Let’s talk about how to improve your public speaking skills. We’re gonna talk about five ways that you can get better, so let’s get into those details.
I’m Alex Lyon, and we’re gonna talk about how to improve your public speaking skills. This is the second video in a three-part series that I’m doing this month. The first video is the importance of public speaking, and then the next one is how to practice a speech.
But in this one, we’re going to look at five ways that you can improve your public speaking skills. So let’s get into that. The number one way that you can improve your public speaking skills is to speak about a topic that you care about.
When you are passionate about a subject, you are going to put way more work into it because you’re motivated. And no one has to tell you to do it. You want to speak about this topic. And speaking about a topic that you don’t care about, you can still get better, but you will take your skills to the next level when you’re passionate about the subject because you’re like, oh, this is so important.
And I really wanna get this across. And you want your listeners to benefit the most. So, in my experience, when you care about a topic, your skills will go to next level completely. So figure out what you really wanna talk about and look for opportunities to speak about that particular topic.
The second way to improve is to watch great speakers. Identify some speakers that you admire, that you look up to, and watch what they do. Now, don’t copy them. Don’t imitate them. But watch two or three different kinds of speakers that all have their own skills and learn from them.
By watching a few different people, what you’ll do is you’ll see the general skills that cut across, and then you can pull out of that principle that you can then apply on your own. For example, I really admire Patricia Fripp.
She’s a very well-known professional speaker, and she is an amazing storyteller. And so I don’t tell stories the way she does. She has her own unique way, but I said I wanna get better at telling stories.
So when I speak publicly, I tell a lot of stories. I also like to be funny. Now, I’m not a standup comic by any stretch, but I like to watch standup comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, just to get inspired by their amazing skill to make people laugh with just a one-line joke.
That’s impressive. So watch great speakers. Pull out the general principles from them. And then put those into practice for yourself. The third way to improve is to prepare. And this might sound a little dry, but I can tell you that 95% of the way a presentation turns out is determined by how you prepare.
And that basically means making a clear outline beforehand, so you really have your thoughts in order, intro, a few main points, and a conclusion. And also, practicing from that outline a whole bunch of times, five, six, seven times.
I practice about 10 times or more for every presentation I give. I know some people who don’t practice at all. They just put out their whole outline, and then when they stand up to speak, it’s the first or maybe only the second time they have spoken through it.
And you can usually tell. In fact, I teach this stuff to professionals. I do workshops for companies, and I can’t tell you how many times someone, it’s their turn to go up and speak. And they say, you know, I’m just gonna wing it.
Well, you can tell what’s gonna happen ahead. I already know what’s gonna happen. The people who prepare always do much better than the people who say, I’m just gonna wing it. So preparation is really key.
Don’t underestimate that. Get alone in a room. Talk through your notes. Stand up the way you would really stand up, and power through it. You also may want to record on your phone your practice sessions.
That can be really motivating. It can identify a couple of things that you need to work on. So record yourself, and it’s almost like getting another person to give you feedback. The fourth way is to get more experience.
There are a lot of low-risk, low-stakes ways to stand up and present. Maybe you would run a short training session for example in your workplace around the people that you already know. That’s how I got my first start after college.
I had done public speaking in college, but then on my first job in Rhode Island, there was an opportunity to do a training session. And so I did a 20-minute session on listening skills. And I can tell you right now, it wasn’t good.
In fact, I remember looking out at a lot of confused faces in the room for that 20 minutes. But it helped me start. It was a starting place, and everybody was supportive. They were all my coworkers. They were all on my side.
Look for low-stakes opportunities, low-risk opportunities to speak. Maybe it’s announcements at church. Maybe it’s like running a training session. Maybe you can do a little meeting where it’s just four or five of you, but you prepare your thoughts in advance as if you were going to be speaking publicly.
Look for as many opportunities as possible to get more experience. And the fifth way is to take a class. So maybe you’re in college. Look for a public speaking class. Look for an advanced public speaking class after that.
Maybe on the job where you work there are opportunities and workshops and people that come through to teach communication skills. Take one of those. You can take an online course. And one of the great things about a course of some sort is that the instructor has already thought through some of the most common issues that people need to overcome, and so they’re gonna take you through a curriculum and move you forward in all those other areas.
Like I have a lot of people that say, well, I’m so nervous. If I could just get over my nerves, then I’d be better at this. Well, yeah, that’s a start but really learning concrete skills is going to help you get better, and a teacher can help guide you through that process instead of just guessing on your own what you need to work on.
Now, at the beginning of the video, I mentioned there are a couple of free resources that I wanted to tell you about. The first one is free. It’s an instant PDF download that you put in your email, and I send you tips to help you become a more confident and composed public speaker.
So you can look for the link to that in the description below the video. And the second one is a full course that I have created. It’s called Present Like a Pro. And the whole goal of the course is to help you become a top 10% presenter in your professional setting.
So I invite you to check that out. Again, links and descriptions are below. So question of the day, what do you think the best ways to improve your public speaking are? I’d love to hear your thoughts on what works best for you, and I look forward to reading those comments in that section below the video.
The quality of your presentation, plus the size of the audience, creates the level of attraction you create as a speaker. So the first thing we talked about this morning is the stage effect. The stage effect is the unfair advantage that you create.
For yourself, by standing in front of an audience, and I just want to give you a little bit more information about that. The stage effect is a really fascinating thing. The stage effect is kind of like it works like this.
The quality of your presentation, plus the size of the audience, creates the level of attraction you create as a speaker. Does that make sense? So what that means is that the bigger your audience, the more attractive that’s going to happen, and I’ve noticed this very much in my career, because when I go out on tour, when I launch in a new country, I might go on a tour in a new country and nobody knows me, and so I go there and some of the audience, some of the events might have 20 or 30 or 40 people, but then some of those people end up coming to one of my workshops.
Those people have a certain attitude toward me when they come to the workshop, as my career in any given country gets bigger, like when I came here to Tal some years ago, and I did an event, and there were about 2 500 people in the audience.
They treat me differently than the people who saw me with 30 people, because there’s something powerful about people watching you. The same thing applies to YouTube. Somebody sends you a video and it’s got four views, and somebody sends you another video and it’s got four million views. Which one are you going to watch? The views are the size of the audience, and so, if it’s got four million views, you’re more People are more likely to watch it if you’ve got five thousand people in the audience. It creates more attraction, and so what this means is that when you stand up in front of an audience and you deliver from your heart, you are creating a level of attraction that is far beyond what you can create one-on-one. If there are 10 people in the audience, it’s far more attractive than one-on-one.
This is so important because in marketing, there is no system of marketing that is more effective than personal contact. I’m not talking about effectiveness in numbers. There are many systems that can do better with numbers, but I’m talking about effectiveness when it comes to creating a lasting memory or impression with somebody.
Nothing will create a more lasting impression than face-to-face contact with somebody. But the problem is that face-to-face contact isn’t very practical. How many people can you meet and really connect with in a day? I mean, if you really have it back to back and you’re spending, I don’t know, if you live in England, you can kind of travel around pretty quickly and meet with a lot of people, because there are 60 million people living on a postage stamp.
But if you live in Canada, it’s a little different. I was working in Canada in Vancouver, and I had a client in England. We’d been doing business for a few years, but we’d never met before, and one day he called me and said, “Eric, we’re finally going to get to meet,” and I said, “Austin, what’s happening?” He said, “I’ve got a conference I have to go to and I’m coming to Canada.”
I said that’s great. I said, “What’s what’s the schedule?” He said, “Well, I’m flying into Toronto on Monday.” The conference is on Tuesday, and I’ve got Wednesday and Thursday free. So I figured we should get together for lunch, and I said, “Okay, um, when are you planning to come out to Vancouver?” and he goes, ” I have a rental car now.
Some of you will be aware of North American geography, but some might not. So I just want to put this in perspective. This is Canada for you. If you would like to drive from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Vancouver, Canada, and you have three friends to do the driving with you, the car only stops for you to put petrol in it, eat, and sleep in the car.
It will take you four and a half days. It’s just that you know it’s a big place. What I’m getting at is that face-to-face contact in our world today is not going to be the most effective because it takes so much time, but the good news is that face-to-face contact is even more powerful than face-to-face. It’s even more powerful.
I am well. Let me ask you, and if you already know the answer, I don’t need your answer. If you don’t know me, you haven’t met me. Am I introverted or extroverted? Who thinks I’m pretty extroverted? Whoever thinks I’m pretty extroverted seems to think I’m up here on stage doing whatever. How many of you think I’m more introverted?
So the fact of the matter is, I am significantly more introverted than I am extroverted. You will notice that I will walk around here. I don’t walk up and talk to people all the time and introduce myself. I wouldn’t say, “I’m shy.”
I’m just introverted, and one of the greatest tools of the introvert is learning how to be great at storytelling and standing on stage, because then you don’t have to go meet people; they come and meet you. It’s different.
You meet them all at once. It’s an incredibly powerful thing, but that’s social. But what about economics? If I’m a business consultant and I’ve got my friend Derek Eric and Derek, and we’ve decided to buddy coach each other, we’re going to try and get through our stuff, and what we’re going to do is go to a networking event and have a competition to see who can meet the most people.
So introverted business consultant Derek goes off to the event with a pocket full of business cards and he’s meeting all the people. “So good to meet you. I’m so happy to meet you. Here’s my card.”
Do you have a card with you? Do you have one? Do you have a card as well? Can I have and and and Derek is meeting them all, and at the end of the day, he’s got a pocket full of business cards. On the other hand, I am an introverted Eric business consultant too.
I don’t want to do all that. I call the organizer and say hi. I’d like to come and speak at your conference. Here’s my show reel, here’s my bio boom, and I got myself booked as a speaker. I walked on stage.
I spoke for 45 minutes. I make people laugh, maybe cry, maybe think I give them distinctions on who’s going to have the most business cards at the end of this conference. I probably am, but wait a minute.
Let’s call it a tie. Let’s say we get back to our hotel room. We take out our stacks of business cards, we put them down, and it turns out it’s a tie. Okay, so we have to go to the tie-breaker round of the tie break around.
How does that work? Well, what we do is start calling the people we meet. So Derek starts picking up the phone and saying, “Hey, do you remember how we met at the conference?” It was over by the Starbucks.
I was the blue shirt. Do they remember him? Barely a few. I might see if I call them, pick them up, and go hi. It’s Eric. You’re Eric. Calling from the presentation, I’ve created a deeper, lasting memory.
Is it true? So the tiebreaker is that I have as many business cards as I have, but these business cards mean something. They connect. Something now, let’s go to the next tie-breaker round, where one can charge more for the same consulting services.
I want you to hear me about this. This is not a small thing. This individual does not charge 10% more than this individual.This person can charge many times what this person can charge. I didn’t fully understand this.
Until one day, I was doing an event in Las Vegas, Nevada, and I did my presentation at this event. Many speakers were there. I spoke for about two hours, and then these guys walked up to me afterward. I was standing with my wife.
They walked up and said, “We’d like to buy you lunch.” What do I know at this point? They want something, but I’m hungry, [laughs]. So I accept the lunch, and so we go off for lunch, and we’re sitting there at lunch, and they start trying to hire me to work for their company in California.
I don’t want to live in California. I live in the Dominican Republic and just to put this in perspective for you, how many of you are familiar with kiteboarding? So how many are not familiar with kiteboarding, but you are familiar with wakeboarding? So I’ll describe kiteboarding for you.
It’s like wakeboarding, right? It’s like wakeboarding; you’re on a snowboard type thing and wake boarding. The boat is pulling you right, but with kiteboarding, it’s like you control the boat and the boat can fly.
It’s an incredible sport, and I live on a kite beach where there’s wind for 10 months of the year. San Diego is beautiful, but the wind is seasonal and the water is. There’s a technical term for this. Let me just say I have it here.
I have it on my phone. I looked it up. It’s freaking cold. It’s really cold, and so if I don’t need a wetsuit even in December, I’m not interested in going to live there. I didn’t want the job, but they kept trying to get me to do it, and I finally said, “Look, what do you really want from me?” They explained what they were looking for, and I said, “Um.”
“Well, could we hire you as a consultant?” they asked. Actually, no, I’m not looking. I’m busy. I have a full calendar, so I’m not. I want to spend time with my family. I don’t really want to, but I don’t like saying “no” either, so sometimes I’ll say “no” with a number.
This is one of the smartest ways that any of you will learn to raise your prices. So you deliver so much value that people want to do business with you, and then you say no with a bigger number, and so I decided to do that as well.
Could we have you come in for like one week a month for six months? I wanted to say no, but I didn’t. Instead, I said sure, it’d be twenty thousand dollars for each week. They said Okay, I said, and then I said, “Wait.”
Whoa, whoa, before you say, “Okay, I don’t fly on the weekend, I’m with my family.” I fly on Monday and I fly home on Friday. So it’s three days and twenty thousand dollars and they said okay and so for the next six months.
I did this before and I would have sold it for a fraction of that amount if I was open to consulting, which I wouldn’t have sold, because I didn’t want it, but all of a sudden I found the stage effect had an immediate and powerful financial return.
It helps you sell things, it helps you get a job, and it helps you get that promotion. It helps you get funding for your business and it helps you recruit people for your company. It’s the ability to leverage that’s so powerful now. In order for that to work, though, we have to have some skills.
We talked today about how to get more comfortable, but now what we have to do is talk about some skills. One of the most important skills you can develop as a speaker is the ability to go to a conference and deliver a talk that will appeal to the highest percentage of the whole audience.
Irrespective of the topic, because you will occasionally get asked to speak at conferences where there’s a wide variety of people in the audience and your topic might only appeal to half or a third of the people, is that possible, and so the trouble is, you’d almost They’d be better off if the other people would just leave, because if they stay in the room with their naysayers’ energy, if they stay in the room checking their Facebook, if they stay in the room talking to each other, they’re going to ruin the energy of the room and they’re going to distract other people from your presentation.
You know, they don’t all sit on their side, right? So you get the interested person and the disinterested person and the interested person, and then it just messes up the room and you can’t make them leave, and so what you need to do is keep their attention, and so in doing that, we use something.
That is what we call broad-spectrum appeal, which is to deliver with broad spectrum.’s to be delivered in a way where the audience likes what’s going on, even if the topic isn’t a direct match for them. So there are some keys to this.
The first key use stories We already talked about it this morning. Stories are the operating system of the human mind. You see, if you tell somebody something, they’re not going to remember it, but if you relay the information to them in a story that triggers emotion, they’re going to remember it. You see, your mind has too much stuff to process, and so what does it decide? What to hold on to and what it will hold on to is anything that has an emotion attached to it.
Does this make sense to you? You see if you have a day that’s completely boring and you have no emotions about that day, Will you ever remember that day? No, but if you have a day where you had an intense emotional experience, like when somebody drove into your car, are you going to remember that day? You had an intense emotional experience.
If you have no memory, sorry, if you have no emotion, there’ll be no memory. If you have too many emotions, you could end up with PTSD. That’s ultimately, what it’s about is that the emotion is so intense that it writes the memory in so solidly that it can’t be shaken out. Once we begin to understand that emotion is the glue that causes memories to stick, once we get that, then we know that we have to deliver things in a story format which is the operating system of the human brain.
People come and go now and then, Eric. That’s all fine and good. You’re up there telling your stories. I don’t have any stories. Does anybody feel a little like that? They don’t have so many stories, or the other thing they say is, “Well, Eric, but I have to.”
I have to just deliver the numbers. I just I’m an accountant, and I have to deliver numbers to the board of the company. How do I write that story? Well, what you begin to realize is that delivering a story is about the way you deliver anything and-and what I mean is that if I have to come and deliver the numbers, then I can walk out here, and I can say, ladies and gentlemen, of the board, I have the numbers. We projected 14 growth for the quarter, and in fact, we achieved 16.
Well done everyone; that’s how it’s done right. In fact, that’s somebody doing it quite well in our world. It can be done a lot worse than that. How many of you have been to a conference where you’ve been sitting in the middle row and you’ve been wishing? Were you on the edges? Has anybody been to that conference? Right, so I’ve been there and so what? If that’s the case, what if? I walk out and go.
Ladies and gentlemen, the board, I’ve got the numbers from the accounting department today and I’m really excited about this, because when we set the targets, you’ll remember, we projected 14 growth for the quarter, and you might recall, I wasn’t a big believer.
I wasn’t so optimistic about that and so this morning, when I got the numbers from the accounting department, I held the envelope in my hand. I just took a moment before I opened it, and then I tore the envelope open and read the report, and then I had to read it a second time, and I’m not kidding.
I had to read it a third time to understand what happened. We predicted 14 percent growth on the horizon and ended up with 16 percent.Is it different? I created suspense, I created drama, and I made it a story.
It didn’t even take much longer, but I did it in a way that you will now remember it. In fact, I will be able to walk up to some of you in three or four days from now and ask how much growth did we post and you’ll go, “Yeah.” It was 16, right, like you will, because I gave it to you in the story.
