You Are In Great Company Find Out Who

If you are a beginner when it comes to communication skills, then you must look around at celebrities or superstars in your own industry and think,“ Wow! They are such compelling and confident speakers. They must have been born with this natural talent.” Well let me tell you, they are not natural born communicators.

Everybody is scared and nervous when it comes to giving speeches, presentations, or talks.I have seen people before who seem to be great speakers but their hands are shaking before they start speaking. I have trained people all around the world and most of them think that it is much harder for them as compared to anyone else because they do not have any natural talent and that they are uniquely bad at this.

If you are able to raise your hand and ask a question at a staff meeting, then you are completely normal! The reason you feel uncomfortable is that no one has formally trained you to develop your communication skills. You may have been taught how to write great emails but the most important part of communication is being able to speak effectively and confidently. And that is exactly what my courses target. So do not feel bad or disappointed; work with me. Together, we are going to get you to a point where you are completely relaxed and comfortable speaking on any occasion because you are going to be sure that the audience will understand what you are trying to say and subsequently, will be able to take the actions you want them to, and that is all what communication is about.

Become a Five for Five 100% Speaking Success

I want to make your life easy and save your time instead of giving you hour after hour of due diligence for every presentation you have to give. Here is what I want you to do: after you have isolated what it is that you want your audience to do, I want you to brainstorm messages that are important to you and will motivate your audience to do what you want them to do. Take a fresh page and a pen or even your laptop, and brainstorm without thinking about any restrictions such as spelling, grammar, punctuation, or what is legal and what is not.

Here is the catch though: I want you to isolate one idea at a time. Instead of writing a paragraph full of four to five ideas, I want you to jot down several ideas as separate bullet points to see how many you can come up with. Then, without worrying about the flow or the phrasing of the ideas, I want you to go back and look at the ideas one by one and ask yourself if that message is truly one that is important to you and will motivate the audience to take the actions that you want them to take. After that, I want you to arrange these ideas in order of priority, from the most important to the least important. Whatever does not make the top 5, throw them away! Or, you can even compile those ideas and messages, and communicate them to your audience through some other means such as an email, a book, a document, or a handout. Treat those ideas as supplementary to your core ideas.

So much of being a good speaker is being able to use your judgement before you speak rather than the quality of your voice or the charisma exuding from your personality. Good speakers know how to eliminate critically unimportant messages from their presentation or speech because they are not going to help the audience in any possible way, making them unnecessary. As Mark Twain once said, “Sorry I wrote you a long letter, I did not have time to write you a short one.” It actually takes more time, intellect, and thought to write something meaningful and condensed. Similarly, it is much more difficult to narrow things down to 5 ideas than it is to dump everything you know on your audience.

I have limited the messages down to 5 main ones only from experience because I test audiences from all over the world constantly. I have never had any audience member be able to recall more than a handful of ideas from the presentation or speech of the best speaker they have ever heard or seen in their lives. So don’t be greedy! You can tell people 50 things about what your passion is and what you do, but guess what? Nobody cares about you! Your speech or presentation is about your audience and what they are going to be able to remember, find useful, and take action on.

A big part of being a good speaker also depends on your ability to be able to view your speaking opportunity as a means to help your audience and give them something useful and meaningful to think about. That does not mean that you only tell them what they want to hear- you may have some unpleasant things to say and that is completely okay. But you have to package it in a way that is digestible to your listeners.

If you think that you simply have to do more than 5, say up to 7 ideas, then you can do that as well. But you have to test: if you can get your audience to remember more than 7 ideas, then be my guest! I have never seen it work, but if you have evidence that it does, then do it by all means. But until then, my recommendation for you is to narrow your ideas down to just a handful so it is easier for your audience to remember, because ultimately, that is all that matters.