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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.
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.
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