Unleash Your Speaking Potential and Conquer Any Stage

Stop putting limits on yourself. I see this all the time in my communication skills workshops. People will say to me, tj, I'm not a public speaker. I just give presentations to my colleagues and my board. I'm not a keynote speaker. It's always a way of minimizing it. Now, you might not be on a stage with 5,000 people and a band behind you, but if you speak in a business setting, in a civic setting, and anything other than chatting with a few friends, you're a public speaker. People can see you. And if five more people watch, that's just more opportunity for you to connect with more people. So stop telling yourself, I'm not a public speaker. Don't focus on what you aren't. Focus on ideas you have that you want to share with other people. Whether it's to raise money for your startup to generate more votes for your candidate, or your cause to get funding approval for your budget for next year, you are a speaker. Sometimes different parts of the public will be there, even though you don't think of them as the public. But you can speak, you can talk, you can present, you can share your ideas with people. And that can help you. It can help the world. So I'm begging you, don't put yourself in this little box of telling yourself, I'm not a public speaker.