So the first thing you have to understand is that it’s not even that you have to have so many stories. You have to recognise that the information needs to be delivered in story format. When it’s delivered in story format, it becomes memorable.
The only way you’re going to get anybody to remember anything is by linking an emotion to it. How many people in this room did you have in school in your first 12 years of school? You had at least one or two teachers that to this day, you would love to have lunch with them and thank them for the contribution they made in your life.
Keep your hand up if they were a storyteller. Nine times out of ten, more like 99999 times out of a thousand, these guys are storytellers. Isn’t it true? They’re totally storytellers. And the teachers that didn’t tell you stories, you don’t remember what they taught you. These days, you don’t even remember their name.
Do you know that I moved? I grew up largely in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the eastern side of Canada, and one of my teachers was When I was in grade three—and I know, every country uses different grades, but three means like eight years old, and so I was seven or eight years old, I was in his class, and he was brilliant at storytelling.
He understood everything about storytelling. One day, he understood the suspense. He used to sit in his chair and he would put his leg up on his desk. You know, kind of bad manners, don’t you think? So we often sat in our when he came into the class, and we’re eight years old, we’d put our feet up on our desks, and then he walked in one day, and he goes,
You guys, You think that’s funny, don’t you, and we’re like, yeah, you do it, so we can do it too, kid, thinking right, and he goes well. I’m going to tell you why I do it. He said one day, I was going out on my first date in my car, and I was driving along when I dropped my girlfriend off at her house after an incredible day, and then I turned around and I was so high.
I was so happy. I was so full of love from this experience. I’d gone out on my first date, my first in my car, my first time and I was driving along and I was heading low when suddenly something happened to the car.
Somebody had hit me a little bit from behind, and then the car started to slide, and it was sliding toward this tree, and I saw the tree, and it was the weirdest thing, because there was nothing I could do and the tree just kept getting closer and closer and it was almost like slow motion, and all of a sudden, I just slammed into the tree and then and then, and a little while later, I woke up on the road. The weirdest thing was that I’d never been able to do the splits before, but now I was doing the splits. The only problem was my knee was bent here and so this bone had been broken.
So badly that it was sticking out through the skin, and so now there’s a metal rod in my leg, and so when I sit at my desk while you guys are working, if I don’t lift my leg up on the desk, it becomes incredibly painful.
That’s why I put my feet on my desk. He says otherwise it’s considered incredibly impolite and I’m sorry I didn’t share that with you earlier. I was eight. I still remember that story.
Incidentally, I have not shared that story once on stage until this moment. I have never shared that story that I can think of. I still remember it from when I was eight. Then one day, he comes in and he goes, because one of the important types of stories to tell is metaphorical or allegorical, where you tell a story that the audience wants to hear.
This has broad spectrum appeal. You tell a story that the audience wants to hear, but that’s teaching something else. So one day he walks in and says, “Guys, it’s health class.”Does he have our attention? No, we’re
Eighth grade health class doesn’t get interesting until you’re 12. I mean, let’s be clear: 12-13 health class starts getting, you won’t admit it, but it’s starting to get interesting right. You’re eight years old, it’s not interesting, so he’s like, “It’s health class, nobody’s interested,” and he walks up to the blackboard and he takes out this thing and he’s like, “So he says all right now: does he have our attention?” Why does he have our attention? It was 1978.
No, it’s 1978. Okay, no matter how popular Harry Potter becomes, he will never have an impact on society.you watch any three hours of television in North America, any three hours of television news, any sitcom movie, you will hear a Star Wars reference.
That’s the way it is. He understood this in 1978 when, in 1978, he was drawing characters from the Star Wars universe and he did this. He goes now to this force field. Was he brilliant? This force field is your skin.
He says these are antibodies; they are defending you; and these are the germs and bacteria that are trying to get into your body and make you sick. When I was eight years old, that’s exactly what the blackboard looked like, because he understood how to tell stories.
Storytelling will change everything about the way you do a presentation. It will change everything about the way the audience receives it, and the beauty is that stories are broad spectrum automatically. The toughest audience I’ve ever had is the absolute toughest audience I’ve ever had.
I got this phone call. Eric, would you come and speak at this inner-city school in London? I will speak for schools pretty much unreservedly if I’m around. If I’m nearby, I’ll do it pro bono. If I’m around and it’s free, I’ll show up and do it.
The one thing is that when I’m doing pro bono speaking, I won’t always put in the same level of preparation as when I’m getting paid. I have things to do in my life, so if I’m speaking for free, I just kind of show up and wing it.
I’ve got enough stage experience that I can usually pull that off. It’s okay, and I get to the school and I haven’t done any research, and I walk in and the headmistress walks up to me and says, “Are you ready?” and I go, “Yeah totally.” I’m ready.
I said which kids I was speaking for, and she said all of them. I said, “Oh really, um.” What kind of school is this? Is it a high school because I could speak to all of them? You know, sixth, eighth, sixteenth, and eighteenth grades in high school.
I could do that, or is it a junior high? You know, thirteen to sixteen. I could do that, or is it like the last half of elementary school? You know, six to twelve, or you say, eight to twelve, or is it elementary school? I could do that.
“Six to five to eight or something I could handle,” I said, and she replied, “no, it’s a k-12.”I said k-12. That means for those who don’t understand k-12, It means that the youngest kids will be four years old and the oldest kids will be 19.
..They will be from 4 to 19 in one audience. I said really, how interesting. I said, “How long how?” How long do I have to speak for an hour and a half? They’re from 4:4 to 19. and I’m going to speak for an hour and a half? I said: “Okay, excellent, no problem,” and so immediately I started going through the system I was going through.
I have to if I’m going to create a wide range of emotions and feelings, which I need to figure out. What’s common to all these kids, like I’ve got it figured out, is the first thing that is common to all of them. All of them are common, all of them.
Now you have to tell the story slightly differently, but the fact is that four-year-olds do like stories. They like the same stories over and over and over again, and do 19-year-olds like stories? Sure they do.
In fact, telling layered stories is one of the most valuable skills you can develop in the world, and you all know this, even if you’ve never heard the term before: layered stories. This is what I’m talking about.
How many of you have ever watched a Disney movie with children and you’ve noticed that you suddenly realised as a child? You were watching a movie that was actually made for adults. Isn’t it true? You watch a Disney movie and there are weird little sexual innuendos and adult jokes that are all above the consciousness of children, so they’re telling two stories, and so this idea of being able to tell parallel stories or multi-layered stories is really valuable.
So I’m thinking, okay, I’ve got to tell a story and make sure it has four-year-old features and 19-year-old features in total. First thing, I decide, second thing: what else is common to all of these kids games?Do four-year-olds like games? Do 19-year-olds like games? Done deal. I’ve got it covered. Then I think about it.
I need one more thing. I require a thread.I needed some kind of thread that I could use, and I suddenly realised what it was, and I thought back to Mr. Kulczinski’s Harry Potter, because that was what was going on back then. If you were four years old, did you, like Harry Potter, damn right, you did if you were five or six years old.
Did you like Harry Potter? Absolutely if you were seven or eight, or nine, or 10 or 11 years old. Did you like Harry Potter when you were 12 years old? Absolutely if you were 13, 14, 15, 17. 18. 19. Did you like Harry Potter? You did, but secretly you read the books in a brown paper bag. You didn’t like them. But it was a bit, and by the way, if you were 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 years old, did you like Harry Potter? Damn right, you did. My wife and I lined up at a bookstore to buy the final Harry Potter book on release night at midnight, and we had to buy two copies because there was no way one was waiting for.
The other Harry Potter was pervasive, it was pervasive, and so then I went out and I delivered a talk for these kids, and I used stories. I played a game with them and I used Harry Potter references. I talked about guys. I’m going to show you some really cool stuff, and by the time I show you this stuff about your life,
All the other people will seem like muggles to you because you did that work for them, and at the end of my talk, the kids celebrated. I got a big clap from them. Everything was fantastic and normally, when I finish a talk, it’s the audience that wants to come over and say hello, take a picture, and do that fun stuff, but not this time.
This time it was the teachers, literally, and by the way, I just want to say that again, especially if there are any Americans here. Actually, I just want to be clear that you can’t have your head literally explode unless it actually explodes.
I just want to be clear about that. Something that bothers me every now and then is the teachers, literally. Which means they were actually right, literally cornered me. I’ve got my back against the wall and the teachers are surrounding me, and they’re going.
How did you do that? How did you do that? I can’t hold them for half an hour. One age group, I said, first of all, you need to relax. I said I only had to hold them once. I only had to hold them once, and I was new and I was novel, so you can’t blame yourself.
The first thing is, I only had to hold them once, and they were like, “Yeah, but still like.” I have to hold them for a whole hour for my class, and I just can’t do it. You held them for an hour and a half and all the age groups.
I said, “How did you do that?” and I broke it down for them. I said to you guys, it’s about storytelling. I told him about Mr. Kulczinski and no kidding. They immediately asked me if I could come back and speak at the school again for the teachers, because teachers are not being taught really effectively how to teach; they’re being taught how to babysit and how to run a curriculum.
Does this make sense, with such broad spectrum appeal? It all starts with the realisation that story is the ultimate language; it’s the ultimate operating system for the brain, and once you realise that, you make certain that your talks always include a percentage of story.
You know, you tell them some information and then you use a story to prove it, or you tell them a story and they get the information from inside the story. But the fact is that no emotion, no memory was done then.
The next thing you saw me do there is: what is the common thread among the audience? You always want to know. What’s the common thread of the audience as best you can figure out who your audience is and try to figure out? What’s common about them? And if you can’t find anything that’s common about them, that might be the common thing.
I will often come out here and do it right now. Shout out to some of the countries you guys are from. Let me hear it: Canada, United States, Mexico, UK, Brazil, Korea, Israel, Ukraine, Crimea, that’s that’s Russia! Now! Isn’t it that’s not funny? The point is, all of a sudden, I’ve found something where you’re all uncommon with each other.
Only I’ve made that common because you’re an incredibly international group and suddenly I can speak to you all about me. I’ve created something uncommon in common. Does this make sense? And so you want to look at what the common threads are in the company, in the audience, and then let’s get to delivery delivery.
It’s so straightforward, guys, and it’s not what most conference speakers are doing. How many of you guys were at the finals at the speaking academy? Okay, there were what, 14 or 15 speeches? Have you ever been to a conference where all 14 or 15 speakers appealed to you like that? What happened there? Do you know what many of you came up and said to me? Many of you walked up to me after that and said, “But why were they at a speaker course?” That’s what they came and said to me, “I’m like you, I should have seen him on that day.”
On Day One, some of them were very talented on Day One. Some of them were so shy and so nervous on the day, that if you handed them a microphone, it kind of looked like this, and that’s not what it looked like on the day.
Five did it, so one of the things that we showed them and that you saw was using a range of vocal techniques, not speaking in one tone. You’ve all been to that conference where somebody stands up and puts you to sleep for an hour, and they weren’t.
even a hypnotist, but they should have been. Ladies and gentlemen, and fellow toastmasters, I don’t mean, look, I love toastmasters. I truly believe that it is one of the things that each of you should do, which is to join a Toastmasters group and practice.
The challenge is that it’s a great place to practice, and what often happens is that people become formulaic speakers. If, if, if anybody ever comes up to me and says, “Did somebody do your course?” The only reason I want them to know that they did my course is because they were so much themselves.
You understand, and so when we talk about delivering, we’re talking about delivering with passion, about you delivering yourself to the audience, about you being who you are, about me being who I am.
I am not interested in the speakers that can come up and act really well. It can be fascinating, it can be wonderful. I saw a talk once. It was one of the best talks. I’ve never done I admire the speaker a great deal.
It was incredibly funny. It had hugely poignant moments in it, it taught really valuable stuff, and it was clinically perfect. It was one of the best talks I’ve ever done, but he’s just missing one thing: heart and soul.
It was perfect. He moved to the exact right place every time on the stage to say the right thing, and he did the right posture every single time for this thing that he did, and everything was clinical, and then when he wanted to go back and reference that story,
He went back to that same spot. This is all really powerful skills to have, but if the audience can tell that you’ve done this same talk a hundred thousand times, then it doesn’t feel genuine anymore and the heart connection is broken with the audience.
You should know your story so well that you can tell them with imperfection. You can tell them like you’re telling them at the dining room table. Yeah, I’ll be in the middle of a conversation. Sometimes I’ll be going.
You know, it’s like that time. You know, What is the archaeologist, Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones, doing? That’s right! What are the odds that I forgot Indiana Jones? What are the odds of that? They say that whoever you admired most when you were 11 years old is who you grew up to become, in Indiana Jones.
Go look at my website. I mean, I travel around the world, I’m interested in archaeology, and I’m in the bush with the animals all the time. There’s no way, I forgot his name, but I’ll do it right then.
Why? Because it breaks the story and makes it look like it’s fresh and coming out of my soul, it makes it and then the other thing is. Does it get the audience sitting on the edge of their chair going? We better pay attention because he sure isn’t right. It’s it.
It brings them in and the other thing that it does-and please hear me about this, because some of you have one of the greatest fears of speaking, and that is that you might one day be on stage and forget what you were going to say: who’s.
I’m afraid of that. It’s horrible that you’re standing up here and you’re going. Oh man, they’re never going to pay me now. It’s just that it’s horrible, but the good news is that the audience is paying attention. And so I will do my Indiana Jones trick every now and again to keep the audience alive and fresh, and then every now and again I will get distracted.
Something will happen and I’ll have how many of you have ever found yourself giving a presentation and your brain is talking to you back here. Yeah, every now and again, my brain will distract me and then I might forget where I was going and then I’ll go What was I going to do with that, and then the audience said, “You were going this way.”Isn’t it true? They will tell you that you never need to be afraid of it again. Don’t be afraid.
Just tell really compelling stories, and make sure they’re paying attention. Then you don’t have to worry about remembering ever again, because here’s the real funny part: in many of my trainings on speaking,
I will do that a few times, and then I’ll come to the part where I’m teaching that I do it. I’ll do it without showing them, and then I’ll go. How many times have I forgotten what I was going to say or where I was in the story, and they’ll say, “Oh, three or four times this morning,” and then I’ll say, “And then I’ll show them what I did,” and then I’ll say, “And how many of them were real and they have no idea.”
They have no idea, and I will tell you it does happen to me. I’ll tell you it’s ten percent compared to how often I do it, but it does actually happen to me and I’m never afraid of it. “Oh crap,” I think as I stand here.
Where was I going with that and I’ll look down at a section of the audience and they’re like, “oh, oh yeah?” Where was he going with that and then they’ll tell me and I’ll go? When I say thank you to them when they come up with the answer, how do they feel when I say thank you to them? Do they feel great? So you don’t have to worry about that.
You engage the audience when you tell stories. If you tell stories, you will have their engagement, but then you have to use the vocal range. You have to use your voice when it’s when a speaker stands up and does that, good evening.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m so glad that you came here for my talk today. What I’m going to do is attempt to kill you through boredom. I’m going to use this one vocal tone the entire time, which some of you currently find pleasant, but within a short time you will stop hearing my words at all. Who has seen that speaker?
We all have, and now here’s the good news for you: how many of you think it would be really cool to become a speaker? How many of you would like to do that? Here’s the good news. How many of you have all seen that speaker? You’ve all seen them think about this.
If you’ve seen that speaker, that speaker is making money as a speaker. I’m not kidding you, it’s like the easiest place in the world to be the best. So if you just walk out and be yourself, they’re not willing to do it, and so you can walk into any conference and instantly be one of the top speakers simply by being yourself, using your voice and telling stories that it’s been done.
It’s absolutely incredible. I just received this incredible.Lucas is a young man who discovered me on YouTube and ended up signing up for and participating in our wildfit program.never met him before and he did our wildtip program, but then he got more interested in my stuff and it turned out.
I was doing my speaking academy programme in Calgary, and so he signed up for it. He’s like 23 or 24 years old. This is pretty proactive behaviour for a 23-year old and he signed up for it and he showed up and he was so quiet and so reserved and then, at one point, he got up to introduce himself and he told this whole story that none of us knew. My team didn’t know it.
None of us knew it. He says he found Eric on YouTube. I signed up for a wildfit. I’ve lost 35 to 40 pounds and I’ve given up alcohol and drugs. I’ve completely turned my life around because of WildFit, and so I knew I had to come out to this programme and learn about speaking and stuff.
So I got another video from him. I got it just yesterday. Actually, no, I got it this morning. I watched it. This morning he has, since doing the speaking academy, gone out and spoken in two speech contests, like in these big contests for speaking, and he finished in one third place and he finished in the other one in first place.
He had never done public speaking before coming into the program. He is so grateful for his ability to communicate, but here’s the kicker: those winning prizes were things that all that was for him was empirical evidence.
What really blew him away is that now, when he has to talk to the adults in his life, he’s able to communicate with them effectively. When he has to talk to the police, if somebody pulls him over for speeding or whatever, he’s able to talk to them effectively. He said it’s given him this ability to communicate and it’s fantastic.
