Occasionally, I have prospects call me who want to learn how to be better public speakers, but have been procrastinating working with me or any other trainer because they perceive that it is a wildly time-consuming process, perhaps requiring weekly sessions spanning months or even years.
Fortunately, it’s a lot easier than that. Most of my clients go from average or even awful presenters to great speakers in just 16 hours. Typically that involves 8 hours of homework that can be done anywhere, anytime. And it involves 8 hours of an in-person training where the person is recorded speaking 10 times or more.
By the end of the 16 hrs, an executive can truly be an excellent speaker.
Public speaking is a drastically easier skill to learn than, say, becoming a scratch golfer or working a gymnastics high beam. And with public speaking, it only takes adopting a few basic principles in order to instantly catapult over the competition.
Here are the basic attitude adjustments that take place during a training:
*I must focus on just a handful of points, not everything I could say.
*If a point is important, I must tell a story about it.
*An outline on a single page of notes is fine, but reading a speech or bullet points on a slide is awful.
*Just as I wouldn’t send out an email without hitting spell-check, I won’t give a speech unless I have practiced and reviewed it on video until I am happy with it.
That’s it. It’s not particularly time consuming and the positive implications on your career and life can be significant. Imagine if you were trying to lose 40 pounds of unwanted fat and you could do it in just 16 hours. Wouldn’t that be an easy decision to make? Why should going from an awful speaker to a great speaker be any different?
TJ Walker is president of Media Training Worldwide. You can find his online training courses here. https://www.mediatrainingworldwide.com/online-training.html