Practice Your Speech On Video Until You Love What You See

We're coming to the end of season one of these weekly public speaking tips. It's been almost a full year. I want to stress again, really my number one tip. If you ignore all the other tips in this entire series, the last 50 tips, please follow this one tip and it will make a huge, huge, radical improvement in your speaking. It will also, by the way, completely eliminate any nervousness you have about speaking. And it comes down to this. Practice your speech. Practice your presentation on video. That alone doesn't help. You've got to then watch it. That alone doesn't help. You got to figure out what you like, what you don't like. That alone won't help. You've got to then do it again. You've got to keep practicing on video, doing more and more of the stuff you like, doing less and less of the stuff you don't like. And maybe it takes you four times, maybe it takes you 40. I've had clients do it more than 107 times. I don't care how long it takes. Your audience doesn't care how long it takes. Take as many times as you need to to get to the point where you, not me, not Dale Carnegie, not any other so called speaking expert. But until the point that you can look at a video of your own speech and you love every aspect of your style and substance, please note, I did not ask you to practice in front of a mere complete waste of time. I'm not asking you to audio record your speech. Complete, not complete, but 95% of a waste of time given the fact that you have a video camera on your cell phone or your laptop or your iPad or someone you know does. Now this is easy, easy, easy advice to follow. And yet very few people do it. It's hard to do. Not because of any technical sense. We're all comfortable, or most of us are comfortable recording a video these days. We do it of our kids at a birthday party. We record video all the time. It's not technically hard to do. It's emotionally hard to do. Oh, I don't want to look at myself. I don't like how I sound. I'm not photogenic. Guess what? You don't look any better in real life than you do on video. In fact, you probably look better on video. So get over it. If you want to be confident, you need to actually see that your speech is great. Think of it this way. If you had to go to the most important black tie event of the year, would you want to dress in dark and have someone tell you that your hair is good and your dress or your tuxedo looks good, or would you actually want to look in a mirror? You'd want to look in a mirror to see that you come across the way you want. You don't want to just feel that you dressed okay in the dark. It's the same thing with speaking, only with speaking. You cannot look in a mirror and judge yourself. You have to record it on video, watch it, keep doing it until you love it. Follow that one tip, folks, and that's worth the price of admission. That's worth a year's worth of tips. Here. Please do it.