect to become a pro tennis player. You need to do that deliberately, with the right feedback so you get better every single time. Practice alone won't make perfect. You need to do intentional practice. So there you have it. Three reasons why you may not be good at speaking More importantly, how how to become better at it. Perfectionism will kill speakers. Speaking about things you don't know will kill speakers. And not practicing on getting better will kill speakers.