It changes everything, do you know? I was driving along in Tanzania and had just finished. I used to run these leadership programmes where I would take people up Kilimanjaro to teach them leadership. Skills and state management skills and all this kind of stuff, and after the Kilimanjaro trip, we went to Zanzibar and a few of the clients came with us.
My mom was meeting us there because my mom does a lot of work in Africa and in Tanzania specifically, and my wife was there, so we’re in the car and I’m driving and I’m driving along and I’m not wearing a shirt because it’s Africa.
Okay, it’s very hot and I’m not wearing a shirt, and I come around the corner and there’s a policeman there with his car and he waves me down and says, “Excuse me, can I see your driver’s licence please,” so I show my driver’s licence and he In Tanzania, it’s against the law to drive a car.
Without your shirt, I’ve been to Tanzania several times: I’ve climbed Kilimanjaro seven times, and I’ve been to that country to not climb the mountain. I’ve been there. It is not illegal to drive without your shirt on, okay, but I know what’s going on. I go, “I don’t think it’s illegal to drive without your shirt on here,” and he goes, “Yes.”
It is. And I said, “Well, at this point in my head, I’m like, “No, it’s not a Muslim country.” Zanzibar is a Muslim area within a larger country that has a non-denominational approach to language and religion.
So no, I chose not to say that to him, and he said, “Well, you’re going to have to pay a fine,” and I said, “Fine, I’m okay with that, and I’m not going to pay a bribe.” That’s what he wants. He wants a bribe, and I won’t do that.
I’m not going to pay him a bribe, so he goes well. You’ll have to come with me, and it turns out that I’m right beside the police station, so we walk over to the police station. Now many of you will know-or some of you might not-that Tanzania used to be Tanganyika and it used to be under German control and think about when it was under German control, right like back in those days, you know, doberman, pinschers, and that kind of stuff-and so this building was clearly built back then, you could just see it had that gestapo look about it and I walk into this gestapo building and he takes me into a little room and it’s a gestapo room.
I walk into the room; it’s concrete, and I sit in the chair. There’s a desk, and there’s a guy behind the desk who is wearing a military style uniform, like he has ribbons and medals. I’m not kidding you, and this is all, by the way, designed to intimidate me.
I sit down, and, as I sit down in the chair, I realise that the lamp over here is aimed exactly at where my head is in the chair, still left over from when the gestapo was there. If I listen really carefully to the walls, I can hear that we have the face of getting the answers from you right now.
You know, and this is all by design to freak me out, but I just unfreaked out, so I’m just sitting there. I just made that up, so I’m sitting there having this, you know, conversation with him, and it goes well.
You know, you should be respectful and wear your shirt and blah blah. Well, yeah. I guess so, but I don’t really think it’s illegal. So I challenge you to write me a ticket and show me how it’s illegal and he’s like
Well, we might maybe be able to avoid the whole ticket thing and I’ll go. I think we should avoid the whole ticket thing and hope he goes well. Maybe you could make it worth my while to avoid the ticket thing, and I said, “Uh, no, write me a ticket,” and so we have this little banter in conversation and outside in the car.
My mom is in the car with a couple of my clients and my wife and one of the clients goes and they’re freaking out, because you know what, if you haven’t travelled a lot and and the guy you’re travelling with just gets hauled away by the police in a military uniform, you know you’ve watched CNN, you know what’s coming up, you know something bad, and so they turn to my wife and my mom and they go, “Mrs. Edmuts,” which she hates because, like she changed her name back after the divorce again, “Eric” and she said she’s in the passenger seat of the car and she goes nope.”
I’m worried about the cops, and true to form, about four minutes later, I walk out with both cops with me. The one cop comes up and opens the door. For me, He opens the door for me, I get in, he closes the door, and then he hands me a hand-drawn map that he’s made to get me to the spice market.
No fine, no bribe because I was comfortable communicating. Being comfortable communicating is your right. It is your right, and so one of the ways that you become comfortable with it is by recognising that you’re already comfortable with it.
You are, you just forget every now and again. Here’s one of the ways you remind yourself: it’s called alcohol, isn’t it? I mean, I’ll tell you, I’m not a super big fan of alcohol myself. I haven’t had alcohol since I was 21 years old.
I have no judgement about people having alcohol. In fact, some of my friends are much better people after one drink. You know, they’re just more fun, but the fact is that what happens when we drink alcohol.
Our inhibitions are reduced somewhat, and-and I remember seeing this commercial. It was actually a radio commercial. So I didn’t see it. When I heard it, it was a radio commercial in Canada, and what they did was they had the sounds of a party full of eight-year-olds, and then they had a ten-year-old party, and you could hear the eight-year-olds, ten-year-olds,
You know, partying and doing their thing and then a sound with adults having a party as well, and you can hear the difference-it’s a big difference. Then they said now. Here are the eight-year-olds after the cake and the sugar and the ice cream. Where the eight-year-olds are different completely. It went like nuclear blah, blah, and you’re yelling, and then you can hear it.
It was just incredible, they said, and now here’s the party with the adults after four bottles of wine have been consumed by them, and what you could not tell the difference between was the children and the adults, the children on the sugar and the adults on the alcohol, you couldn’t tell the difference between the sounds.
The pitch was slightly different, but everything else was the same. Now, what’s happening is that when we drink alcohol, it’s like, it gives us permission to be a little louder than we normally are, or a little quieter than we normally are, or a little bit more vocal and use bigger hands.
Is it true? So what I’m saying to you is that you are already a good communicator, but sometimes we need a rule or a mechanism or a chemical to help us get that out, and so what I want to suggest to you is that it doesn’t have to be that way and and you can watch this like at our workshops-you’ll see me-do this. I’ll have somebody up on stage and they’ll be delivering like an adult.
I would like to tell you a story about the time that I went to Disneyland and they. I just stop talking like that, and I just stop for a minute. Tell the story like the audience is full of 12-year-olds. What do they do on the stage before they go? I’d like to tell you a story about the time I went there.
They know what to do. They know what to do. They start using their full vocal range, and so I want to share with you what that looks like there. There are some different communication frequencies in our population, so there are some people that are largely more visual in the way they communicate. They’re largely more visual.
So what does this mean? It means that they think in pictures, and a picture is worth a thousand words. So they stop. They talk quite quickly because they have to get all the pictures out, and since they are so visual, people tend to talk really quickly and loudly, and they speak like this.
There are some speakers that are quite well known for being very visual. Anybody have any names? You know, if you want to create massive action in your life, you have to make a decision, and then once you’ve made the decision, you have to take action, and once you’ve taken action, you’ve got to check the results. If you’re not getting the results, you want to change your approach.
There are other speakers that are more auditory. They have a more steady tone. They talk with a predictable cadence. They speak in a way that is quite pleasant to listen to for a short period of time, but is also somewhat hypnotic.
They use words like sounds. Listen to me. I’d like to share with you that they have this kind of different energy about them. Then you’ve got another group of people that are a lot more kinesthetic in their delivery or feel centered, and they talk really quietly and use long pauses.
They give you time to process the things they’ve said. They use words like “feeling,” “warmth,” and “connection.” Those are the visual people. It’s driving them crazy. So the fact is that all of those ranges-and if you really look back at everything that I’ve done so far today, I’ve used all of them.
I’ve used all of them and yet most speakers will come out and they will deliver their talk right here. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen and fellow toastmasters. I’m going to continue to speak like this for another hour and a half, and as I continue to speak like this, I’d like you to know that the cabin is deep pressure depressurized. In the event that the cabin depressurizes, oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling.
Ah, so these people are louder and faster. These people have more cadence, more predictability, better pronunciation. These people have soft long pauses. These people use words like “vision,” “destiny, “see it done.” These people are crazy; they say things like “can’t.”
You understand what I mean: you’re not a cartoon, and these people here use words like “listen” and “click.”For me, I like the sound of that, that resonates, and then when these people talk about it’s in their gut, I feel really warm.
Is it true, but here’s the good news: your audience includes all of those people, not just 30% of them.30. 30. It’s not like that. That’s the way it’s taught very often. If you’ve studied neurolinguistic programming or psychology, they’ll often teach that there are some people that are like this, and there are some people.
No, don’t do that. It’s a thermostat, it’s a thermostatic range. So there’s some people that are here and here and here and here and here and all the way up-your whole audience is made up of these people, and I learned this because I’ll tell you it’s not just useful on stage, it’s useful in your entire life.
The first time I learned it, I was 22 years old and I was in another category just slightly above this one called global thermonuclear visual. It made Tony Robbins look very quiet. I was so fast and so excited about everything, and I was always basically
I was like this: I was terrified to be on stage, but with my friends I was nuclear visual, and then I went off and I learned this stuff, and I was in sales and I was on telesales, and I would pick up the phone and I’d call people and go hi.
This is Eric. I’m going to sell you some stuff today and-and I did very well-I had the highest call levels in our company. I had the highest closing average in our company. Then one day, I learned this stuff and I sat down at my desk and I was ready to make more calls than I’ve ever made before. The average sales person in our company was making 35 calls a day.
I was making 50 a day, which was making the most money for me, but I had made a commitment to get to 75 a day. Now I was not going to have a moment of peace. I was going to make calls every second and I went down and I went to make my first call.
I picked up the phone and there’s Marilyn and I’m going, “Oh damn it.” I don’t want her to be the first call. Today a woman never takes my call, never returns my call, but we didn’t come here for this to be easy. Did any of you come into this life for it to be easy? Because I just want to tell you that sometimes you want it to be easier, but if video games were any easier, people would stop playing them. If books were any easier, you wouldn’t read them. And I just want to tell you that the next time your life’s a little difficult,
You should rejoice in that because you came here for that. Didn’t you? I’ll prove it to you. How many have ever had that breakup? You know the one! The really soul-destroying breakup who’s had the soul-destroying, crying-awful breakup.
What kind of music did you listen to? Okay, you came here because it’s delicious, even the pain is delicious. That’s why we listen to that. So glad you made it. I will just sit here and cry myself to sleep.
We like it. Okay, What was I getting at, Maryland, Maryland?I actually forgot about that time. And so I pick up the phone and I call Maryland. I’m going to break through. I’m going to get through my I think, I’m throwing because millennials back then had to press buttons and before that, we actually had to dial You, you might not know this when we talk about dialing a phone number. It’s because we used to have to dial anyway, so I press the buttons and then Marilyn does not answer the phone because she never does, but her voicemail comes on hi.
This is Marilyn and, uh, I’m not here to take your call, but if you feel like it, you can leave a message. You know, after the beep, I’m going to beep, hey Marilyn. This is it. That’s not what I learned, and I deleted the message.
Hi, I’m Vanessa from SpeakEnglishWithVanessa.com. Do you have a fear of public speaking? Let me help you. Have you ever needed to give a speech in your native language? How about in English? A very nonprofessional study I did of my friends shows that 99% of people have a fear of giving a speech in public. If you are part of that 0.01%, you can go ahead and leave. But oh, okay, I see everyone is still there, all right. Today I’d like to give you some more tools in your public speaking toolbox to help you feel more comfortable and confident when you give a presentation or when you speak in public.
To be a confident public speaker, you need to bring your A game. When you bring your A game, that means that you are bringing the best part of yourself forward. You are doing your best. So let’s talk about three skills that you need.
In order to bring your A game, you need to bring your body game, your mental game, and your preparation game. To help you bring your A game, I am going to give you a little presentation. This is going to be public speaking practice for me, but it’s also a presentation about the way you can best bring your A game.
Are you ready? Let’s go. Let’s start by talking about your body game. When you give a presentation, how are your shoulders? Are they hunched forward or back? Do you feel like you’re standing up tall? How about your spine? Is it leaning over or do you feel like you’re reaching high to the sky? One of the most popular TED Talks on YouTube is by a lady called Amy Cuddy.
And she was talking about how your posture affects how other people see you. But it’s also how you see yourself. So when you are giving a presentation like this, or even if you stand like this, you feel smaller and less important.
If you stand strong, other people will feel that too. But most importantly, you will feel like that. So that’s why we’re talking about your body game first so that you can prepare your body with good posture, which will also affect your mind.
When you walk into a conference room to give a speech, are you walking like this, kind of hunched over and not sure of yourself, trying to feel a little bit smaller? Or are you standing straight and tall and confident? Even if you don’t feel like it, it’s good to have a posture like that.
You don’t have to walk in like some kind of overconfident gorilla, being a little bit crazy. But being confident in your posture, even a little bit, will make a big difference. The next part is your mental game.
So we’ve already talked about your body game, making sure that your body and your posture are the best they can be. But what about what’s going on inside your head? Well, when you are prepared and ready and thinking positively about your presentation, it’s already the best start.
I want you to focus your mind on being positive. This is easier for some people than for other people. Some people are naturally more positive and some people are naturally more negative about things in their lives.
So I have one big tip that will help you to be a little bit more positive. When you’re giving a presentation, whether it’s in front of a big crowd of people, just a couple of people, or just a business presentation, try to focus on how your presentation will help other people.
When you focus on helping other people and meeting their needs, you’re less likely to be stressed about it yourself. So I challenge you to think about how this marketing presentation will affect the people I’m talking with. If you think, “Okay, my presentation will help them to get a better marketing plan and will sell more,” then you’re already feeling a little bit more positive.
This is for those of you who struggle with negative self-talk. the mental game section is really tough for you. I challenge you every morning, especially right before you’re about to give a presentation, to create some kind of short and easy positive sentence.
Sometimes we call that an affirmation, and that means that you’re thinking about something that will positively affect your mind, and usually that’s how your presentation will affect other people. So maybe in the morning when you wake up, two days before your presentation, you say, “My marketing presentation will help us sell more products.
This is super simple and it’s not really fancy. But when you say that to yourself with a deep breath, “My marketing presentation will help us sell more products.” It’s so simple, hopefully, it’s true.
You’re focusing on the positive things—the impact that your presentation will have instead of the mistakes that you’ll make and all of those things that make us feel really nervous. The third game is the preparation game.
Now, this is the one that a lot of us focus on the most. Writing the speech, making sure we have the best pictures on our PowerPoint, all of that. But do you know what? Sometimes we overlook actually saying the speech out loud and preparing it verbally.
If English is your native language, it’s usually recommended that you practice your speech three times. But if English is not your native language, imagine if you are watching this, it’s probably not.
It is best to do it more than three times. Three times is not enough. This is my recommendation. Practice your speech twice, paying special attention to your intonation and the way you say it. Make sure that you have all the words exactly the way that you’d like them, and then, on the third try, I challenge you to record yourself.
You could just record your voice. That’s a good first step, but because we’ve already talked about how your body and your mental game are also really important, I challenge you to record yourself with your phone.
You can just set it up. It could be really simple if you just practice the speech in front of the camera. And then go back and watch that as if you were the audience as if you were your coworkers sitting and watching your presentation.
Or if you’re giving a speech in front of a big group of people, imagine that you’re the audience. What do you think of the audience? Are you engaging and looking at them? Are you feeling really nervous? And you can see, “Oh, I’m stuttering a lot. I’m shaking a lot.
Try to assess your body and your words as if you were the audience. After you’ve recorded yourself, I want you to practise it two more times. This is going to help you to just level up your skills. You’ve already kind of assessed or critiqued yourself.
So those two other times should be way better than the first two times that you did it. What do you think a professional athlete does on the day of their big game? Do you think that they watch some TV and kind of just sit around? No, they do not distract themselves from their objective, which is to win that game.
So this is what I want you to do on the day that you have a presentation. Let’s say you have a presentation at 3:00 PM. When you go to work, focus on that presentation, review it, and do everything that you can for that presentation.
I want to give you a quick example of this guy, Ryan Suter. He’s a hockey player. He has a very strict game-day routine, and I think it’s a good way to show that professional athletes are not distracted on the day of their big game because they want to fulfill their potential.
They want to do the best that they can. So you can also kind of imitate his style. On the day of his big game, he goes to the skating rink, skates a little bit, talks with his coaches, and they have a meeting with the team.
Then when his team goes out to lunch, he orders the same thing. You don’t need to do that; it’s a little extreme. But he orders the same thing every time. And then, after that, he takes a quick nap, goes back to the rink, talks with his coworkers or his teammates, talks with the coaches, and gets a chance to kind of mentally prepare for the game.
Then they go on the ice, they practice, and they have the game. Did he do anything that day that wasn’t related to hockey? Not really, except for eating and taking a nap, which are kind of necessary for life. So I want you to focus on nothing else that day if you have a big presentation and you especially feel really nervous about it.
Try to do everything that you can possibly do for that speech on the date to get your mind ready, to prepare yourself. So on the day of your big presentation, I want you to focus. Don’t distract yourself. Don’t have friends over for lunch and talk about other things.
Focus on your presentation. Visualize it going well. Everyone’s responding positively; you’re having a great time; they’re understanding; they’re learning a lot, and your speech is helping them to achieve their goals.
So in conclusion, to bring your A game to your presentation, you need to bring your body game, great posture, your mental game, positive thoughts, and your preparation game, active practice. So thank you so much for this quick presentation.
