6 Public Speaker Tips to try Today...
Psst we are all public speakers.
I realize some of you might often go an entire work day or day-day without speaking to a human in real life. Perhaps you write an email or 83 emails, you take a shower and speak to yourself and the many critics that reside in your brain, you listen to a podcast and/or live in excel docs. Working from home is all the rage so maybe you join the zoom and don’t turn on the camera or you record videos to soon to be an online course you will launch and then order food on an app and press the “leave at door” option.
May I just say, what a weird world we are living in now. Not to be all ‘back in my day…’ but seriously, back in my days of my early careers, I had to pick up the phone and make cold calls to ask for donations for a non-profit, I had to look a customer in the face and take their breakfast order for the deli that served oversized pancakes to hungover college kids and yes, I wrote with an actual pen on green paper and then had to go type it in some early tech machine to then be sent to the kitchen and pray I didn’t mess up. I had to get dressed, I know what?, even dressed up and go to so many (so many!) networking events when I worked for an agency in Hollywood, and I ran corner to corner looking for the right size for someone behind a fitting room door in my days at lululemon slanging spandex.
It was a lot.
A lot of talking.
A lot of energy.
A lot of people.
And yet, when I think about my work now that is so screen-centric, tech-centric and email-centric with its many, many advantages, I wonder often “is this really okay?” And do we really know how to speak to one another anymore?
It is not for everyone, the speaking in public thing. This I know when you take a search with Google and read any research about human’s greatest fears, public speaking is way up at the top of the list and it even has a medical term, glossophobia and effects 4 out of 10 Americans.
The truth is we are all going to be speaking in public, at some point.
And,
I
thrive
in
it.
I live for it.
I love public speaking.
I believe speaking can be an art form. It is expression, it is emotional, it is creative and it is powerful. There are countless forms of how to speak be it on a stage, on zoom, at a conference, to your barista this morning, to our teams at work, to a lover, a child, a dog.
I have been speaking for over a decade in corporations, in coffee shops, at my book club, while crying, at conferences, at retreats, with powerpoint, without powerpoint, and if there wasn’t a stage, I created one for myself as this is truly my art.
Through so much practice, training with an amazing teacher, Valerie Galvin of Stand & Deliver, and finding cross sections in my leadership coaching, trauma informed training and yoga, dance and even recently in Jiu Jitsu, I wanted to share six public speaker tips you can actually try today:
#1 Find your feet. Speaking is so connected to being in your body. If you’re not there, your audience is not either. Feel your feet rooted, connected, supporting you. Can’t find your feet? This actually happened to me last year when giving the eulogy at my Grandmother’s funeral. Do you know what I did, I found my pinky finger. Some times we start smaller, build a map, then get to our feet and ground in our body to voice.
#2 Make eye contact. In a World where the computer in our pocket (what pocket? it is probably in your hand) is notifying us of 33 different platforms that need our attention in that very second, can we look up? Today notice eye colors, see what happens in your voice, in your day.
#3 Please give yourself permission to pause. And when you pause, breathe. If we can befriend the silence, not only will our brain thank us, so will the person or people listening to us. We all need a moment to integrate the conversation, the thought, the presentation. Be the gift, press pause and breathe as a speaker.
#4 This sounds so simple yet so imperative: Have a start, middle and end. I used to speak on stages and rush through content to make sure you thought I was smart. I would deliver every single tool I could cram into the allotted time while barely breathing and then get to the end and just walk off stage right. It was so abrupt. No recap. No thank you. I did this time and time again. Because I never wrote the end and I always ran out of time. Prepare yourself, another teacher of mine says “transformation is 95% logistics”. Commit to a beginning, middle and close - this can be in speeches, this can be hosting people for dinner, a conversation with a friend over lunch. Try it.
#5 Know the meaning of the words. This sounds weird, right? I cannot tell you how many people I coach weekly and we are talking about core values, the words that create matter in your days, your life and I ask what the word means and it shocks them. Their eyes widen and my eyes focus in and there is the silence and definitely no breathing. Make sure you choose your words wisely and know the meaning. Because if you don’t know the meaning of the word, when you say it out loud, it goes right past us (the listener). No depth, no gumption, no landing. Period.
#6 Feel what you say. I worked with Valerie Galvin on this in my training and one time in front of the class, she had me read a beautiful poem. We weren’t allowed to prepare so we sat in front of the class and in that moment, read a piece she had selected for us. I started to read and the words were so moving, I burst into tears. I asked if I could start over, Valerie said no. She said ‘keep going’. I said, ‘but I am crying, I am a mess over here’. She gently said, ‘keep going, see what happens’. So I did. I read the words and each line went deeper and my crying became one of those heaving cries and I lost it. When I made it to the end (while hating every single second and burning hot), there was silence. I looked up tears streaming down my blotchy red face and everyone in my class clapped. Feel what you are saying. Feel it anywhere; in your feet, in your pinky finger, see what happens.
In closing here, as we know the importance of an ending (see tip #4), we are all humans public speaking at some point or another. This is like those stickers we all used to have where you would scratch and sniff (were those toxic? Had to be). Explore the art form, scratch and sniff and try any and/or all of these tips today. Let it be messy. Let there be a pause of silence. Let it all be so human and feel you in your language. And let me know how it goes.
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