TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

So how do you win a public speaking contest? And why would you want to.

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

Folks, you'd never know it by looking at your local newspaper, which has every single news about every little league game, sports scores, junior high school, middle school, high school, college, professional sport, all gets tremendous, tremendous news coverage for those sorts of competitions. But meanwhile, there are a lot of competitions going on everywhere in the world, sometimes daily when it comes to public speaking for adults, there's Toastmasters conventions where they have competitions for speakers at the local, state, regional, national, international level, and certainly at the college level. There are college level public speaking competitions, debate competitions, and on down there are Rotary clubs that sponsor oratorical contestants. They are optimist. I got my first start at age 13 coming in. I didn't win. This is embarrassing, but I think I came in second place for an Optimist oratorical contest in Charlotte, North Carolina back in the 1970s. There's the Future Farmers of America. 4H. They have speaking contests. So they're everywhere. I am, as you would probably imagine, very positive and pro on the idea of speaking competitions for people of all ages, especially young people, but not just for young people. So that's the spotlight today on public speaking competitions.

Speaking contest spotlight.

First of all, if you have a child, anyone that you are supervising your guardian to or parent to, by all means give them tremendous encouragement to participate in speaking contests. If they ask you if they could, should would encourage them to do it. I can think of no better skill for a young person to master that will help them throughout their life to being a confident, comfortable, relaxed public speaker and communicator. The same cannot be said for learning how to tackle because folks, I spent a lot more time learning how to tackle in sixth grade and in ninth grade playing little league football and high school or junior high school football than I did learning how to give a speech. Guess which skill helps me more. By the way, I was horrible at tackling. I was one of the worst football players ever. But that's a topic for another day. My point is, public speaking is a skill that people use their whole life. So certainly, why not encourage kids to learn how to do it and to do it better? So I'll get into tips in a moment on how to excel at these competitions and how to win them. But let's deal with the fundamental issue of why you should even do it if you're a kid. It's a way of doing Something that's competitive, that isn't just sport. I'm not against sports, folks, but let's have a little balance. If you're going to spend thousands of hours of your childhood trying to do baseball and basketball and football, why not spend 50 hours really trying to master public speaking and do well in at least one public speaking competition? Because that's a skill that's going to help you forever. And as far as I know, there are no injuries associated with public speaking contest. I've never seen anyone walking around on a cane. And when I asked them what happened, they said, well, it was all back to this high school public speaking competition when the judge tackled me or my competitor tackled me and tore out my kneecap. I've never heard that, folks. So that's yet another reason to encourage young people to enter speaking competition. Now let's talk about people my age. I'm 53 people of any age. You can be 75, you could be 22. There are competitions for you at Toastmasters. Toastmasters is a fantastic international organization, more than 300,000 members, probably a local chapter within a few miles of you right now. And they have public speaking competitions compete. What happens if you lose? Now, I don't want to be a hypocrite, folks. Full disclosure, I have not entered Toastmasters public speaking competitions. At some point, talking about public speaking every day and training people every day, I kind of get my fill of it. And the competition I entered in a sense was I got in the Guinness Book of Records for most speaking in a 24 hour period ever by a human being in the field of radio. Now someone has since beat my record, but in 2009 I entered and essentially created my own competition by getting in the Guinness Book of Records for most talk show appearances ever in a 24 hour period. I did, I believe 114, 94 were certified. And that got me into the Guinness Book of Record. So that's my own way of competing. But I certainly recommend competing in any arena you can find when it comes to speaking because it just anything you compete in, anything you measure, you're likely to get better at. And that's exactly what I want to encourage you to do. So let's hop right in with some very, very, very specific advice.

Good advice from around the web.