Thank you for learning with me. I hope that your presentation skills will improve from here. How did you enjoy that presentation? My presentation skills are not perfect. My speaking style is not perfect, but I want to come across as a professional.
Someone who knows a lot more about public speaking than me. So if you would like to dig deeper into this topic of having confidence when you give a speech in public, I invite you to join me in my course, The Fearless Fluency Club.
This month you’re going to meet Nathan, who’s one of the organizers of a local group called Toastmasters. Toastmasters is a nonprofit international organization that helps anyone in the community who wants to participate learn to speak better and more confidently in front of others.
I also visited Nathan’s Toastmaster Meeting here in my city. So if you join The Fearless Fluency Club this month, you’ll get access to my conversation with Nathan about public speaking skills, some of the positive things he’s learned, and some of the negative things he’s learned.
And you’ll also get access to a Toastmasters meeting. I went to this meeting and I recorded it, so you can kind of get a sneak preview of what a Toastmasters’ meeting is like. It was actually a lot of fun.
So if you would like to learn more about public speaking, feel free to join me in The Fearless Fluency Club. And make sure that you write the word “new” in the coupon code section, so that you can get the first 30 days of the course for only $5.
The regular price is $35 per month. But if you write the word “new,” you’ll get it for just $5 for the first month. Now I have a question for you. Have you ever given a speech in English? Have you ever given a speech in your own language? Let me know in the comments below.
You’ll learn what you need to do to speak confidently and fluently.
Public speaking is a skill useful in school, at work, or if we want to convince a group of people. Investor Warren Buffett called it the most important skill. We can learn to advance in a career. Here is a short guide to mastering the most powerful weapon.
If we want to bring change to the world, Take one issue. You really care about it. When you study it, you are intrinsically motivated to learn it deeper and put in the extra effort. Later, it gives you passion.
You need to inspire your audience. When we speak in public, passion is probably our most powerful force. It shines through our eyes and straight into the hearts of the audience. One simple message: every issue has many angles from which we can highlight them.
But the audience has a limited attention span and many other issues in life. So if we say too much, they will lose interest. To make a message Stick Chris Anderson recommends boiling it down to one idea that is worth spreading.
A speech is good. If it plants one creative seed in the heads of the audience, that seed can then grow into a sprout that can change lives and be shared with others. structure. Over 2000 years ago, The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, established three simple rules for good speech.
Establish credibility. Ethos Give good arguments, logos, and convey emotions. Pathos, But you can also tell a personal story or present a problem and then offer a solution. GET HELP. A good method is to use note cards.
You can use one card per argument and keep the deck in your hands, alternating them. As you speak, Politicians often read their speeches from a teleprompter. Professionals often sell their ideas with the help of slides. When you have a product to show, demonstrate it.
If you try to memorize your speech and you have one hour, spend 20 minutes studying and 40 minutes practicing to recite it. That’s usually the best ratio. They speak their language. It doesn’t matter what we say; it matters what they hear.
According to Nerdwriter, Donald Trump speaks in a way that any fourth-grader can understand. Him. Guy Kawasaki recommends using what he calls “salient points.” People don’t want to know how large a battery is.
They want to know how long they can use it. When preparing, ask yourself, how does my issue matter to this particular audience? PRACTISE Before you present, practice your delivery. It’s important that we stand with arms raised, palms open, facing out.
We should speak loud and clear and make eye contact with our audience. One way to practice Try to speak in front of friends who don’t know the topic. Then you will see if they get your point. Alternatively, you can also record and watch yourself on video.
Check your stage. How big is the room? How many people will listen? Will you need a microphone? Professionals will want to walk onto the stage diagonally from the left-back. Apparently, it’s the most dynamic way to make an entrance.
Also, always have a glass of water. It’s next to you, so you can take a sip whenever you’re losing it. Don’t be afraid. Everybody can experience speech anxiety, also known as glossophobia. It’s natural and sometimes actually helps us achieve excellence.
Mahatma Gandhi called it “the awful strain of public speaking“. For years, It prevented him from speaking up, even at friendly dinner parties. But in 1942, Gandhi convinced 60,000 people with his “Quit India Speech” to join a peaceful revolt against British colonialism.
..He spoke up. The people followed his words, and the British left, open for sympathy. When you enter the limelight, wait until you have everyone’s full attention. Then play to win. Sympathy is also called capitation benevolent.
..One way to do that is to excuse yourself. You can say, “you are a smart audience, so I don’t really know what I can still tell you.” Obama opened his 2008 speech in Berlin with the words “I have to admit that I have developed a special place in my heart for the German people.” And they loved it.
Build Curiosity Once they like you, grab their attention by building curiosity. Provide a fact. Statistics or a study Or start in the middle of a story with “On my fifth birthday, my father started crying.”
It was the day he lost his job.”Dananjaya Hettiarachchi, a champion of public speaking, asked,” raise your hand. If you have an emotional mother, “and everyone did,” But you can also do something funny or open with a crazy stunt.
Deliveries Your message Now make your arguments, share those personal stories, and deliver metaphors that create images in the minds of your audience. If you forget what you wanted to say, don’t worry.
, andNobody understands what you were trying to say. In 1963, Martin Luther King gave a speech in Washington. In the middle of it, he stopped reading from the script and started to improvise. He delivered one of the greatest speeches of the twentieth century, “I have a dream.” CLOSE After you are done, summarise your arguments or repeat the core message.
But you can also leave them with a quote: “Share your dream of a new future or close.” Your speech, like our videos, should end with a specific call to action. Here it comes. Write a speech about an important issue such as education.
Open with sympathy, build curiosity, and then bring in your convincing argument. In the end, it closed cleverly. Limit your speech to 200 words and post it in the comments below. If you want to learn to speak in public, you should also practice your speech.
For example, the next 5 days. 15 minutes each. Ideally, record yourself on your phone so you can track your progress and learn from your mistakes. Upload. The last try of each day on Youtube and share the link in the comments.
Then we can see how you progressed and applaud you for trying, failing, and doing it.
Presentation mastery got one of the questions I get is what happens if I forget my presentation and I’m halfway through midstream, and I forget everything. How do I look really like? I know what I’m talking about.
How do I make sure that my audience is really engaged? Look: some of these subjects come up all the time around presentations, Dale Carnegie, of course, I’m William farmer from Dale, Carnegie, Australia, Dale Carnegie was fantastic and helped people out.
How would I present themselves how to do it effectively? In fact, he wrote a famous foot. Could the quick and easy way to effective speaking so here are a couple of those techniques from Dale Carnegie’s work, I’d like to share with you today now, if you are planning on doing a presentation and you were planning on memorizing it I’m going to give you A piece of advice: don’t do it, because what happens is you’ll start to really think about your presentation and every word.
If so it moves. The chair stands up to go to the toilet and you lose your place. All of a sudden, all the wind will go out of the sale, so don’t try to memorize your presentation. The other thing is that comes across a little bit artificial.
Now, with the beauty of PowerPoint, you can just flick and then the PowerPoint will come through and it usually reminds us of what the next thing is in our presentation: skills. If you don’t have a lot of PowerPoint slides good onya, because your PowerPoint slides should be there to actually enhance the presenter, not replace the presenter.
How many times have you been a presentation with its been death by PowerPoint? You felt like emailing them and saying just email me the presentation because it was just as effective. So if you are going to trade people’s time, that’s your wage or your salary and everybody else and above 20, 20 people listening.
I always think I want to trade their time with as much value as I possibly can so when you’re presenting your ideas, think about it. What’S the benefit to the people that are in the audience and if you do find yourself in one of those unfortunate events where you have got this full stop, and you don’t know what comes next? Here’S a couple of techniques, here’s the first one! First of all, don’t tell your audience all the time, we’ll lift our eyes show some fear and we’re telling our audience.
We don’t know what comes next, if I’ve been to just do look very wise pause, look, and by that amount of time I’m sure the words will start to flood out. The next thing just speaks because it’s like a segue, it’s like a bridge that connects to the next thought or asks a question of the audience and straight away by asking a question: looked in your hand, there may be someone engaging it stimulates conversation and it helps you to remember what you’re talking about all take your presentation into another direction.
If you are going to use notes, okay, make sure your notes are very, very clear, maybe six words, six words, six lines, no more! Nothing is to make sure it’s easier to see. Don’t hide behind a lectern, because what that does is it creates a barrier between you and your audience, use power points as a prompter.
I could talk about the subject for a long period of time, but that’s probably the key and regards to mastering presentations. There’S remember that you are the message and not PowerPoint and that when you do have that full stop use it to your advantage.
Don’t tell your audience that you don’t know what comes next. So I’m way, if I’m an engagement, specialist hey, how do you give effective presentations? Have you ever had that experience or you didn’t know what to say next? How did you handle it? Oh and if you’re an executive, what you like about presentations and what presentations are stimulating to you, I will have far more engagement specialists.
We’re going to look at seven tips that will teach you how to speak up with confidence. And we’ll not be using one of these things. We’re going to teach you how to do it in a group setting because that’s usually where people struggle.
So let’s get into it. (upbeat music) Before we get into these tips, be sure to look at some of the free resources in the description below the video, including a PDF download about the five essential communication skills that all professionals should have.
As we look at these tips, you’ll probably notice that these are the exact behaviors that people who already speak up confidently do. In other words, this is what confident people sound like and look like when they speak up.
So let’s learn from them and develop our own skills. Here are seven do’s and don’ts. Don’t sit back in your chair or lean away from the table. You want to literally lean in. When you are pushed back or leaned back in your chair, it’s more difficult for others to see you and make eye contact with you.
Now, I will admit that this sometimes feels more relaxing and makes it seem like the world is at my command but it doesn’t come across that way to others. When you are sat back from the table, you’ll look like you are voluntarily casting yourself in a minor role.
You might be taking up more space but you’re taking up space away from the action. Instead, you want to push in your chair so your body is up against the edge of the table and even lean forward a little bit.
This puts you non-verbally in the mix. This sends the signal to yourself and to others that you are in the game as an active participant. It puts you in a great nonverbal position and posture to speak up even if you haven’t said anything yet.
Number two, don’t ask for permission to speak. Assume they expect you to speak. I’ve heard many people over the years say things like, “Can I say something?” Or, “Is it okay if I ask a question?” So asking for permission like this implies that you are a lower status person compared to the others.
And that’s a question that brand new employees sometimes ask. You don’t wanna sound brand new. Also asking for permission is another way of communicating that you don’t think you have the right to speak.
And that can undermine what you say and can hurt your credibility. If you are attending a meeting, assume you already have permission to speak and that everybody wants and even expects you to speak. The truth is if you’re not speaking up, at every meeting people will begin to wonder what kind of value you are adding.
So don’t ask for permission, it sends the wrong message. Number three, in the same way, don’t wait for an invitation. Just wait for a short pause. So don’t wait for someone to say, “Sarah, what do you think?” So I’ve been in hundreds, maybe thousands of meetings and I can count the number of times I was directly asked for my specific opinion on one hand.
Now, if somebody looks in your direction in the discussion, that’s about as close as you’ll get an invitation most of the time but don’t wait for that. The expectation in almost all professional settings is that if you have something to say, you will say it.
But if you’re not waiting for an invitation, then when should you jump in? Well, the way confident people speak up is on the pause. As you’re getting ready to speak, you can usually hear that a pause is coming.
That somebody is winding down what they’re saying. And what confident people do is when they hear that somebody’s talking turn is winding down, they ramp up and begin to speak in that micro-moment, just as the first person is finishing.
So a big part of this is timing. Anticipate somebody is about ready to finish, get ready and start talking as soon as they pause. And number four, don’t assume that other people know you wanna speak. Clearly signal that you’re about to talk.
So people don’t typically look around the room and see if anyone else wants to talk before they jump in. You have to send the right signals. So here’s how to do it. As the person before you is finishing their talking turn, send these three clear nonverbal signals.
First lean forward, second, inhale audibly through your mouth, and third, lift your finger. And I mean this finger, not the one next to it. So if you have done these three non-verbal behaviors at the same time, most people will recognize that you are about to speak and they will look at you and they’ll wait.
I’ve done this many times just as an experiment and you can practice it with me right now. (deep breathing) And almost every time, people around you will stop and they’ll look at you. And sometimes somebody will speak before I do in a situation like that.
What I’ll do in that situation is I’ll remain leaned in and make eye contact, maybe even keep my finger up subtly until they acknowledge me. And then I’ll get to speak next. So usually what they’ll say is one of two things.
Sometimes they’ll say, “Oh, sorry Alex, go ahead.” Or they’ll say, “Sorry Alex, just let me finish this point.” And as long as I remain leaned in and I’m making eye contact with the person speaking, I don’t think I’ve ever been denied the opportunity to speak next.
Number five, when you speak, don’t get long-winded or cluttered. Make your point clearly and concisely. Boil down your statement to its essence and just say that. So you get in, you get out, don’t use fillers or qualifiers.
Don’t apologize. Just say what you have to say. Clear and concise sounds confident. If you boil it down to just a couple of sentences, you are more likely to hit your target. So if you tend to ramble, you may want to jot down some keywords right before you speak or practice it once or twice in your head.
Number six, when you speak, don’t be dramatic. Stay composed. Don’t burst in other words. Sometimes we finally speak up, it can feel like a big deal because we’ve been bottling something up for a while.
But stay cool, don’t explode. If you are the type of person who tends to bottle it up and then burst, that means you waited too long to speak. So speak up earlier in the meeting before you feel your emotions getting pressurized.
Number seven, don’t send weak nonverbal cues. Show confidence. So here’s the way confident communicators look. I was recently looking at some research that showed that high-status people tend to make direct eye contact with everybody at a meeting, especially eye contact with other high-status individuals.
Low-status individuals tend to avoid eye contact, especially with high-status people. So if you want to signal that you have high status, look directly at the leaders in the room when you speak. Next, after you speak, keep your eyes up and listen attentively to whoever speaks next.
One common mistake that people make is to say something and then look immediately down at their notes or at a computer. But this can make you look defeated, not confident. Confident people look up when they talk, and they continue to look up and make eye contact when the next person starts talking.
So keep your eyes open and go 100% back to active listening mode. So this moment right after you speak is critical, because this is what we’ll leave that last impression. So let’s step back and talk about the big picture.
If you follow these seven tips, you’ll look and sound more confident when you speak up. However, a little note here. It may not immediately feel confident on the inside. People frequently look and sound more confident to others long before they feel that self-assurance inside.
Question of the Day: Which of these tips do you find most helpful? And feel free to add your own tips and comments in that section below the video. I look forward to reading them. As mentioned, I have some free resources like a PDF download on the five essential communication skills that all professionals should have, as well as some other resources.
I will put links to all of that in the description below this video. Until next time, thanks, God bless and I will see you soon.
Why are you so shy? Come on, speak up a little, be more confident. That’s what people used to say to me when I began my journey, and I heard that from teachers girls, you name it left to right and center and tell you insider it wasn’t until I discovered these three things.
I’m gonna share with you today, especially the final one things began to change. People began to treat me seriously. I was able to increase my wealth, my relationship, and so forth as a result, and that’s why I’m so excited to share my view.
These three points so make sure to pay close attention without further ado. Let’s go into the first thing, which is to stop making your statements sound. Like a question, you gotta share what you believe in with absolute conviction.
The only way that happens is this by you. Not going like this, would your tonality such as is that making sense instead you go down. Is that making sense more certainty? Compare this? This is a great pen.
This is great pen notice, the difference so you’ll notice, insider just by tonality, going up or down. It makes a huge difference in regards to how something is perceived now. This is where I struggled a lot with, because my background, I suffer from social anxiety for many years, severe social anxiety, whilst homebound pretty much every single day.
I was just locking myself in my room as a result, I was always looking to people please. I was always looking for validation from other people. As a result, when somebody asked me my opinion, my tonality always used to go up because subconsciously if you’re somebody who can resonate with being shy, we seek validation and that’s what we were scared.
We’Re scared of going down we’d rather go up, and that way we are less likely to tread on other people’s toes and talk about treading on other people’s toes. That goes perfectly onto the second point realize this insider, even if you’re the most perfect speaker on this planet with a perfect tonality cadence, you name it all of the BS stuff that you may have come across, which some of it, I don’t agree with, even if You’Re, the most perfect speaker realize that the best speakers that have changed history or best entrepreneurs that I’ve created billion-dollar companies they’re not essentially the best speakers in the world and yet they’re able to create huge amount of success.
Why? Because they drop low the truth bombs. They know what they believe in and they’re willing to stand up for it when you find the thing insider that you’re willing to stand in front of a bus for to defend it and you’re able to speak with that amount of conviction, people naturally believe in you.
People think wow this person’s confident. Why? Because confident people, one of the things I learned from studying a lot of confident people, because I used to be very shine, confident people believe in their message, so much believed in themselves so much they are not people pleasing they’re not looking to please others.
They speak up for what they believe in look at all of influencers insider. You follow online, which you agreed. They drop low, the truth bombs. Would you agree. This is why you like them, because they’ve given up the need to be liked, give it up because realize this, you think people care about you, but in reality people really don’t they’re too busy worrying what you are thinking of them.
