TJ Walker argues positive thinking matters more for public speaking than most fields. Acting confident, smiling, and showing enthusiasm makes audiences receptive and improves how you're perceived. He cites Reagan, Clinton, and Schwarzenegger as examples of speakers who used this approach.
Chapters
Folks, I have to be honest with you. I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the so called positive thinking motivational speaker gurus out there. But I do have to confess that when it comes to public speaking, I really do find there's a high correlation between having a positive attitude and actually being a great speaker. In that respect, speaking is very different. I can have the greatest attitude in the world about golf and tell you, wow, I'm going to be Tiger Woods, I'm going to be great, go out on the golf course and I'm going to shoot 150 and that's cheating. My positive attitude is not going to. I can have a positive attitude on designing a new fall fashion collection for Christian Dior or some other fashion house. It's not really going to matter because anything I design would be horrible. For starters, I'm colorblind. Okay? So for many things in life, positive attitude isn't. I can say, I'm going to try out for the New York Yicks basketball team. Well, I'm going to be laughed out of the stadium. So positive attitude is not everything. However, public speaking is different. What I have found is simply acting like you're a good speaker. Smiling, acting like you're having a good time is contagious. It rubs off on the audience in a positive way. Especially when you contrast it with so many business speakers, political speakers, public policy speakers, they get up to give a speech and it's kind of like this drudgery of, okay, I'm here, you're here, neither one of us wants to be here, let's go and trudge through this stuff. That's the attitude that so many speakers exude. Not great speakers. Simply acting like you love what you're talking about. You love the opportunity of being here. You love being able to share ideas with people and you're excited about it. It helps. It helps tremendously. It makes people feel more comfortable with you, makes them listen to you more closely. Think of some of the best speakers of the last 30 years and forgive me, many of people on our foreign audiences, because we have people listening from more than 100 countries, I am giving a lot of us references. That is what I know best. But when you think of some of the best speakers in history, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton maybe, and I'm not talking politics here, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Margaret Thatcher, for that matter, to give you non US based example, what they have in common is when they speak, they just exude the sense that they think it's going really well. They can't believe how well it's going. They're happy to be there. There's a certain joy and optimism that comes out even if they have to talk about tough subjects or unpleasant subjects. So I do want you to keep that in mind. It's not that I want you to have a big smiley face plastered on your face at all times no matter how bad the subject matter is, but I do want you to think about what you can focus on that's positive and just feel positive about how you're presenting your ideas and that you're doing a good job and at least act like you are comfortable and confident and happy with the way it's going. You can always second guess your speech later when you're reviewing the video that ideally you're capturing or you're having someone capture on either a cell phone video or some other video camera. The time to second guess yourself is later when you're giving the speech. You need to act like you can't believe how well this is going to.
