Ep 7 New Year's Public Speaking Resolutions

Be it resolved in the new year, I will become a better public speaker.

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

So, folks, it is New Year's week. It is a time when a lot of people are making New Year's resolutions. Now, I realize the first choice many of you have isn't to make a New Year's resolution on how to be a better public speaker. Quite often it's more things like how do I take a few inches off my waist or lose 20 or 30 or 40 pounds? But why not make a goal of being a better speaker for the upcoming year? Because it's frankly a lot easier than losing weight. It takes less time. I want to give you some very practical tips on how to go about it. The number one tip, of course, of all time is you've got a presentation to give. Practice on video until you can watch it and love it. Now, it sounds simple, but that really is far and away the number one thing you can do to become better as a public speaker. Because most people aren't willing to do that. They'll spend all their time writing and rewriting and rewriting a speech type, type, type, type, type, type, type. And then they're giving the speech for the first time. Don't do that. Spend some time typing your notes. If you're going to use PowerPoint, by all means do. But save most of your time to practicing on video. And I know you don't want to do it, but you also don't want to go to the gym. Some of you have made New Year's resolutions for that. You don't want to lose weight. You don't really want to pass on that portion of cake for dessert. You don't really want to pass up on that second helping. But you do at least the first week or two of the year, right? So if you're already willing to do some things you don't like to help yourself to help your life, why not do something that is almost guaranteed of helping your career and that is learning how to be a much better speaker. Doesn't take a lot of time, doesn't take a lot of effort. And I want to give you one very specific, practical tip that you can hop into right away, and it costs maybe $25 a year.

Toastmasters Spotlight.

That's right, folks. You've heard of them. They've been around forever. Toastmasters. They're taking new members all the time. Chances are there is a chapter near you, very near. You probably in your zip code. And I'm speaking to an international audience. I know that they are all over the world because I've been asked to speak at Toastmasters in India, in the Middle east, you name it, they're all over the world. The beauty of Toastmasters is it's a low, low pressure situation because you're talking to people who aren't actually your customers, your clients, your bosses or your co workers. So if you screw up, no big deal. Speaking is like anything else in life. The more you do it, the harder it is to be nervous about it. Going out with someone on a very first date is generally a little more nerve wracking or anxiety creating than going out with a spouse you've been married to for 10 or 20 years. You may love your spouse, you may have the greatest time, the greatest marriage in the world, but you probably aren't literally nervous about going out with your spouse on a Saturday night, date night. If you've been together 10, 20 years, first dates, you might be a little jittery. It's exactly the same thing with speaking folks. The more you speak, the better you get at it. So part of your goal of improvement is to simply find more opportunities to speak Toastmasters and go to toastmasters.org and you can find out. The nearest chapter to you is a great opportunity for speaking. And speaking and standing in front of people and getting used to dealing with that anxiety, that adrenaline that flows in your body, the butterflies in your stomach, getting used to it. Because every time you speak, not always for everyone, but in general you have a little less anxiety. And maybe on a 1 to 100 scale you go from 99 to 98, that's still progress, even if it's less than 1%. If you do it a whole lot, it gradually will go down and down. You look at the best speakers in the world, it's quite often people who just speak the most. Now it's not always quantity delivering quality, but for example, look at someone like Bill Clinton. Most fair minded people would say he and Ronald Reagan are the best well known American and for our international audiences, excuse my North American centric references, but in the English speaking world, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan are considered to have been the best speakers of the last 30 years. Bill Clinton's a good speaker in part because to this day he still gives 300 speeches a year. Martin Luther King Jr. Considered by many to have given the greatest speech of the 20th century, his I have a dream speech, people forget or they never KNEW he gave 300 speeches that year. They weren't all great. So part of being a great speaker for your New Year's resolution is just find more opportunities to speak now. You don't have to wait to be invited to speak on the Mall in Washington in front of 100,000 people like Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes just being in a meeting with five people raising your hand to ask a question, that's a type of public speaking. And the more you get used to this and asking a question seated, the easier it will be to actually stand up and speak out. So please keep that in mind.

Behind the news.

In our behind the News segment, I wanted to look at some well known politicians. Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, one a Republican, one a Democrat. I'm not being partisan here today, folks, previously mentioned Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Why do I mention the two of them? They both improved their public speaking. A number of years ago when Hillary Clinton first ran for president and back when she was first lady and running for the Senate, she had this tendency to speak like this. She basically shouted the whole time and it became annoying. And it was sort of a monotone. It was annoying. Now, I'm not being sexist, folks. Al Gore had the same problem. Both of them have improved. We don't see Al Gore out speaking as much, but Hillary Clinton has improved because she has become conversational. It's okay to raise your voice a minute, but then soften it. Contrast it with a whisper. You want to use the full range of your voice. And her husband has always been great at that, uses the full range of his voice, doesn't shout. So she improved dramatically at a time when she was in her 60s. To me, that's what's exciting about public speaking is you can really improve anytime now. There are plenty of New Year's resolutions you may have. I want to get better at golf and become a scratch player. Well, I don't know a lot of people who are over 60 who currently shoot 90 or above. And I'm not a golfer, suddenly becoming scratch golfers. I don't know many people over 60 who say, you know what? I want to get really good at basketball and be able to dunk the basketball. I don't know a lot of people who've done that, but I do know people in their 60s who dramatically improved their public speaking. Now let's look at a younger demographic. Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida, is in his mid-40s and he's improved. Many of you may remember just a few years ago he was giving the Republican rebuttal to the state of the Union Address. And as soon as he started talking, he sort of lunged, grabbed a bottle of water, undid the top, took a sip furtively, and then sort of lunged back and put the bottle down way on the edge of the table where he was stretching. It looked comical. It looked ridiculous. He looked like a little boy trying to steal a cookie and nobody noticing. He was widely mocked, ridiculed, lambasted for his performance, and yet is still, at the time of this recording, is still one of the top tier Republican presidential candidates and has been lauded in the first 10 or so Republican debates as the strongest communicator of the lot. So big lesson there is, if you have a really bad night or you make some mistake, or you make some blunder, don't let it bother you. Just go out and give a better speech the very next day and keep getting better. Because people will forget most of the time, not all the time. There is a situation of Michael Bay, the famed movie director, who was at a CES conference not that long ago, went out completely froze, panicked, said, I can't do this, muttered, and walked off the stage. That's something I don't think anyone will actually forget. Although if he continues to make movies, that will be his legacy. Not that one speaking blunder. But for the most situations, for most cases, you make a mistake, you have a bad day and you improve. People will focus on the new, improved you as a speaker. So many of you ask me, you know, tj, if I really wanted to just spend, I don't know, five minutes a month being a better speaker, that's a pretty small investment of time for a New Year's resolution. How would you spend it? What I would recommend is think of one opportunity where you could speak. Whether it's a Monday morning staff meeting, Toastmasters. Think of a couple of minutes where you could speak and then practice holding up your cell phone. Record it on video, watch it, and then go ahead and give it. Figure out what you like, don't like in just five minutes a week. You could rehearse it once for a couple minutes, watch it for a couple minutes, and then just reflect on what you liked, and then actually give it. So that would just be five minutes a week or a month. Do that and by the end of the year, you will be a better speaker, you will be a more confident speaker, you will be a more comfortable speaker. So take a moment and think right now, where can you actually get better? And where can you speak so you can use this one technique? Now let's look at Some things not to do.

