TJ Walker explains why nervousness kills your energy when speaking publicly. He says practicing on video, especially in front of people, helps you see what you're actually doing with your voice and how you're connecting with the audience.
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Shane writes in with the following question. TJ I'm not someone who's easily excited. How can I bring my energy level up enough to connect with my audience? Well, Shane, I'm glad you're aware of that. Too many speakers sort of get down here in sort of a low energy mumble and they're blissfully unaware of it. And meanwhile their audience has fallen asleep. Here's the problem with energy level for most human beings. Until you're giving 10 speeches a day, when you're standing up in front of people, you're nervous. When you're nervous, we're like little bunnies or turtles. We sort of shrink, we freeze. Our energy level goes down and that can make us seem scared, timid, harder to hear, harder to understand, and frankly, kind of bored and boring. So it is important that your energy level is, isn't just up the whole time. You don't want to be shouting the whole time, but you want to have a whole range of your voice. You want to have some ups and downs, some fasts and slows. That's what's important. Now most of us have a range of energies. If you're at a football game or a soccer game and your team is winning by a lot or losing a lot, chances are there's energy in your voice. So the problem for most people is not that they can't speak with energy, it's that they let their nervousness bring their energy level down. The main thing you've got to do is you have to practice on video, preferably in front of people, so you can see exactly how your energy level is when you are speaking. You need to know exactly how you're being perceived by your audience, exactly what their perception is of your energy level. The the only way you can do that is by watching yourself on video repeatedly. And that's why you hear me stress again and again and again. You've got to rehearse on video, you've got to practice on video. Watch yourself. Every speech you give in front of real audiences, you need someone to record it for you, even if it's just holding your cell phone so you can watch it and judge it on every aspect of style and substance, including the energy level. Because if your energy level is too low, nothing else is going to matter. You're just going to fall flat.