Everybody features in the movie called my life, walking around thinking the cameras all on us lights on on us, but realize your next-door neighbor everybody around you they’re all thinking, actually the cameras all on me, so everybody walks around in the movie called my life you’re.
The main act in your movie, I realize the person next, you they’re the main actor. Nobody cares about you to speak up for what you believe in. Naturally, that makes you appear really confident. Naturally, that is the one thing that makes you a great speaker.
So be sure to own that the third is use the power of pause. I talk about this a lot pausing, but today I’ll get a little bit deeper in regards to why you should pause, realize that we’ve got an awkward meter in our mind, depending on how self-conscious shy you are you’re.
Awkward meter is going to be maybe milliseconds before you feel the need to fill in the blank um like you know what I mean by filling the blank, these random words you just kind of chuck out there, because you don’t like pauses.
Firstly, if you look at any president’s talking, what do they all do they pause? Why? Well? There are two reasons. The first reason it allows the audience to think about what you’ve just said. Second reason: it allows you to think about what you’ve just said as well, and what you’re gonna follow up with if you’re gonna just speak, like this, hey insiders how you doing today, I’m gonna be sharing the three things you got to know in Order for you to become a confident speaker and then gonna feel at the end of it you’re gonna be like it’s absolutely amazing.
You’Ll, be like. Oh, my god, Tim I’ll, come at you. I come at you We’ll connect all of the thoughts cuz you’re speaking so fast you’re like I’m. What can I just seem in here, but the moment I pause.
You now think, if you’re somebody who self-conscious right now, something like me, okay, because by the way, I’m quite self-conscious, believe it or not, I’m still shy to this day. I just manage it quite well.
You want to begin to stretch this muscle where you are extending this pause time. I jump onto a stage nowadays, people give me a massive round pause right when I go on and then I stand right at the front of the stage and I just look at them.
I don’t even say a word just look at them with a big smile and I’ll look at each one in the eyes and ten seconds. It shows absolute certainty before I even begin to say anything use the power of pause, get rid of filler words if you’ve got the tendency to use filler words like um, like that is a very bad low status, behavior that people will perceive you as shy.
If you were to keep on doing that, so make sure you pause instead. Is that making sense by the way? Was this pretty awesome, but I hope you found this video helpful insider if you have be sure to click the like button comment below: what’s been your biggest takeaway and I’ll, be sure to get back to you and also insider if you’re new to our channel we’ll Be sure to click that subscribe button because we got awesome content coming your way.
I’ve created video insider. Where I talk about confidence, how you can increase it in less than five minutes. I put it up right now on the screen and, as always, follow your heart. My friend and take action I’ll see you on the next video take care.
You become what you consistently practice so practice consistently for the person you want to become public speaking is one of those things that is very hard to hold yourself accountable to if you’re running a marathon with a friend, there’s a clear goal run the marathon and if Your friend knocks on your door at 5:00am
Are you going to get out of your house and run that marathon, but with public speaking? It’s a lot trickier because it’s harder for you to do those types of exercises without that clear goal, and that’s exactly why this week’s episode of the master talk will be elaborating on my three daily exercises to help you master your talk on a daily basis.
Hi everyone, I hope, you’re having a fantastic week Brendan from the master talk here and today we are talking about the daily practices. So, let’s get into number one. The random word exercise. I absolutely love this drill, because, if you can master it, you’ll be in the top 1 % of public speakers.
The random exercise is simple: all you do is you have a friend give you a random word in the dictionary that you need to then build an introduction from this is very interesting, because, if you’re able to master this you’ll have a lot less stress in presentations, you’ll also learn to think on your feet.
Faster and you’ll be able to give presentations like spontaneous ones, specifically out of the cusp. I know this is recording and I might be cheating, but let’s use the camera as an example to demonstrate these shots.
The shots that you take don’t just picture their experiences. Their moments don’t just last for yesterday for today or even tomorrow, but for a lifetime of shots, as you can see from the way that I just created a random introduction from the camera.
You can then use that for multiple different words and practice. Five words for five minutes: every single day, number two forced silence, drills. The biggest difference between great speakers and exceptional ones, is their ability to use silences as a way to make their present better and for silence.
Drills help you make those differences by making your silence is better and more strategic in your presentations, so the exercise is very simpler and it’s a lot easier to do with the partner. All you do.
Are you have a partner record. You give a presentation right so you’re, giving the presentation for a minute or two and then in the second recording of the presentation. Your partner is then going to point at you at specific parts of the presentation where he wants you to pause like so and then, as you’re speaking when you watch both recordings, you will be shocked to see that the second recording sounds so much better with silences.
In them, this done on a daily basis will help. You believe that silences will make you better and will also help you strategically weave them into your presentations. So you can become world-class number three.
The endless gaze building upon my last tip about for silence, drills exceptional speakers can pause not just for two, three, or five seconds, but for a long period of time, whether that time happens to be 30 seconds or even a couple of minutes.
So the endless gaze exercise is very simple: the next time you’re practicing silence drills with your partner. Don’t just pause them for a couple of seconds, but pause them for very long periods of time since you’re the only member of the audience.
Your partner is forced to just look at you for that period of time and not make it look awkward and just keep looking at you endlessly, and that way by mastering your endless gaze you’ll be able to gaze into the eyes of your audiences for an indefinite Period of time, as always, if you enjoyed this week’s episode of the master talk, be sure to smash that, like button and subscribe to the YouTube channel as well, to see more videos like this and if there’s anything I’ll leave you off with its this, you become what You consistently practice so as long as you use these tips to get better on a daily basis.
I believe you’ll be 10 steps closer to mastering your public speaking. Everyone has a fantastic week and see you next time.
Not one person in this room was born afraid of public speaking. Nobody, no matter how fearful you are of it today, no matter how nervous you might get about it today, not one person in this room was born afraid of public speaking.
Nobody I am about to share with you one of my favorite things in the whole world to share with you. I have devoted this part of my life to giving people the gifts that I believe are the most valuable in the world.
I have been honored over the last three weeks that we’ve been here in Tallinn to have people walking up to me all the time and telling me the stories about how their life has been transformed from a health perspective, people are telling me about the weight that They’Ve lost and the pain and symptoms that are gone that their children have.
Even you know. I have had people come up to me and go after a month of watching your videos every single day my kids started getting curious, and now they want to change their food habits and so on, and I think one of the greatest gifts in the world you Can give anybody is their relationship with food? Is that true – and you know who’s trying to take away your relationship with food, the entire time, the food industry, and so that’s my job is to undo what they’re doing, and I love doing it and one of the other gifts that I really love to give People is the gift of communication, the gift of being able to communicate your thoughts effectively persuasively influentially, and the challenge is, is that our society has done everything it cannot on purpose just the way it is to train that out of us and and and I think That that makes life a lot harder to live.
I think some of you find yourselves having an intense conversation or a negotiation, and every now and again you walk away from that conversation and you think to yourself afterward. I wish I’d said this who’s had that feeling I’d like it to go away.
I’d like you to not have that feeling I’d like you to say the things that you want to say I’d like you to express yourself. The way you want to express yourself, I suspect that if you do that, it will change your relationship with you.
It’Ll change your significant relationships, your romantic relationships, it’ll change, your relationships with your parents, it’ll change your relationships, professionally, it’ll change everything, and, for those of you, are interested in getting an incredible professional advantage.
I’m talking the biggest professional or business advantage possible. What we’re going to do today is going to be unbelievably valuable, and I’m going to give you some of the sort of theory and science behind this now this is going to become.
This is going to be shocking for some of you, especially those of you that are younger. There was a time before the internet. I know I know and then and then this will be even more shocking to some of you that are a little older than that there was a time before television.
Can you imagine what did families do? Did they sit around the radio? No kidding families used to sit around the radio, and so what’s really shocking is there was even a time before the radio and what did families do? Then they sat around the fire, they sat around the fire and I have been privileged to sit around that exact fire and what i mean by that is that in my research for wildfit, i have had numerous visits with the hadza bushmen and the hadza bushmen live Very much the way most of our ancestors did for most of our history and they sit around the fire and – and i want you to think about something if you’re sitting around my fire a hundred thousand years ago, and i share a story with you.
I share a story with you and it’s entertaining and it’s engaging and it makes you think, and maybe it makes you laugh, but in that story i tell you about the time that these big white rhinos tried to kill me because they really did i’m not kidding You, it really happened to me and i’m standing there, and these big white rhinos are running toward me and what i knew about white rhinos is that they don’t have good eyesight.
In fact they barely can see, they can smell and they can hear, and so the reason they’re running toward me is that they could smell me and – and i knew as they were running toward me and let me tell you something: rhinos are bigger than you think Have any of you guys been in that cafe with the big white rhino head on the wall that is to scale? That is what a big male white rhino that’s the size of its head.
Then you add the body and and they’re way faster than you would think and when two of them are running toward you you’re, this is basically how it feels in your feet. They’Re running toward you and you’re doing this because they’re shaking the ground.
What does every inch of my being want to do when they’re running toward me run? But i know that if i run they’re going to hear my footsteps and that’s going to give them the ability to follow me and if i, if i let them follow me with those big horns, i’m gonna get some interesting piercings, not good right, and so Instead of running, i stood there and stared them down and waited, and they got about 15 feet from me and they stopped and they turned around and walked back into the bush, and then they got curious again when the wind shifted directly.
It came running again at me and then they got about 10 feet 3 meters and then they stopped again and they walked away. If i had run, i would be dead today, or certainly i would have interesting piercings one way or the other, and so imagine that we’re sitting around the fire – and i share that story with you and a week later – you’re off in the bush, picking berries doing Whatever you want to be doing, and two white rhinos come running at you and you suddenly remember: oh my god, i’m supposed to just stand still and you stand still and it saves your life whose fire do you want to sit around for the rest of your Life, do you understand? This is why we have this thing called the stage effect for millions of viewers, your survival and your ability to thrive was completely dependent upon the stories being told around your campfire.
It was the most valuable thing there was. Nothing could be more valuable than you sitting around the fire and hearing the stories and – and you started listening to these stories when you were two and three years old and by the way can two-year-olds understand, even though they can’t speak.
Can they understand everything they understand? Everything the other day, i’ve got my little girl here in tallinn with me and my little boy, who’s, not so little. My boy is 20 years old and my little girl is two years old, and so they don’t get to spend much time with each other and so they’re hanging out and i go to zoe, i go zoe, do you love daniel and she goes and i go Daniel’S your brother and she goes and i go.
That means daniel that i’m daniel’s daddy too, and she goes she understands it all and so we’re sitting around the fire listening to these stories and they are making it possible for us to survive the most difficult circumstances and they’re making it possible for us to thrive In the most difficult circumstances – and so our dna loves stories – that’s why hollywood will spend 200 million dollars making.
Do you understand that think about that? They will spend 200 million dollars, creating a story and they won’t begin to see any revenue on that story until after the 200 million dollars is spent it’s risky, but they know that we like stories.
They like we like stories because it is the primary operating system of the body, and once you begin to recognize that stories are the best way to write information in then you can look at history and recognize that it’s completely true every great revolution, every great revolution, Whether it’s a a political revolution, a war uprising, a technological revolution has been preceded by great speeches and great oration.
I remember reading that. Roosevelt president, roosevelt was trying to pass some legislation through the u.s congress, and none of the congressmen would vote for this because it had to do with changing their lives.
It was legislation about congressmen and they didn’t want to change it and he he was getting nowhere and then he recognized that the world had changed and he could speak directly to the people, radio, town halls, and so he started doing that.
He started giving speeches, and – and do you know what’s amazing – is when they put that legislation in front of congress. It passed with only three dissenting votes, because he’d gone directly to the people speaking is one of the most powerful things we can create in the world.
Look and by the way can powerful things be used for both good and bad adolf hitler gave 8 000 speeches. He knew exactly what he was doing. He wrote in his book mein kampf many years before world war ii.
He wrote in that book essentially that the microphone was more powerful than the pen. That speaking was more powerful than writing that, if you really wanted to stimulate people, if you really wanted to change their hearts and minds, you did it with great stories.
You did with great speeches. Speaking is one of the most powerful forces there is in our society. It creates an advantage in business and your professional life that is far past any other advantage here.
Let’S test out a few things: are you aware that in american corporate world – and i imagine this is probably fairly consistent in the westernized civilized corporate world in the american corporate world – people make slightly more money for each inch they are taller? Did you know that they actually make slightly more money, they’re more inclined to get the promotion they’re more inclined to make the sale slightly more taller and then, by the way, is there? Is there a gen? Is there a gender pay gap issue? Yes, and – and so there are all kinds of little tweaks in our society that are little optimizations – the gender gap pay gap.
How big is that? These days they say they say it’s about 10, it’s about 10, but if you remove the fact that, for example, it came out, do you guys know that uber uber pays male drivers more than they pay female drivers? Yeah? Okay? This is the way.
Statistics lie. Female drivers choose not to drive as many hours and they try. They choose not to drive during peak hours and they choose not to drive in dangerous neighborhoods and so uber doesn’t pay them any less.
Uber pays them exactly the same. They choose to do things differently. Women choose not to take jobs where they die. Women men die in the workforce, something like seven times more often than women do, and so, when you remove all that stuff, the gender pay gap closes a little.
It’S still there, but it closes a little. Does that make sense, but these tiny little professional advantages that height or maleness or or whatever they’re tiny, but the most massive massive advantage you can give yourself in in the corporate world and in the entrepreneur space is to be able to speak if an inch of Extra height can make you 0.
01 more income, being a speaker being comfortable. Sharing your ideas being influential in the way you communicate can triple or more your income, it obliterates all other advantages. It is the most powerful thing you can do for your professional life.
The problem is we don’t because we’re afraid and the crazy part of it is not one of you was born afraid not one of you now, because i understand this whole fear. What we did before you guys came in here this morning is we took 15 envelopes.
15 envelopes and we wrote in those envelopes a few words a couple of questions. One envelope, one word one question, and then we stuck those envelopes under don’t check, we stuck the envelopes underneath the chairs and don’t think we didn’t notice the bean bags we stuck them.
Underneath and in a minute when i say, go you’re going to check underneath the chair underneath the beanbag and you’re going to see if you’ve got an envelope if you’ve got an envelope, i want you to check in with what happens in your body and here’s.
Why? Because if you’ve got the envelope, you must not open it, you will simply stand up. You will walk over here. You will come up on the stage and then i’m going to have a handheld microphone and i’m going to hand you the handheld microphone and then you’re going to tear the envelope open and you’re going to see the word or the question and you’re going to speak.
For three minutes about that topic in front of this audience, i will tell you that some of the words some of the words one of the words, is orgasm. Another word another word: that’s in there is brexit another word.
That’S in there donald trump, so who’s ready go ahead and check. Okay, stop it. There are no envelopes, [, Music, ]. Now the reason i do that did you find an envelope. I do sometimes have envelopes, so they might be stuck under there.
The reason i did that is, there were a different. There were a variety of different emotions that came up in the room. Now i want a totally honest answer here. Please don’t worry about looking good. I want a totally honest answer.
There were a few people in this room that were absolutely genuinely excited about this idea, who were they wow welcome to mine valley university, because it is not like that out in the rest of the world.
That was a good 15 of the room in the rest of the world. In a room of this size, it would be one or two people and they would almost always be one of my clients. That’S how it is that’s how it is, how many people were like a little excited, but also your stomach was doing a little backflip thinking, routine, okay, all right and how many were thinking, i’m not the least bit excited and i feel like i might actually vomit Who was in the category and then how many of you are thinking? Please no, no envelope, i won’t do it anybody and then there was a couple of you that thought.
If there’s an envelope, i’m not pulling it out, [ Laughter ], i know, and so what i want you to know is that i used to be in the category of that. If i was sitting there in that chair and i found and i reached under and i touched an envelope, i would have immediately pulled my hand back and pretended i didn’t have an envelope.
I kid you not. I was so terrified of public speaking that if you called me on a friday, if you called me on a friday – and you asked me to do a talk, no, if you called me on monday – and you asked me to do a talk on friday, i would Absolutely have said no without question.
I don’t care what the topic, how big the audience was. I would have said no and when i said no, i would then have started feeling sick and i would have continued to feel sick on tuesday and on wednesday and on thursday, and i would have woken up on friday morning feeling sick and i said no, i Don’T even want to think what would happen if i said yes, that’s how terrified i was, but you know what’s so important about this.
Not one person in this room was born. Afraid of communicating. Not one person in this room was born afraid of public speaking. Nobody, no matter how fearful you are of it today, no matter how nervous you might get about it today, not one person in this room was born afraid of public speaking.
Nobody, it’s really important for you to understand that. Can you imagine what would happen if a baby came out afraid of public speaking? How would it ever get its diaper changed? How would it get food? What happens is at first when babies are born, we are so thrilled by their noises.
Aren’T we baby noises? I mean: aren’t they incredible, i i get home if i miss zoe’s bedtime like if i miss it occasionally i come home and she’s already in bed. I want to go wake her up. You can imagine my wife’s reaction when i say that i’m going to go away, i will never go wake her up, i’m going to go wake her up.