Bad advice.

Folks. Sadly, there is a tremendous amount of bad advice in the world about public speaking. One of them is practice in front of a mirror. Folks. That's horrible advice, because unless you are incredibly beautiful, and in my experience, even beautiful people see their flaws only you're going to fixate on the fact of, oh, no, am I losing more hair? Is my nose a little bit crooked? Do I have a divot in my nose? You're not actually going to focus on how you're presenting. So do not practice in front of a mirror. Complete waste of time. Especially these days when we're all surrounded by video cameras. You can say, well, I don't want to look at myself. Tough. You look at yourself in a mirror before you leave the house to go to an important meeting or event or a party because you want to see. How does the rest of the world see your face, clothes, hair. It's not that you necessarily love looking at yourself in the mirror, but you know you've got to do it. It's exactly the same thing with a speech. If you want to be comfortable and confident, you need to actually see the speech. The speech is not a bunch of words on a piece of paper. The speech is you literally speaking. So please, please keep that in mind. You need to practice on video. Don't look at the mirror. Don't memorize the first line because you're going to be nervous when you speak. And if you trip out the first line, you're going to be grimacing, you're going to be apologizing. Nothing is worse than seeing somebody in the first 10 seconds kind of apologize or grimace or roll their eyes, suggesting they're not great. Never focus on memory. I haven't memorized the script of what I'm telling you each day in this show. I am simply talking to you as if I were talking to one client and we're having a conversation. So I am not memorizing a script. I have basically one page and sometimes one and a half pages of notes, and this gives me a framework for talking to you for the 15 or 20 minutes a day we have together. But it's not memorization that's really hard. So that's the bad advice to avoid. Do not, please, whatever you do, do not try to memorize. Now, another question I get is, should I take a public speaking course? Yes. But make sure it's a course where you are videotaped and recorded at least a dozen times. If it's a course where no one's recording you complete waste of time. Don't bother. If it's a course where it's once a week for 12 weeks and your video recorded three times, don't bother. You need to be video recorded at least 10, 12 times. You're really going to get to the point where you see how you look at your best and have a new role model for yourself. Now I have a solution for you in that area as well. Here it is.

For a free, no obligation online public speaking or media training course, go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and start learning today.

Here's the other big self improvement tip for public speaking. Great speakers do this. Some of the most famous speakers in the world you've heard of do this. And here is what it is. Every presentation you give, have somebody record it. You can just take your own cell phone and go up to somebody in the front row, say, hey, do you mind just recording this? And then watch it that day. And if you're not willing to do that, at least put your own phone out, hit the memo, audio, record and record it. You see comedians do this in stand up comedy clubs all the time. Now they're recording it to sort of listen to how they paused and how long the applause was or the laughter was. When you're recording your own speech, you're not worried about laughs necessarily, but you do want to listen to how you said it. How did it come across? Was it interesting, memorable, and did you get a reaction from the audience? It doesn't have to be a reaction in the form of laughter. Could be questions, it could be other comments they want to add. That's what you want to listen to. And these days there's just no excuse. You can't use the excuse of, oh, there's no budget to hire a production crew to capture my speech. Baloney. You have a cell phone. You can capture the video or at least the audio. So you have no excuse. So that's the other big tip I have for you, and that is to simply record every speech you do. Listen to it so you can make a teeny tiny bit of improvement every single time.

A question for you.

Finally, my question for you. I want to know, what would you like to do better when it comes to speaking skills this year? Not long term, not when you finally get to be CEO. Not 10 years from now, but this year. What is your goal for yourself as a speaker, presenter, communicator, podcaster, when it comes to how you communicate? I want to know what your goals are. Please send me a message. You can comment on Twitter JWalker. You can post comments whether you're watching this on Facebook, YouTube or any other platform. I'd like to hear from you finally. As always, I'm TJ Walker. May all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

Speaking with TJ Walker is the number one rated daily streaming TV and radio show devoted to all aspects of of speaking and communication. If you received value from this show, then please subscribe to it@mediatrainingworldwide.com Please review the show, leave comments and share it with your friends and colleagues today.