Overcome the Fear of Public Speaking

One downside of being a professional speaker is that I get to attend hundreds of meetings every year and listen to literally thousands of speeches. The downside is that most of them are boring.

I have never quite understood this. Surely people know when they are not good at speaking. The clue is in the number of audience members who are falling asleep or leaving during the presentation.

The reason people are boring I believe is that they are scared to do anything exciting in case they make a fool of themselves, and that is the primary reason for fear of public speaking. Most of us can speak in public places - as long as we are not the centre of attention - and when we are it is the fear of ridicule or embarrassment that challenges us.

For the past 30 years I have coached all sorts of people to improve their speaking skills and brought it down to just four simple principles and unlike many authors of books on this subject I will briefly explain you those steps now.

You might wonder why you would then want to buy the book if I have explained the content.

The workbook contains 13 practical assignments designed to take you on a journey to discover how to turn your own content into compelling speeches using the four basic principles outlined below. By the end of seven days you will be standing up in front of an audience feeling empowered and ready to entertain and inform.

Just $27 to Banish Fear of Speaking in Public


Four Principles of Outstanding Speaking

1. Speak from Experience
2. Become a Storyteller
3. Provide Clear Purpose and Structure
4. Be Passionate about Your Topic

1. Speak from Experience

Speak on a topic about which you have earned the right to speak. If you speak about something you know well, if you speak on a topic about which you are an expert, then you are going to feel far more confident, and more importantly you don't have the problem of trying to remember the speech, because you already know the content inside out. And of course you are already an expert on the subject of your life which is the source of your primary content.

2. Become a Storyteller

Develop stories about your experiences in life and in work. Start getting into the habit of telling stories to friends and colleagues socially or at work. Stories are easy for us to remember as speakers and easy for the audience to remember.

3. Provide Clear Purpose and Structure

When you start writing your speech, begin with a clear and definite purpose. Why are you delivering this speech? What exactly do you want to achieve with it? What are the audience expecting from it? Write out your One main message - your purpose – and then support that with three key points to illustrate the purpose with interesting facts and stories and you have a winning speech. That makes it easy for you to remember and easy for the audience to recall. They will thank you for your clarity and you will overcome your fear because won't make a fool of yourself.

4. Be Passionate about Your Topic

Get excited and passionate about what you speak about. People spend so much time trying to memorise a speech and then perform it, when really all that is needed is to get passionate. The more excited you are the better your animation, the better your gestures and body language and the more engaged your audience will become – put all these four elements together and you are sure to have a compelling speech.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

People should need a licence to use PowerPoint

I do a lot of voluntary work in my local community and as a result I attend a lot of "presentations" and "workshops" presented by senior executives in public, private and voluntary sector organisations and there seems to be common feature with the presenters. They all use PowerPoint but have never learned how to use PowerPoint.

Most of these senior executives spend a great deal of their time communicating with a variety of stakeholders and community representatives, yet seem never to have spent a much time learning how to communicate. Having looked a number of job specifications for these senior posts however I can confirm that in every case "Excellent communication skills" is there as an essential requirement. I think the problem is that the interviewers for these posts are not good communicators so they set the bar of "excellence" very low.

Let me give you an example of how bad it gets. This is the wording on the first slide of a workshop I attended last week. (I have changed the names and departments to avoid adding further embarrassment)

Some Introductions

• My name is John Smith, a senior officer with the City Council's Important Developments Department. I will give a short presentation.
• This is my colleague James Brown who will help with any questions you may have and with the workshop that will follow the presentation.
  
• You have probably met Jenny Jones and Peter Green of the Voluntary Council who are here to assist us all.
  

If he had actually understood PowerPoint I am sure he would have used Motion Path Animation to create a little black ball to bounce along the words as he spoke so that we could all join in :)

Inevitably the presentation was difficult to follow - because we were all trying to follow 33 slides packed with words and half way through I started asking questions and the meeting finally came to life. Unfortunately after a long and very interesting question and answer session they insisted on finishing the slides.

When I ask people why they use slides the most common answer is "I want to make sure I cover everything - and with out the slides I may forget". My response is "If you are having a problem remembering what to say, it's likely that the audience is going to have more trouble trying to remember it."

I think most presenters would be better off simply setting the scene and letting people ask questions - at least that way the audience get to hear what they came for. There is no justification whatsoever for slides full of bullet points - they destroy the presentation, make the presenter sound stilted, undermine any chance of building rapport and finally they make lousy handouts. So often the PowerPoint slides are the speakers notes or even worse their script and the speaker becomes the narrator to a boring slide presentation

Here is my advice.

1. Write down your speech objective and how you will measure that it has been successfully achieved.
2. Write your speech (and I don't mean write it out - I mean write your notes and structure - see my PEPP Talk recommendations for that)
3. Add in a couple of questions to ask the audience to get them into the habit if interacting.
4. Ask yourself - How would slides help this presentation? Be honest and then IF they are necessary, make sure you produce a professional looking presentation (hint - it takes time)
5. Create a useful standalone handout that helps you to achieve your speech objective

When I use PowerPoint the slide presentation takes me days to produce - sometimes weeks - There are few words and few slides and I switch off the slides (press B on the keyboard) when I don't need them. I invested a lot of time in learning how to use PowerPoint and make my slides part of a performance - not my notes. Most importantly the slides are there to support me and help me to communicate my message (one message) more effectively.


Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog

Rikki Arundel - PEPPTalk Speaker Showreel

I have started looking at how to use video more effectively both on my web sites and on my blogs. There are so many resources around now to help it is amazing and the great thing is that these resources are free.

There are four main sites where you can upload video and share it with the world.

YouTube
Google
MySpace
Yahoo

Most sites limit the size of the video to 100 Mb - which is about 10 minutes - though if you sign up for a director account on YouTube - you can upload longer video. At this stage I am still exploring, however the good thing I have discovered is that as a speaker I can now embed my showreel video in my blog here as you can see below, on my Professional Speaking Page and on my Speaking and Marketing Tips site. Other sites like The Ecademy and Squidoo have a YouTube embed link. Embeding a video means that it appears directly in the page and plays there - the visitor does not need to click on a link to the hosting site to view it.

In addition I can add the link to all the social bookmark sites like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia which also help to improve search engine rankings. Video is really taking off on the web and I am about to explore a number of other options available for video email and video and audio auto play on web pages. But one thing is clear - pretty soon most sites are going to be showing video and as a speaker not using it is going to be a real challenge.

My PeppTalk Showreel

7 minute edited version of Rikki Arundel's PEPPTalk Motivational Speech on how to write and deliver and outstanding speech. Great resource for anyone needing to become a better public speaker, especially relevant to women in business.

Rikki Arundel
Motivational Speaker
Speaking and Marketing Tips
The GenderShift Blog