No, but you know in the morning now, when she wakes up she wakes up and immediately. She starts talking and she talks in some strange mix of english and spanish and now estonian and it’s beautiful and we love it and most parents do.
But then there comes a point in time after the age of three and four, where the talking isn’t so great, where you’re on a plane and the chill child is being too loud and that’s where you’re trying to go shh, [, Music, ] indoor voice.
Think before you speak, children should be seen and not heard, and it begins, and almost every person in this room was subjected to at least some of this stuff. When they were a kid and that’s where your apprehension of communicating that’s, where your apprehension of speaking came from, because social conditioning started putting a cocoon around you and started telling you to control yourself to not be so excited, is it true and and and then we Continue to live with that fear, we continue to live with that, and then it gets even worse because we go to school and one of the things that teachers forget teachers forget what it’s like to think like a child.
They do look guys when children are born. They have no meanings, they don’t know what stuff means, and so their entire job for the rest of their life is to assess meanings. Oh, i have pain in my stomach from hunger and when i cry i get fed.
Oh look at that. When i cry somebody sticks a boob in my mouth, wait a minute. Why did i stop doing that anyway? [ Laughter ], but the fact is that the children make a meaning they make a meaning and and and then they continue to make more meanings.
And the problem is: is that some of the meanings that we make when we’re children they become rules that we then keep? I shared? I spoke to the teens on the team track here at mein valley university. I spoke to the teens.
I told them a really embarrassing story, i’m going to share it with you one day i was eating an apple. I was eating this apple. I was about six years old and then i decided that i needed to use the washroom.
So i went into the washroom in our house. I went in closed the door. Put the apple up on the shelf, went in and did my business. I won’t act that part finished up. Flushed washed hands grabbed the apple, took a bite, open the door and walked out, and my mom was standing.
There now think about this. From my mother’s perspective, all she heard was toilet flush and son, walking out with apple in his hand that he was eating while he was in the bathroom. How does my mom feel about this? Not good right, so my mom goes eric.
You can’t do that and i said what she says: you can’t eat an apple in the bathroom and i said why not she goes it’s dangerous and then she got distracted and went off and did mom stuff and i’m sitting there with it’s dangerous.
Why is it dangerous, and this was this – was when i was six, so this was a few years bg before google, and so i couldn’t like go. Why is eating an apple while you go to the toilet, dangerous? I i couldn’t do that.
I i i, the question was just in my head and do you remember like, but back in the days before you could just ask the universe for the question like you did you ever have that thing where you had a question bouncing around in your head, bouncing On and it’s like the rest of your life kind of got filtered through that question, that’s what happened to me, and so i was sitting out with some friends one day and we’re at a restaurant and and and we have the straws you know, you’re drinking out Of a straw and – and we were doing like kids – do where you block off the top of the straw and you pull the liquid up and then you uh and you drop the liquid in right.
It’S physics, basic physics, it’s fun and then and then i was doing it and suddenly i was like oh wait. If you block off the bottom of the straw, the liquid won’t come out. If you block off the bottom and the top the liquid won’t come out.
If you block off the top, but you open the bottom, that’s the bizarre part right, you block off the top and it won’t run out the bottom. Maybe we’re the same. Maybe maybe the danger is that if you swallow and open the top at the same time that you poop and open the bottom, you just fall out.
[ Applause ]. I figured it out she’s right, it’s bloody dangerous. I won’t be doing that again. I’M telling you for months after that i could be chewing gum, just chewing gum and i go to the bathroom we’ll get rid of that gum wouldn’t want to have an accident.
You know where i slipped out of myself and so children children are doing stuff like that, all the time is it true, and so we forget that and so you’re in a you’re in a in a class and you’re teaching.
If you’re a teacher – and you want to teach the children a bunch of things, you want to teach them the curriculum, but you also want to teach them how to learn. Is it true and so you’re teaching the class, and you recognize that one of the students jb is just not paying attention all distracted by her recent nuptials she’s, just not paying any attention to my class, and so how am i going to teach her the lesson To pay attention, how am i going to teach her i’m going to call on her? You see what i’m going to do? Is i’m going to teach something like i’m going to teach the great story of the war of 1812.
? Most of you that are from america have no idea about this war, but this is where america decided to invade canada and take over. They invaded canada with numbers, seven to one seven to one. They invaded canada and, by the way canada burnt.
The white house. Did you hear donald trump talking about this recently? The war did not go so well for the united states and i could teach you all about how they invaded canada in the war of 1812 and then at some point during the lesson i am as the teacher going to go.
I have some questions. When did the war of 1812 happen and and a number of students are going to raise their hands, which students are going to raise their hands the ones that have been paying attention and know the answer? Teachers will typically not call on the children that have raised their hands the teachers when they ask you a question like that: it’s just a poll.
They just want to know how many of you got it, and so, if you raise your hand, they know you got it. If you don’t raise your hand you’re asking for trouble, i figured this out young. I taught the kids this by the way i taught them a trick.
I had in school, i’ll teach it to you. I went to school and i hated that because i didn’t like school very much, because i would typically pick stuff up on the first pass and do teachers stop on the first pass.
No, they teach it again and again and again, and it would drive me crazy. So i got into meditating, they called it daydreaming now. I know it’s meditating, but i i got into meditating and i would be doodling and meditating out the window and then the teacher would call on me and i didn’t hear anything and then i would feel like an idiot and i’d feel stupid.
And so i learned that if you do this in september, you can give yourself freedom for the rest of the year. What you do in september. Is you pretend to meditate you pretend to daydream. You pretend that you’re not paying any attention you doodle, but you’re, really listening and then she goes.
What is h2o and you don’t raise your hand, you pretend you’re not paying any attention and then and then she goes eric and you go water. You just do that. Two or three times in september, you’re free for the rest of the year free pass now the trouble is is that when children do this or sorry when teachers do this, what they’re trying to do is teach jb the lesson they’re going.
When was the war of 1812 jv doesn’t raise her hand jb when was or of 1812 jb wasn’t paying attention now in that moment, is she maybe going to get startled if she gets startled? What kind of chemicals is her body going to produce cortisol adrenaline, even and if she produces chordal, cortisol and adrenaline? Here’S something a lot of people don’t talk about, but the minute you start producing, cortisol and adrenaline you step back in time in your brain.
You go to the more primitive parts of your brain. The more scared you are, the more primitive you go. The idea is, is if you’re scared, you become pessimistic. It’S safer. That way you see if you’re walking along in africa, and you suddenly see some lion tracks.
That’Ll startle, you tell me it’s happened to me: it’ll definitely startle you, and in that moment every rock that could be a lion starts. Looking like a lion is that is that true, is that safer than mistaking a lion for a rock? Of course it is, and so when we have some adrenaline and cortisol, we become slightly more pessimistic and we lose touch with our proper brain, and so in that moment, even if she knew when the war of 1812 started.
The answer is in the question. After all, she might not know it is that possible, and so i go jb when was the door of 1812 and she’s like uh, 1814. and now she’s just done something called public speaking in front of one of the most difficult audiences in the world, children.
Children are the toughest audience ever. Children are not nice come on. I know i’m not talking about your kids, i’m not talking about my kids, i’m talking about the rest of them. They’Re, not nice. When, when are jb’s classmates going to remember, or when are they going to forget that she made this mistake when never jb goes off to palo alto? She starts the next big.
com company she’s a billionaire. She flies to her 25th anniversary high school anniversary. She arrives in a private jet, limousine picks her up, she’s got all the jewelry and the cool stuff and the great clothes, and she shows up at her reunion and she walks in the door, and they go look guys it’s 18 14.
, because they’re never going to Forget, but the real problem is, is that the teacher intended to teach jb the lesson pay attention in my class, but the lesson jb got that day was public speaking is freaking terrifying and for the rest of her life, maybe she’s nervous every time somebody hands her Microphone every time somebody asks her to do a toast or prepare a conversation, and this is what’s happened to so many of you as well.
At various points, i will tell you that i was so so terrified that it would make me sick to even think about speaking, but the transition i’ve gone through over the last 20 years has completely changed my life because of the stage effect i’m going to share Some things with you when i was 15 years old, i was homeless and when i say homeless, i should point out that i was living in a place called edmonton and it was winter.
Now some of you live in places that you think of as cold, but you’ve not been to edmonton. I will tell you that in edmonton in the winter time, it is absolutely routine for it to be minus 30 degrees, minus 40 degrees, and for those of you that are americans that are wondering what that means in fahrenheit, minus 40 is the same in both.
It means fatally cold and – and if i look at my life from that starting point, if i look at my life from being a homeless teenager on the streets of edmonton alberta to the things that i’ve achieved in my life since and i’ll, give you some examples.
Some of you know i i was invited one day to do a tour of the original industrial light and magic movie studios, for those of you are not familiar with industrial light and magic. It is the special effects shop that george lucas created to make star wars, and one day i was offered a chance to go, do a tour of these studios and when i got there, i found out some interesting things that george lucas had sold the studios to Some private guys that were running it for about three years and they weren’t running it very well and they were trying to raise money from investors for all kinds of cool movie, technology and 3d technology.
And and and i watched one of their investor pitches. And it was atrocious, i mean it was bad, it was, i mean it was like it was the don’t, invest in my company presentation. It was terrible, and so i’m sitting down with everybody afterward and i’m not saying anything because i’m just a friend, i’m just a guest here and then gavin my friend says eric.
What are your thoughts on the way? We should do this and i’m like gavin. I don’t want to offer my thoughts, i’m not from the movie industry. I don’t i don’t i don’t i don’t. I don’t want to do this. I wasn’t nervous of public speaking.
You see, i was just i just didn’t want to crash in on their party and then they said well, why does yeah yeah eric? What’S your opinion, and i said, do you guys really want the truth like? Do you really want the truth, and many of you will know this about me, how many of you have been to any of my seminars? Anybody am i nice, i’m not nice, and what i mean by that is that you might ask me a question and the first thing i’m going to ask you is: do you really want to know, and so that’s what i said to them.
Do you really want to know and they go yeah? We really want to know – and i said well, the presentation sucked i mean it was bad, it was really bad and they said why – and i said well because of this and this and this and this and then at the end of my talk, i just i Braced myself, because i basically expected them to kick me out and they said we have another group of investors coming in this afternoon.
Would you give the presentation no problem? I like i thought it was a big problem. What do you mean and i’m not kidding you? Two hours later, i’m standing on a stage in the george lucas, theater 140 seating, private theater, where thx sound was debuted and i’m standing in the cedar and there are investors in there and i’m giving the pitch and then the investors at the end of the pitch.
Here’S what they say if we invest, will eric stay and run the company, i’m on a tour [, Laughter ]. This is a very you know when you go to the tours and they try to make it really realistic. You know they’ve made this one really realistic.
In the end, the investors decided not to invest, and i got talking to my friends and and and i went to the owners one day and i said: look i think you guys are in a lot more trouble than you’re letting on and here’s my offer and I offered to buy the company and they said no, and so i flew home and i was living in the caribbean in turks and caicos and i flew home and i got a phone call almost the minute.
I walked in my front door and they said, would you come back and i said why and they go because we want to take your offer and i ended up buying the studio and the first thing we did after that was work on avatar and then we Worked on pirates of the caribbean and transformers and elysium and and then from that company, we started a really cool company that literally built life-saving technology for the us military, we say like literally saved lives, and that only happened because i had become comfortable with speaking
So the first thing we talked about this morning is the stage effect, so the stage effect is the unfair advantage that you create for yourself by standing in front of an audience – and I just I want to – I want to give you a little Bit more information about that the stage effect is a really fascinating thing.
The stage effect is kind of like it works like this. The quality of your presentation, plus the size of the audience, creates the level of attraction you create as a speaker. Does that make sense? So so what that means is that the bigger your audience, the more attractions can happen, and I’ve noticed this very much in my career, because when I would go out on tour when I launched in a new country, I might go on a tour in a new Country and nobody knows me, and so I go there and some of the audience, some of the events might have 20 or 30 or 40 people, but then some of those people end up coming to one of my workshops.
Those people have a certain attitude toward me when they come to the workshop, as my career in any given country gets bigger. Like I came here to Thailand some years ago, and I did an event – and there were about 2,500 people in the audience when those people come to my events, they treat me differently than the people who saw me with 30 people because there’s something powerful about people Watching you, the same thing applies on YouTube.
Somebody sends you a video and it’s got four views and somebody sends you another video and it’s got four million views which one are you gonna watch. The the views are the size of the audience, and so, if it’s got, four million views you’re more likely to watch it.
If you’ve got five thousand people in the audience, it creates more attraction. And so what this means is that when you stand up in front of an audience and you deliver from your heart, you are creating a level of attraction that is far beyond what you can create one-on-one.
If there’s ten people in the audience, it’s far more attraction than one-on-one, this is so important because in marketing there is no system of marketing that is more effective than personal contact.
I’M not talking about effective in numbers, there’s many systems that can better with numbers, but I’m talking about effective when it comes to creating a lasting memory or impression with somebody. Nothing will create a more lasting impression really than face-to-face contact with somebody.
But the problem is: is face-to-face contact isn’t very practical. How many people can you meet and really connect with in a day eight, if you really have it back to back and you’re spent, I mean I don’t know and look if you live in England, you can kind of travel around pretty quickly and meet with a Lot of people, because there’s 60 million people living on a postage stamp.
But if you live in Canada, it’s a little different. I was working in Canada and Vancouver and I had a client in England and we’ve been doing business for a few years, but we’d never met before and one day he calls me there was Eric we’re.
Finally, gonna get to meet and I said awesome what’s happening, goes I’ve got a conference I have to go to and I’m gonna come come. I’M coming to Canada. I said that’s great, I said: what’s what’s, the scheduling goes well, I’m flying into Toronto.
On Monday, the conference is on Tuesday and I’ve got Wednesday and Thursday free. So I figure we should get together for lunch, and I said okay and I were you planning to come out to Vancouver and he goes.
I have a rental car now. Some of you will be aware of North American geography, but some might not so I just want to put this in perspective. This is Canada for you. If you would like to drive from Halifax Nova Scotia to Vancouver Canada – and you have three friends to do, the driving with you and the car only stops for you to put petrol in you, eat and sleep in the car.
It will take you four and a half days. It’S just you know it’s a big place. What I’m getting at is face-to-face contact in our world today is not gonna, be the most effective because it takes so much time, but the good news is is that face-to-face contact is even more powerful face to faces it’s even more powerful.
I am well. Let me ask you and if you already know the answer, I don’t need your answer. If you don’t know me, you haven’t met me, am i introverted or extroverted how many people think that I’m pretty extroverted who thinks I’m pretty extroverted seems so I’m up here on stage whatever? How many of you think I’m more introverted.
So the fact of the matter is, I am significantly more introverted than I am extroverted. You will notice, I will walk around here. I don’t walk up and talk to people all the time and introduce I mean I wouldn’t say: I’m shy, I’m just introverted and one of the greatest tools of the introvert is learning how to be great at storytelling and standing on stage, because then you don’t have To go meet people they come and meet you it’s different.
You meet them all at once. It’S an incredibly powerful thing, but that’s social. But what about economic, and so the example I often use economically, is that if I’m a business consultant – and let’s say I’ve got my my friend – Derek Eric and Derek and – and I am the introverted business consultant and he’s also an introverted business consultant and we’ve decided To buddy coach each other we’re gonna try and get through our stuff, and what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna go to a networking event and we’re gonna try and have a competition to see who can meet the most people.
So introverted business consultant Derek, goes off to the event pocketful of business cards and he’s handing out business cards and he’s meeting all the people so good to meet you I’m so happy to meet you.
Here’S my card. You have a card with you, you and you have a card as well. Can I have an and Derek is meeting them all and at the end of the day, he’s got a pocket full of business cards. I, on the other hand, introverted Eric business consultant to I don’t want to do all that.
I call the organizer and say hi I’d like to come and speak at your conference. Here’S my show real here’s, my bio boom and I get myself booked as a speaker. I walk onstage, I speak for 45 minutes. I make people laugh, maybe cry, maybe think I give them distinctions.
Who’S gonna have the most business cards at the end of this conference. I probably am, but but wait a minute. Let’S call it a tie. Let’S say we get back to our hotel room, we take out our stacks of business cards, we put them down and it turns out it’s a tie.
Okay, so we have to go to the tiebreaker round the tiebreaker round. How does that work? Well, what we do is we start calling the people we met. So Derek starts picking up the phone and saying hey: do you remember how we met at the conference yeah? It was over by the Starbucks yeah yeah.
I was the blue shirt. Do they remember him? Barely a few might what if I called him, I pick up them ago: hi, it’s Eric, oh you’re, Eric calling from the presentation. I’Ve created a deeper, lasting memory.
Is it true? So the tiebreaker is that I have as many business cards, but these business cards mean something they connect something now, let’s go to the next tiebreaker round, which one can charge more for the same consulting services.
I want you to hear me about this. This is not a small thing. This person does not charge 10 % more than this person. This person can charge many times what this person can charge. I didn’t fully understand this.
