Recently, a friend asked me for some tips on being a better public speaker. I decided to post about this so that others can benefit also. I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject, I have not been speaking very long and I do not have much experience. However, people have told me that I am quite good at speaking and I have made this transformation in a very short period of time. Now, I will unveil my closely-held secrets on how I have done this.
I have read books on speaking, which have given me some great ideas. Just like anything else in life, success in speaking depends on how you picture the experience in your mind, and on your mental state at the time. I got a couple great tips reading “The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking” by Dale Carnegie. Carnegie says that when people fail at speaking, they are usually picturing themselves as small in front of the audience, with the audience much bigger than them. He suggests visualizing yourself getting up in front of the audience, pretending that you are a giant, tall, powerful, and picturing the audience as very small, almost minuscule. Additionally, he suggests pretending that everyone in the audience owes you money. I have tried both of these techniques, and both of them are excellent for boosting confidence if done correctly and vividly enough.
Additionally, I reasoned that if I could see a great speaker give a speech, do the same things he or she did, then I could be a great speaker too (NLP Modeling). I searched YouTube for “toastmasters” to see if there were any speeches on there worth watching. I found a few speeches by Andy Dooley, who is a phenomenal speaker by the way. There is one particular video of his that I watched over and over again for a couple hours or more, just to see how he pulled it off. I memorized his speech and I acted out his speech, pretending that I was him. This caused me to feel on top of the world, I was an excellent speaker.
I checked out other videos on YouTube and found a video of a speech given at Austin Toastmasters by Kristi Curry about how she used to be deathly afraid of public speaking. She spoke very well and did not seem nervous at all. She explained that she had overcome her fear of speaking almost instantaneously with the help of a hypnotist. “How obvious!” I thought. I have used affirmations to change my thinking and my beliefs, hypnosis can accomplish the same things, but is much faster and more effective. I had experimented a little with self-hypnosis, and this sounded like a great application for it.
(disclaimer: if the idea of hypnosis scares you, or you don’t know about it, read this.)
And also a discussion of hypnosis and Christianity
This past summer I had bought a book at a used bookstore called “Financial Well-being Through Self-Hypnosis” by Joseph Itiel (which is now out of print). It is a quick read and an interesting book. But the main reason why I am mentioning it here is because it has some great hypnosis inductions that you can use on yourself. The basic idea is that you record yourself speaking the induction, then I made up a lot of stuff to say about how great of a speaker I am, repeat that a few times, and then have yourself come out of trance. Then, I listened to the recording once a day for a few days leading up to my speech. The results were amazing. I felt the confidence, and it has become real for me. If you would like a transcript of what I actually said on the recording, please contact me.
In the past few months, I have used these techniques to transform myself from someone that was so scared you could hear it in my voice and shook uncontrollably (at a presentation I had to give BEFORE I joined Toastmasters this past October) into someone who has been mistaken for a professional speaker on a few occasions (which I admit that I like to brag about). But the bottom line is that you can do the same thing, and it isn’t even difficult. It just takes some planning and discipline.
If you want to be notified the next time I write something, subscribe via email or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for reading.
Tags: hypnosis, public speaking