Public Speaking Mastery

A quick bit on my background so you understand what I do. I’m an executive speaker coach for national and international conferences and an investment pitch coach, master trainer, and facilitator.

I coach speakers to become more engaging, more entertaining, more interesting, and more emotionally connected with themselves and their audiences.

I generally coach people in 4 areas, inspirational/educational, tech, sales,?and pitching for investment.

After 25 years as a facilitator/trainer and 4 years as the TEDxChristchurch speaker coach, I've seen great speakers, average speakers, and outright bad speakers. The great ones leave a positive memory and the rest are remembered for all the wrong reasons, but it doesn't have to be that way.

Lets dive into it

I still remember the first speech I ever had to give, it was during my studies in adventure tourism and the thought of speaking in public was daunting, and I’ll never forget the first time I delivered interactive training workshops as part of an intensive one day personal development program with the American ambassador students in Australia, I felt physically sick.

The only thing that helped me get past the fear of presenting and public speaking back then was making sure I was well prepared, fortunately, I was surrounded by a supportive team who made sure I was on track.

All that seems like a lifetime ago and after years of facilitating corporate training workshops, and all the rest combined, these are the top five simple mistakes I constantly see people making.

1, Procrastinating?

2, Not writing a script?

3, Not timing their talk?

4, Having slides that suck

5, Not practicing their delivery?

Let's elaborate on these a bit more to give you a better understanding,

1, Procrastination?

Basically putting off doing the work that is required to make a great talk or presentation.

I understand that it’s difficult to commit the time to do something that is far off in the future, but it’s also difficult to get into the right frame of mind. Also, it’s easier to avoid something that makes you feel uncomfortable, why worry about something now that makes you feel anxious when you can worry about it closer to the time?

The problem with procrastination is it creates a self-fulling prophecy, you worry that it won’t go well and your procrastination creates the inevitable outcome.?

Developing a talk that people want to listen to and that you are excited to deliver requires time and commitment.?

When Lilia Tawara prepared for her talk at TEDxChristchurch, she only had ten weeks to get it right and had coaching sessions at least once a week for a few hours at a time and spent countless hours in between working on it herself.?The hard work and commitment paid off, together we crafted a talk that's become the most viewed in New Zealand, the fifth most viewed on the planet, uploaded to the official TED platform, transcribed into five languages, and has currently been viewed over 12.5 million times.

Commit to spending time on your talk as soon as you know you will be delivering one, the more effort you put in the better the outcome will be, and the more confident and comfortable you will feel when you deliver it. Best of all, your audience will notice the difference.

2, Not writing a script?

Do you think that Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech or President Kennedy’s “We choose to go to the moon” speech just popped into their heads? No, they wrote scripts.?

And the reason it’s important to write a script is that when we are anxious or excited, we all have a fallback position. It can be bad jokes, dad jokes, swearing, mumbling, or even just dry boring monotone.

Scripting out what we want to say helps us to refine our thoughts and find the most appropriate way to convey our message and become consciously aware of our words. This refinement will help us in our day-to-day business communications and can never be underappreciated.

3, Not timing their talk

I was at an event where a series of six speakers were given four minutes to speak about mental health from a male's perspective. The speaker had a fully scripted talk, the wording was well thought out and cohesive, and it made sense and flowed nicely.?

Unfortunately, at the four-minute mark you could clearly see the stack of notes the speaker had remaining, he was only halfway through all of the pages. I looked at the event host, he started to appear uncomfortable as the audience all began to look in his direction as if pleading for him to intervene and call time and stop the speaker.

The longer the speaker went over time the worse it became, the audience was no longer interested in what he was saying, the event host was busy trying to figure out how to restructure the event to allow for the other speakers and, the speaker himself became visibly uncomfortable and apologetic.?

All of this could have been avoided if only he had read his script at home with his phone timer on. He could have captured his actual time and made some smart editing decisions that avoided all that discomfort.

4, Having slides that suck.

It’s brutal and I can’t say it any more clearly, having slides that you read off sucks. It sucks the life out of your ability to engage with your content and your audience and it’s a poor substitute for knowing what you are going to say. Rather than go into detail in writing about what you can do to fix this, I would rather direct you to a quick video on how to make a better PowerPoint.

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5, Not practicing their delivery?

Not practicing your delivery only works if you make the other four mistakes first.?

How can you practice if you don’t make time and procrastinate? How can you practice if you don’t know exactly what you want to say because you didn’t write a script? How can you practice when you don’t know how long your talk actually is because you didn’t time it? How can you practice engaging the audience when your slides suck and you just stand there reading them??

Don't let this happen to you!!

If you have read through this and realized that you might be making some of these mistakes and want some help!!!

Then check out my workshops on The Art Of Epic Communication, I run them in-house and publicly through the University of Canterbury Business School.

Or if you like working at your own pace check out my online learning platform The Ultimate Guide to Speaking