Until one day, I was doing event in Las Vegas Nevada, and I did my presentation at this event. Many speakers were there. I spoke for about two hours and these these guys walked up to me. After it I was standing with my wife.
They walked up and they said we’d like to buy you lunch. What do I know at this point? They want something but I’m hungry. So I accept a lunch and so we go off for lunch and we’re sitting there at lunch and they start trying to hire me to work for their company in California.
I don’t want to live in California. I live in the Dominican Republic and just to put this in perspective for you how many of you are familiar with kiteboarding anybody, so how many are not familiar with kiteboarding, but you are familiar with wakeboarding, so I’ll describe kiteboarding for you, it’s like wakeboarding right.
It’S like wakeboarding you’re, on a snowboard type thing and in the wakeboarding the boat is pulling you right, but with kiteboarding it’s like you control the boat and the boat can fly. It’S an incredible sport and I live on kite beach and there’s wind ten months of the year.
San Diego is beautiful, but the wind is seasonal and the water is there’s a technical term for this. Let me just I have it here. I have it in my phone, I had looked it up, freaking cold, it’s really cold and so alright, if I don’t need a wetsuit even in December, I’m not interested in going to live there.
I don’t want the job, but they keep trying to get me to do it, and I finally said to look what do you really want from me and they explained what they were looking for, and I said no, I really, I don’t want it and they said Well, could we hire you as a consultant? Actually, no I’m not look.
I’M busy. I have a full calendar, I’m not. I want to spend time with my family. I don’t really want to, but I don’t like saying and so sometimes I’ll say no with a number. This is one of the smartest ways that any of you will learn to raise your prices.
You you, you deliver so much value that people want to do business with you and then you say no with a bigger number, and so I decided to do that. They go well. Could we have you come in for like one week of the month for six months, and I want to say no, but I don’t.
Instead, I said sure it’d be $ 20,000 for each week they said. Okay, I said oh [, __ ] and then I said well before you say: okay, I don’t fly on the weekend, I’m with my family. I fly on the Monday and I fly home on the Friday.
So it’s three days twenty thousand dollars, and they said okay and so for the next six months. I did this before that. I would have sold days for a fraction of that amount if I was open to consulting which I wouldn’t have sold, because I didn’t want it, but all of a sudden I found the stage effect has an immediate and powerful financial return.
It helps you sell things. It helps you get a job, it helps you get that promotion. It helps you get the funding for your business, it helps you recruit people for your company. It is the ability to leverage it’s so powerful.
Now, in order for that to work, though, we have to have some skills, we talked today about how to get more comfortable, but now what we have to do is talk about some skills. One of the most important skills you can develop as a speaker is the ability to go to a conference and deliver a talk that will appeal to the highest percentage of the whole audience.
Irrespective of the topic, because you will occasionally get asked to speak at conferences where there’s a wide variety of people in the audience – and your topic might only appeal to 1/2 or 1/3 of the people – is that possible? And so the trouble is, is you’d almost be better off if the other people would just leave, because if they stay in the room with their naysay or energy, if they stay in the room checking their facebook if they stay in the room talking to each other.
They’Re gonna ruin the energy of the room and they’re going to distract other people from your presentation. You know they don’t all sit their side right. You’Ve got the interested person in the disinterested person and the interested person, and then it just messes up the room and you can’t make them leave, and so what you need to do is keep their attention and so doing that we use something.
We call broad spectrum appeal that is to deliver with broad spectrum it’s to deliver in a way where the audience likes what’s going on, even if the topic isn’t a direct match for them. So there’s some keys to this.
The first key use stories we already talked about it this morning. Stories are the operating system of the human mind. Look if you tell somebody something they’re, not gonna. Remember it, but if you relay the information to them in a story that triggers emotion, they’re gonna remember it you see your mind, has too much stuff to process, and so what it does is it decides what to hold on to and what it will hold On to is anything that has an emotion attached to it.
Does this make sense to you see if you have a day, that’s completely boring and you have no emotions about that day. Are you gonna remember that day? No, but if you have a day where you had an intense emotional experience like say somebody drove into your car, are you gonna? Remember that day you had an attention motional experience, if you have no memory, sorry, if you have no emotion, there’ll, be no memory.
If you have too much emotion you, you could end up with PTSD. That’S ultimately, what it’s about is that the emotion is so intense that it writes the memory and so solidly that it can’t be shaken out now, once we begin to understand that that that emotion is the glue that causes memories to stick once we get that, then We know that we have to deliver things in story format, that is the operating system of the human brain.
Now sometimes feel company go well Erik. That’S all fine and good you’re up there telling your stories. I don’t have any stories. Does anybody feel a little like that? Don’T have so many stories or the other thing they say is well Erik, but I have to.
I have to just deliver numbers. I just I’m an accountant and I have to deliver numbers to the board of the come. How do I do that story? Well, what you begin to realize is that delivering a story is about the way you deliver anything and – and what I mean is is that if I have to come and deliver the numbers, then I can walk out here, and I can say, ladies and gentlemen, of The board, I have the numbers, we projected 14 percent growth on the quarter and in fact we achieved 16 percent.
Well done everyone! That’S how it’s done right. In fact, that’s somebody doing it quite well in our world. It can be done a lot worse than that. Right how many of you have been to a conference where you’ve been sitting in the middle row and you’ve been wishing? You were on the edges, anybody been to that conference, okay, so I’ve been there and so what? If? Instead I walk out and go.
Ladies and gentlemen, the board I’ve got the numbers from the accounting department today and I’m really excited about this, because when we set the targets you’ll remember we projected 14 percent growth on the quarter and you might recall I wasn’t a big believer.
I wasn’t so optimistic about that and so this morning, when I got the numbers from the accounting department I held the envelope my hand. I just took a moment before I opened it and then I tore the envelope open and I read the report and then I had to read it a second time and I’m not kidding.
I had to read it a third time to understand what had happened. We projected 14 percent growth on the corner and what we actually achieved was 16 percent. Is it different? I created suspense, I created drama and I made it a story.
It didn’t even take much longer, but I did it in a way that you will now remember that. In fact, I will be able to walk up to some of you three four days from now and go how much growth did we post and you’ll go yeah? It was 16 percent right, like you will, because I gave it to you in story.
So the first thing you have to understand is it’s not even that you have to have so many stories. It’S that you have to recognize that the information needs to be delivered in story format. When it’s delivered in story format, it becomes memorable.
The only way, you’re gonna get anybody to remember anything is by linking an emotion to it. How many people in this room you had in school in your first 12 years of school, you had at least one or two teachers that to this day, you would love to have lunch with them and thank them for the contribution they made in your life.
Keep your hand up if they were a storyteller nine times out of ten more, like nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand. These guys are storytellers, isn’t it true, they’re, totally storytellers and and the teachers that didn’t tell you stories, you don’t remember what they taught you and these days you don’t even remember their name.
Do you? No, I moved. I grew up largely in Halifax Nova, Scotia in the eastern side of Canada and one of my teachers. When I was in grade three – and I know, every country uses different grade, three means like eight years old, and so I was seven or eight years old and I was in his class and he was brilliant at storytelling.
He understood everything about storytelling. He understood the suspense one day we were putting he we used to sit in his chair and he would put his one leg up on his desk. You know kind of bad for him, don’t you think so we often would sit in art and when he would come into the class and we’re eight years old and we’d put our feet up on our desks and then he walked in one day, and he goes You guys think, that’s funny, don’t you and we’re like yeah, you do it, so we can do it kid thinking right and he goes well.
I’M gonna tell you why I do it. He said one day I was going out on my first date in my car and I was driving along and I dropped my girlfriend off at her house after an incredible day and then I turned around and I was so high.
I was so happy. I was so full of love from this experience. I’D gone out on my first date in my first in my car on my first time and I was driving along and I was heading alone and then suddenly something happened to the car.
Somebody had hit me a little bit from behind and then the car started to slide and it was sliding toward this tree and I saw the tree and it was the weirdest thing, because there was nothing I could do and the tree just kept getting closer and Closer and it was almost like slow motion and all of a sudden yeah we did, I just slammed into the into the tree and and and and then and then and then a little.
While later I woke up on the road I had been flung out of the car, and I woke up on the road and the weirdest thing is – I had never been able to do the splits before, but now I was on the road and I was doing The splits only the problem was my knee was bent here and so this bone had been broken so badly that it was sticking out through the skin and so now there’s a metal rod in my leg, and so when I sit at my desk, while you guys Are working if I don’t lift my leg up on the desk, it becomes incredibly painful.
That’S why I put my feet on my desk says. Otherwise, it’s considered to be incredibly impolite and I’m sorry I didn’t share with you share that with you earlier I was 8. I still remember that story. Incidentally, I have not shared that story once from stage ever until this moment.
Never have I shared that story that I can think of. I still remember it from when I was 8. Then then, one day he comes in, he goes because one of the important types of stories to tell are metaphorical or allegorical stories, where you tell a story that the audience wants to hear.
This is broad spectrum appeal. You tell a story that the audience wants to hear, but that’s teaching something else. Do you understand, and so he walks in one day and he goes guys it’s health class. Does he have our attention? No we’re 8 health class doesn’t get interesting until you’re 12 right.
I mean, let’s be clear: 12:13 health class starts getting a little, you won’t admit it, but it’s starting to get interesting right. You’Re, 8 years old. It’S not interesting! So he’s like it’s health class, nobody’s interested and he and he walks up to the blackboard and he takes out this thing and he’s like he says all right now.
Does he have our attention? Why does he have our attention? It’S 1978, its 1978, and I don’t know how many you guys are Harry Potter fans. Okay, however big Harry Potter got, it will never hit society the way Star Wars did not ever you watch any three hours of television in North America, any three hours of television news, sitcom movie, you will hear a Star Wars reference.
It’S the way it is. He understood this in 1978 in 1978, he was drawing characters from the Star Wars, universe and he did this. He goes now this force field. Was he brilliant? This force field is your skin.
He says these are antibodies, they are defending you, and these are the germs and bacteria that are trying to get into your body and make you sick. I was eight years old, that’s exactly what the blackboard looked like, because he understood how to tell stories.
Storytelling will change everything about you away. You do a presentation, it will change everything about the way the audience receives it and the beauty is stories are broad spectrum automatically the toughest audience I ever had the absolute toughest audience I’ve ever had.
I got this phone call. Eric would you come and speak for this inner-city school in London? I will speak for schools pretty much unreservedly if I’m around, if I’m nearby and I’ll, do it pro bono, if I’m around it’s free I’ll, show up and do it.
The one thing is is that when I’m doing pro bono speaking, I won’t always put the same level of preparation as when I’m getting paid. I I have things to do in my life, so if I’m speaking for free, I just kind of show up and wing it.
I’Ve got enough stage experience that I can usually pull that off. It’S okay and I get to the school and I haven’t done any research and I walk in and the headmistress walks up to me and she says: are you ready and I go yeah totally? I’M ready.
I said which kids am i speaking for, and she said all of them. I said oh really. What kind of school is this? Is it a high school because I could speak to all of them? You know high school, 6. 8. 16 to 18.
I could do that or is it a junior high? You know 13 to 16. I could do that or is it like last half of elementary school? You know six to twelve or you say eight to twelve or is it elementary school? I can do that.
Six to five to eight or something I could handle that she goes no it’s at k-12. I said k-12. That means for those you don’t understand. K-12. It means that the youngest kids will be four years old and the oldest kids will be 19.
They will be from 4 to 19 in one audience. I said really how interesting I said how long, how long do I have to speak for an hour and a half there from 4 to 19 and I’m gonna speak for an hour and a half.
I said: ok, excellent, no problem, and so immediately I start going through the system I’m going. I have to. If I have to create broad spectrum, feel I got to figure out. What’S common to all these kids, like I’ve got to figure it out.
First thing that is common to all of them stories stories are common, all of them. Now you have to tell the story slightly nuanced, but the fact is, for you do four-year-olds like stories. They like the same story over and over and over again and do 19 year olds like stories sure they do.
In fact, layered stories is one of the most valuable skills you can deliver up in the world, and you all know this, even if you’ve never heard the term before layered stories. This is what I’m talking about.
How many of you have ever watched a Disney movie with children and you’ve noticed that you suddenly realized as a child? You were watching a movie that was actually made for your adults. Isn’T it true? You watch a Disney movie and there’s weird little sexual innuendos, adult jokes and they’re all above the consciousness of children, so they’re telling two stories, and so this idea of being able to tell parallel stories or or or multi-layered stories is really valuable.
So I’m thinking, okay, I got to tell a story and I got to make sure it’s got four-year-old features and it’s got 19 yield features and all between first thing I decide second thing: what else is common to all these kids games? Do four-year-olds like games? Do 19 year olds like games, done deal, I’ve got it covered, then I think about.
I need one more thing. I need a thread I need. I need some kind of thread that I can use and I suddenly realize what it is, and I thought back to mr. kolchin ski Harry Potter, because that was what was going on back in and if you were 4 year old.
If you were 4 years old, did you like Harry Potter? Damn right, you did if you were 5 or 6 years old. Did you like Harry Potter, absolutely if you were 7 or 8 or 9 or 10, or its 11 years old, if you’re a 12 years old? Do you like Harry Potter? Absolutely if you were 13, 14.
15. 17. 18. 19. Did you like Harry Potter? You did but secretly you read the books in a brown paper bag right. Yet you didn’t you liked them, but it was a bit and by the way, if you were 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 years old, did you like Harry Potter? Damn right, you did my wife and I lined up at a book store to buy the final Harry Potter book at the bookstore unreleased night at midnight, and we had to buy two copies because there was no way one was waiting for.
The other Harry Potter was pervasive, it was pervasive, and so then I went out and I delivered a talk for these kids and I use stories. I played a game with them and I used Harry Potter references. I talked about guys.
I’M gonna show you some really cool stuff and by the time I show you this stuff about your life. All the other people will seem like muggles to you did that work for them yeah and at the end of my talk, the kids celebrated.
I got a big clap from them. Everything was fantastic and normally, when I finish a talk, it’s the audience that wants to come over and say hello and take a picture and do that fun stuff. Not this time.
This time it was the teachers, the teachers literally and by the way I I just want to, especially if you guys are any Americans here literally means. Actually, I just want to be clear that you can’t have your head literally explode unless it actually explodes.
I just wan na be clear about that, something that bothers me every now and again so the teachers literally, which, which means they actually write literally they cornered me and I’ve got my back against the wall and the teachers are surrounding me and they’re going.
How did you do that? How did you do that? I can’t hold them for half an hour. One age group and I said first of all, you need to relax. I said I only had to hold them one time. I only had to hold them one time and I was new and I was novel, so you can’t you can’t blame yourself.
The first thing is, I only had to hold him the one time and they’re like yeah, but still like. I have to hold them for a whole hour for my class, and I just can’t do it. You held him for an hour and a half and all the age groups.
How did you do that and I said, and I broke it down for them. I said guys it’s about storytelling. I told him of a mr. katimski and no kidding. They immediately asked me if I could come back and speak at the school again for the teachers, because teachers are not being taught really effectively how to teach they’re being taught how to babysit and how to run curriculum.
Does this make sense, so so broad spectrum appeal? It starts with the recognition that story is the ultimate language. It’S the ultimate operating system for the brain, and once you get that, then you make sure that your talks always contain a percentage of story.
You you, you tell them some information and then you use this story to prove it or you tell them a story and they and they get the information inside the story. But the fact is no emotion, no memory done then.
The next thing you saw me do there is: what is the common thread of the audience? You always want to know. What’S the common thread of the audience as best you can figure out who your audience is and try to figure out? What’S common about them and if you can’t find anything, that’s common about them, that might be the common thing.
I will often come out here and do it right now shout out some of the countries you guys are from. Let me hear it: Canada, United States, Mexico, UK, Brazil, Korea, Israel, the Ukraine, Crimea, that’s that’s Russia! Now! Isn’T it that’s not funny? The point is all of a sudden.
All of a sudden, I found something where you’re all uncommon, with each other. Only I’ve made that common because you’re an incredibly international group and suddenly I can speak to you all about me.
I’Ve created something uncommon in the common. Does this make sense, and so you want to look at what the common threads are in the company in in the in the audience and then let’s get to delivery delivery.
Is so straightforward guys and it’s not what most conference speakers are doing. How many of you guys were at the finals at the speaking Academy, finals? Okay, there were what 14 or 15 speeches have you ever in your life been to a conference where all 14 or 15 speakers appeal to you like that? What happened there? Do you know what a many of you came up and said to me? Many of you walked up to me after that and said, but why were they at a speaker course? That’S what they came and said to me: I’m like you, should have seen him on day.
One some of them were very talented on day one. Some of them were so shy and so nervous on day, one that, if you handed them a microphone, it kind of looked like this and that’s not what it looked like on day.
Five did it so one of the things that we showed them and that you saw was using a range of vocal techniques, not speaking in one tone. You’Ve all been to that conference where somebody stands up and for an hour puts you to sleep and they weren’t.