You can get great advice from all over the web on these speaking competitions. First of all, where they are, just Google, Google speaking competitions. Google that plus your town if you want to stay local and then find out who wins. If you want to know what works with Toastmasters. Then all you got to do is A go to the Toastmasters website, but B Go to YouTube and you'll see pretty much all the past winners. You'll see their speeches on there. You can see what works. Now full disclosure folks, any competition has its own contours of what works and what doesn't work. I for example, can't stand what has happened to college debate. It has become so perversely fixated on the sheer quantity of facts that the students speak so quickly. No one can understand. No one with normal hearing who is in a world can even understand what they're doing. So that's probably my least favorite speaking based competition because I don't find it particularly useful in the real world. I although some champions, public speakers or debaters in college have gone on to success in politics currently as we are recording this in 2016, Ted Cruz is very prominent in the Republican Party and is a top tier presidential candidate again at the time of recording this in February 2016. And he was a star star debater at Princeton and at Harvard Law School. So it is a skill that can be transferred to other areas. Now other full disclosure, when I see a lot of the Toastmasters winning champions, I personally don't like the speeches. To me they come across as trite, cliche, banal and quite often it's kind of like oh, aren't puppies cute? Hug your kids perfectly fine sentiments. I don't find it particularly interesting to hear somebody say something I've already heard, even though they may have good stagecraft. But that's just me. If you're entering a speaking competition, first of all you need to know who the judge is. I'm not the judge of a Toastmasters competition, so you don't have to appeal to me. You need to focus on the audience if your goal is to win. Now frankly, I don't know why you would want to enter a competition if you didn't at least want a chance of doing well. So I do think you need to look at who's won in the past. These days it's pretty easy to do with YouTube. Even if you are entering a local 4H or Optimist oratorical contest for kids, chances are maybe not the winners in your town, but some of the winners around the world have posted their videos. You can see exactly what they're doing and what has worked. You've got to figure out exactly what the requirements are because competition is a little different from a typical business speech. If the competition says no, speaker may go for more than 20 minutes, and you give the greatest speech ever and you finish at 21 minutes, chances are you could be disqualified. Well, that would be a shame, especially because that's a really, really easy problem to solve. You just need to rehearse your speech and make sure that your speech is less than 20 minutes and give yourself a little cushion. Because when you're speaking for real in front of a real audience, moving around more, they are laughing or responding or clapping or crying or doing whatever, it will take you more time. So don't try to time it to the second. The other thing, and I'm going to differ from some of my fellow coaches out there, I still don't recommend for most people, memorizing. It is true. When you look at the people who win the World Class or the World Championship of Toastmasters, they've given the speech often hundreds of times, and it is almost word for word the same. At that point, it becomes performance art, and it is for the most part, memorized. But for local competitions, for 4H, for Rotary, for Optimist, for all these other competitions at the student level, it's simply too hard. It's too difficult, puts too much pressure on you to memorize. I do recommend that you get comfortable with it, that unless the rules specifically prohibit you, that you speak from an outline, and that way you'll sound more natural, you'll sound more conversational. Again, most of the time, for most audiences, whether they're judges or not, that's the better way to do it. But you may have a competition that really stresses formality. I don't know why they would want to do that. But it's a big world out there, and a lot of people trying to be well meaning come up with different incentive systems and different criteria for speeches. And you've got to know the rules. So, for example, I recommend to speakers that they walk around because all things being equal, most of the time, audiences respond more favorably because it's just less boring. It makes you seem not beholden to a lectern with notes, and it makes you seem more confident. But your speaking competition may prohibit that. Well, you've got to know exactly what the rules are. Okay, folks, we'll take a moment. By the way, I've been trying to give you just pure content here, answering your questions as they come up. And we haven't heavily filled this show out with lots and lots of ads. But every so often, I do want to provide a little plug for me and some of the things that I'm doing so that this can Be a two way street. So this is one of those opportunities right now.

To hire TJ Walker as a keynote speaker or workshop leader for your next conference. Call 212-764-4955.

Also folks, full disclosure. I do have a course specifically on how to win public speaking courses. You can get information about that on my website@mediatrainingworldwide.com but again, at no charge to you whatsoever, I will send you my basic presentation training course. And frankly, that's 90% of what you're going to need in order to win a public speaking contest. Now, the advantage students have today, for that matter, adults and Toastmasters competitions have over. What I did in the 70s is you've got video. You've got video cameras around you. So the number one thing I would recommend is, is really make sure that you practice your speech again and again and again on video until you love what you see. When I was a kid, you practice in front of your parents, you practice in front of a mirror, but you didn't really know how you were coming across. Well, those days are over. You know exactly how you're coming across if you simply pull out your cell phone, speak to it, have a parent, have a family member, have a friend, record it, watch it. Now, this is no different than the advice I give to presidents of countries that if you're a 12 year old and you're entering your school's public speaking contest, it works exactly the same for you. Your subject matter may be different, the words you use may be different, what you wear may be different. But the process of practice on video, look at it, figure out what you like, figure out what you don't like. Keep doing it until you like what you see. That is a process that works for everyone. I don't care who you are, don't tell me you're nervous or uncomfortable or shy. No one else has to be in the room. You look in a mirror before you go to school. No one else is in the room. You can practice your speech out loud on video the same way. So I hope this has given you some tips. The main thing I want to leave you with is enter a speaking competition at some point in your life. For me, it wasn't the pivotal, it's not the only reason I entered this field, but it was a part of the process for me ending up where I am. Certainly the oratorical contest I won is more significant to my life than anything I did on the football field, or should I say on the football bench, on the sidelines. So please take some time to consider. If you're not going to enter a speaking competition yourself, then encourage children, grandchildren, anyone you have influence over. It could make a huge positive impact in their life. I'm TJ Walker. May all your speaking opportunities in life, even or especially if they're competitions, be a huge success.

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