Even and hypnotist, but they should have been. Ladies and gentlemen and fellow Toastmasters, I don’t mean, look, I love Toastmasters. I really do it’s one of them. Every one of you should go, join a Toastmasters and get practice.
The challenges is that it’s a great place to practice, and what often is happening is is that people are becoming formulaic speakers. If, if you, if anybody ever comes up to me and says, did somebody do your course, the only reason I want them to know that they did my course is because they were so much themselves.
I don’t want everybody coming out being the same. You understand, and so so when we talk about delivering, we’re talking about delivering with passion with with you delivering yourself to the audience with you being who you are.
I am. I am NOT interested in the speakers that can come up and act really well, it can be fascinating, it can be wonderful. I saw a talk once it’s one of the best talks. I’Ve ever done. I admire the speaker a great deal.
It was incredibly funny. It had huge poignant moments in it, it taught really valuable stuff and it was clinically perfect. It was one of the best talks I’ve ever done, but it’s just missing one thing: heart and soul.
It was perfect. He moved to the exact right place every time on the stage to say the right thing and he did the right posture every single time for this thing that he did and everything was clinical and then when he wanted to go back and reference that sore and He went back to that same spot.
This is all really powerful skills to have, but if the audience can tell that you’ve done the same talk a hundred thousand times, then it doesn’t feel genuine anymore and the heart connection is broken with the audience.
You should know your story so well that you can tell them with imperfection that you can tell them like you’re telling them at the dining room table yeah I’ll, be in the middle of a talk. Sometimes only going.
You know it’s like that time. You know what are the the archaeologists Harrison Ford Indiana Jones, that’s right! What are the odds that I forgot Indiana Jones? What are the odds of that? They say that whoever you at my most, when you were 11 years old, is who you grew up to become Indiana Jones.
Go look at my website. I mean I, I travel around the world, I’m interested in archaeology, I’m in the bush with the animals all the time. There’S no chance. I forgot his name, but in that moment I will do that.
Why? Because it breaks the story and makes it look like it’s fresh and coming out from my soul, it makes it and then the other thing is. Is it gets the audience sitting on the edge of their chair going? We better pay attention because he sure isn’t right.
Like it’s it, it brings them in and the other thing that it does – and please hear me about this because some of you have one of the greatest fears of speaking, and that is that you might one day be onstage and forget what you were going to Say who’s afraid of that it’s horrible you’re standing up here and you’re going.
Oh man they’re, never gonna pay me now it just it’s horrible, but the good news is the audience is paying attention, and so I will do my Indiana Jones trick. Every now and again to keep the audience live and fresh and then every now and again I will get distracted.
Something will happen and I’ll have how many of you have ever found you’re, giving a presentation and you’re saying words out loud, but your brain is talking to you back here yeah every now and again my brain will distract me and then I might forget where I Was going and then I’ll go? Where was I going with that and then the audience is like you were going this way? Is it true? They will tell you, you never need to be afraid of it again, don’t be afraid.
Just tell really compelling stories make sure they’re paying attention. Then you don’t have to worry about remembering ever again, because here’s, the real funny part, is in many of my trainings on speaking.
I will do that a few times and then I’ll come to the part where I’m teaching that I do it I’ll do it without showing them and then I’ll go. How many times have I forgotten what I was planning to say or forgot where I was in the story and they’ll say: oh, it’s been three or four times this morning and then I’ll say and I’ll show them what I did and then I’ll say how many Of them were real and they have no idea, they have no idea, and I will tell you it does happen to me I’ll.
Tell you it’s ten percent compared to how often I do it, but it does actually happen to me and I’m never afraid of it. I’M just standing here and I go oh crap. Where was I going with that and I look down in a section the audience and they’re like oh, oh yeah? Where was he going with that and then they’ll tell me and I’ll go? Thank you, and by the way, when I say thank you to them when they came up with the answer, how do they feel they feel great? So you don’t have to worry about that.
You engage the audience you tell stories. If you tell stories, you will have their engagement, but then you have to use the vocal range. You have to use your voice when it’s when it when a when a speaker stands up and does that good evening.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m so glad that you came here for my talk today today. What I’m going to do is attempt to kill you through boredom. I’M gonna use this one vocal tone, the entire time which some of you currently find pleasant, but within a short time you will stop hearing my words at all who has seen that speaker.
We all have, and now here’s the good news for you, how many of you think it would be really cool to become a speaker. How many of you’d like to do that. Here’S the good news, Helmut you’ve, all seen that speaker you’ve all seen them think about this.
If you’ve seen that speaker that speaker is making money as a speaker, I’m not kidding you, it’s like the easiest place in the world to be the best. If you just walk out and be yourself and they’re not willing to do it, and so you can walk into any conference and instantly be one of the top speakers simply by being yourself using your voice and telling stories that it’s done.
It’S absolutely incredible. I just yesterday got this incredible video from Lucas Lucas as a young man who found me on YouTube and he ended up signing up and doing our wild fit program. I never met him and he did our wild tip program and then he got more interested in my stuff and it turned out.
I was doing my speaking Academy program in Calgary, and so he signed up for it he’s like 23 or 24 years old. This is pretty proactive, behavior for a 23 year old and he signed up for it and he showed up and he was so quiet and so reserved and then he at one point he got up to introduce himself and he told this whole story that none of Us knew my team didn’t know it.
None of us knew it. He says I found Eric on YouTube. I signed up in a wild, fit I’ve lost 35 40 pounds, I’ve given up alcohol and drugs. I’Ve completely turned my life around because the wild fit, and so I knew I had to come out to this program and learn about speaking and stuff.
So I got another video from him. I got it just yesterday. Actually, no I got it this morning. I watched it this morning. He has since doing the speaking Academy gone out and spoken in two speech contests like in these big contests for speaking, and he finished in the one third place and he finished in the other one first place he had never done.
Probably speaking before he came into the program, he is so grateful for his ability to communicate, but here’s the kicker, those winning prizes, things that all that was for him was empirical evidence.
What really blew him away is that now, when he has to talk to the adults in his life, he’s able to communicate to them effectively now when he has to talk to the police, if somebody pulls him over for speeding or whatever he’s able to talk to Them effectively, he said it’s given him, this ability to communicate and it’s fantastic.
It changes everything do you know. I was driving along in Tanzania and I had just finished. I used to run these leadership programs where I would take people up Kilimanjaro to teach some leadership, skills and state management skills and all this kind of stuff and after the Kilimanjaro trip we went to Zanzibar and a few of the clients came with us.
My mom was meeting us there because my mom does a lot of work in Africa and in Tanzania specifically and and my wife was there and so we’re in the car and I’m driving and I’m driving along and I’m not wearing a shirt because it’s Africa.
Okay, it’s very hot and I’m not wearing a shirt and I come around the corner and there’s a policeman there with his car and he waves me down and he said scuse me. Can I see your driver’s license please.
So I show my driver’s license and he goes in Tanzania. It’S against the law to drive the car. Without your cert shirt. I’Ve been in Tanzania like several times: I’ve climbed Kilimanjaro seven times, and I’ve been in that country to not climb the mountain.
I’Ve been there. It is not illegal to drive without your shirt on okay, but I know what’s going I go, I don’t think it’s illegal to drive without your shirt on here. He goes yes, it is. This is a Muslim country and I said well well at this point in my head: I’m like no, it’s not a Muslim countries and savart is a Muslim area within a larger country that has a non-denominational approach to language and religion.
So no, I chose not to say that to him and and and he says well, you’re gonna have to pay a fine, and I said fine, I’m okay with that and I’m not gonna pay a bribe, that’s what he wants. He wants a bribe and I won’t do that.
I’M not gonna pay him a bribe, so he goes well. You’Ll have to come with me and it turns out that I’m right beside the police station, so we walk over to the police station. Now many of you will know – or some of you might not – that Tanzania used to be Tanganyika and it used to be under German control and, if think about, when it was under German control right like back in those days, you know Doberman, Pinschers and, and that Kind of stuff – and so this building was clearly built back then you could just see it had that Gestapo look about it and I walk into this gestapo building and he takes me into a little room and it’s a Gestapo room.
I walk into the room. It’S concrete and I sit in the chair and there’s a desk and there’s a guy behind the desk, who is wearing a military-style uniform like he has ribbons and medals. I I’m not kidding you and – and I this is all by the way designed to intimidate me.
I sit down and, as I sit down in the chair, I realized that the lamp over here is aimed exactly at where my head is in the chair still left over from when the Gestapo was there. I can, if I listen really carefully to the walls I can hear we have face of getting the ancestor miu right now.
You know, and and this is all by design to freak me out, but I just unfree countable, so I’m just sitting there. I just made that up so so I’m sitting there having this, you know conversation he goes well.
You know you should be respectful and wear your shirt and bla bla. Well yeah. I guess so, but I don’t really think it’s illegal. So I challenge you to write me a ticket and show me how it’s illegal and he’s like.
Well, we maybe we could avoid the whole ticket thing and I go. I think we should avoid the whole ticket thing any goes. Well, maybe you could make it worth. My while to avoid the ticket thing – and I said no write me a ticket, and so we have this little banter and conversation and in outside in the car.
My mom is in the car with a couple, my clients and my wife, and one of the clients goes and they’re freaking out, because you know what, if you haven’t, travelled a lot and and and the guy you’re traveling with just gets hauled away by the police.
In a military uniform, you know you’ve watched CNN, you know what’s coming up, you know something bad, and so so they turn to my wife to my mom and they go missus head meets, which she hates cuz, like she changed her name back after the divorce.
So Jan mrs. head means drives her crazy, mrs. head means, are you worried about Eric and she just said she’s in the passenger seat of the car and she goes nope. I’M I’m worried about the cops and true to form true to form about four minutes later.
I walk out both cops with me. The one cop comes up opens the door. For me, no kidding opens the door for me, I get in, he closes the door and then he hands me a hand-drawn map that he’s made to get me to the spice market.
No fine, no bribe because I was comfortable to communicate being comfortable to communicate, is your right. It is your right, and so one of the ways that you become comfortable with it is recognizing you’re already comfortable with it.
You are you just forget every now and again here’s one of the ways you remind yourself: it’s called alcohol, isn’t it I mean I’ll, tell you I’m not a super big fan of alcohol myself. I haven’t had alcohol since I was 21 years old.
I have no judgement about people having alcohol. In fact, some of my friends are much better people after one drink, you know they just they’re more fun, but the fact is what happens is when we drink alcohol.
Our inhibitions are reduced somewhat and – and I remember seeing this commercial, it was actually a radio commercial. So I didn’t see it. I heard it, it was a radio commercial in Canada and what they did is they had the sounds from a party full of eight-year-olds, and then they had me and you should hear the eight-year-olds ten-year olds they’re.
You know partying and doing their thing and then it’s sound with adults having a party as well, and you could hear the difference – it’s a big difference. Then they said now. Here’S the 8 year olds after the cake and the sugar and the ice cream, where the 8 year olds different completely.
It went like nuclear bomb, aha, you’re yelling and there you can hear it, it’s just incredible and then they said and now here’s the party with the adults after four bottles of wine and soon buy them, and what you could not tell the difference between was the Children and the adults, the children on the sugar and the adults on the alcohol, you couldn’t tell the difference between the sound.
The pitch was slightly different, but everything else was the same. Now, what’s happening is that when we drink alcohol, it’s like it gives us permission to be a little louder than we normally are, or a little quieter than we normally are, or a little bit more ver and use bigger hand.
Is it true, so what I’m saying to you is that you are already a good communicator, but sometimes we need a rule or a mechanism or a chemical to help us get that out and, and so what I want to suggest you is is, it doesn’t have To be that way, and – and you can watch this like at our workshops – you’ll see me – do this I’ll – have somebody up on stage and they’re delivering like an adult.
I would like to tell you a story about the time that I went to Disneyland and they’re. Just talking like that, and I go stop for a minute tell the story like the audience is full of 12 year olds. What do they do on the stage they go? I’D like to tell you this story about the time I went they.
They know what to do. They know what to do. They start using their full vocal range, and so I want to share with you what that looks like there. There are some different, like communication frequencies in our population, so there are some people that are largely more visual in the way they communicate they’re, largely more visual.
So what does this mean? It means really that they think in pictures and a picture is worth a thousand words, so they thought they talked quite quickly because they got to get all the pictures out, and so visual people tend to talk really quickly and loudly, and they speak like this.
There are some speakers that are quite known for being very visual. Anybody have any names now, if you, if you want to create massive action in your life, you have to make a decision and then once you’ve made the decision, you have to take action and once you’ve taken action, you got to check the results and if you’re, Not getting the results, you want change your approach.
There are other speakers that are more auditory. They have a more steady tone. They talk with a predictable cadence. They speak in a way that is quite pleasant to listen to for a short period of time, but is also somewhat hypnotic.
They use words like sound, listen to me, I’d like to share you know they have this kind of different energy about them. Then you’ve got another group of people that are a lot more kinesthetic in their delivery or feeling centered, and they they talk really quietly and they use long pauses.
They give you time to process the things they’ve said they use words like feeling and warmth in connection. Those are the visual people, that’s driving them crazy. So the fact is that all of those ranges – and if you really look back at everything that I’ve done so far today, I’ve used all of them.
I’Ve used all of them and yet most speakers will come out and they will deliver their talk right here good evening, ladies and gentlemen and fellow Toastmasters, I’m going to continue to speak like this for another hour and a half, and as I continue to speak like This I’d, like you to know that the cabin me deep pressure, deep pressure is in the event that the cabin depressurizes oxygen masks will drop from the ceiling, so these people louder faster.
These people more cadence, more predictability, better pronunciation, these people, soft long pauses, these people use words like vision, destiny, see it done. These people are crazy, they say stuff. I can’t you see what I’m saying: no you’re, not a cartoon right and these people here they use words like listen that clicks.
For me, I, like the sound of that that that resonates, and then these people they talk about it’s in my gut. I feel really warm. Is it true, but here’s. The great thing is that your audience has all of those people in it, and it’s not that there’s thirty.
Thirty percent. Thirty percent. Thirty percent – it’s not like that. That’S the way it’s taught very often if you’ve studied neuro linguistic programming or psychology they’ll often teach that there are some people that are like this and there’s some people.
No don’t do that. It’S a thermostat, it’s a thermostatic range. So there’s some people that are here and here and here and here and here all the way up – your whole audience is made up of these people, and I learned this because I’ll tell you it’s not just useful on stage it’s useful in your entire life.
The first time I learned it, I was 22 years old and I was in another category just slightly above this called global thermonuclear visual. It made Tony Robbins, look very quiet. I was so fast and so excited about everything, and I was always a silly.
I was like this, I was terrified to be on stage, but in my friend my friends I was nuclear visual and then I went off and I learned this stuff and I was in sales and I was on telesales and I would pick up the phone and I’D call people go hi.
This is Eric. I’M gonna sell you some stuff today and – and I did very well – I had the highest call levels. Our company, I had the highest closing average of our company. I was the best in our company consistently and then one day I learned this stuff and I sat down to my desk and I was ready to make more calls than I’ve ever made before the average sales person our company was making 35 calls a day.
I was making 50 a day who was making the most money me, but I had made a commitment to get to 75 a day. Now I not gonna have a moment of peace. I was gonna make calls every second and I went down and I went to make my first call.
I picked up the phone and there’s Maryland and I’m going ah damn it. I don’t want her to be the first call today. Woman never takes my call. Never returns my call, but we didn’t come here for this to be easy.
Did we did any of you come into this life for it to be easy? Cuz III want to just put to you that sometimes you want it to be easier, but if video games are any easier people stop playing them if books are any easier, you wouldn’t read them, and I just want to put you that the next time, your life’s A little difficult you should rejoice in that because you came here for that.
Didn’T you well I’ll, prove it to you how many you’ve ever had that break up. You know the one, the really soul-destroying break up who’s had the soul-destroying crying awful break up. What kind of music did you listen to? Okay, you came here because it’s delicious, even the pain, is delicious.
That’S why we listen to that so glad you made it. I will just sit here in Brazil. Just leave. We like it! Okay. Where was I going with that? Marilyn Marilyn? I actually did forget that time. You got me Marilyn, and so I pick up the phone and I call Marilyn I’m gonna break through I’m gonna get through my, I think, I’m throwing gggggg cuz Millennials back then we had to press buttons and and before that we actually had to dial You, you might not know this when we talk about dialing, a phone number, it’s cuz.
We used to have to dial you anyway, so I I press the button and then Marilyn does not answer the phone because she never does, but her voicemail comes on. This is Marilyn and I’m not here to take your call, but if you feel like it you you can leave a message.
You know after the beep I’m going be hey Marilyn. This is it that’s not what I learned and I delete the message. I put the phone down I step back from the desk. That is not what I learned that it’s not what I learned.
That is not what I learned. Okay, I know what I learned: , softly pressing the buttons hi. This is Marilyn.
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept All”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. However, you may visit "Cookie Settings" to provide a controlled consent.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.
Cookie
Duration
Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional
11 months
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
11 months
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
