Fearless Presentations

Want to know how to overcome glossophobia? Does stage fright sometimes make you pass up opportunities in your career? Do you feel like you have an irrational fear of public speaking? You are not alone! Glossophobia or the fear of public speaking is very common. After being in the presentation skill industry for decades, now, though, I've come to realize that the statistics about this fear are really confusing. I've seen public speaking fear statistics as low as 7% of the population and as high as 95%. What I have come to realize is that the statistics really depend on the definition of Glossophobia that you are using. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/how-to-overcome-glossophobia-an-irrational-fear-of-public-speaking/

Short anecdotes for speeches are a fantastic way to end a presentation with a bang. These stories can be fiction, actual incidents from history, or even just funny stories from your own personal life. When you deliver them well, though, they have a lasting impact. I often use these short anecdotes for speeches where I am training to teach something meaningful to the audience. So, in most instances, these stories are used in training sessions or motivational speeches. The anecdotes themselves are often entertaining, some are even funny, but when you use the story to relay a greater message, they have a magic quality. The important part of the process is to spend time in the end tying the incident back to the main point of your presentation. My daughter graduated from High School last weekend, and the keynote speaker was a local pastor in the area. He used a well-known anecdote in a masterful way as the start of the commencement speech (is that redundant?). Since he was a pastor, he told the story of John the Baptist baptizing Jesus. Being a professional speaker, myself, I was wondering exactly how he was going to tie that story to a graduation ceremony. He went on to explain how many Christians might see a "Baptism" as the ending point. In Jesus' case, though, that was the start of his public ministry. The pastor then shared with the graduating class that many of them are likely seeing the ceremony at the end of their schooling. In reality, though, commencement means the beginning. It was really well done and very inspirational to the graduating class. So, I thought that it might be fun to just jot down a few of the most inspirational (or just funny) short anecdotes for speeches that I have come across in my career. Perhaps you can use them in your next presentation. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/short-anecdotes-for-speeches-and-parables-to-amaze-your-audience/

Looking for a quick and easy way to memorize an entire presentation quickly? Well, the solution to how to memorize a speech in minutes will likely surprise you. In this article, we will cover a few important points. First, we will cover the big mistakes that most people make when they design a presentation that makes memorizing the presentation much harder. Next, we cover a few memory techniques that are common among professional speakers. (These tips are fantastic, and they work really well.) However, in the third part, I will show you how to actually design your entire presentation where you won't have to memorize ANYTHING! If you use this technique, your audience will see you as being absolutely brilliant, and your speech will also be fantastically easier to deliver. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/in-a-hurry-heres-how-to-memorize-your-speech-in-less-than-60-minutes/

One of the most important aspects of many speeches is the ability to be persuasive. There is an art to creating a persuasive speech, but there is also a lot of communication skills that are important to the process as well. In this session, we will help you develop and strengthen communication skills that will help you use your words to gain enthusiastic cooperation from your audience. This is part five of our series on Improving Communication Skills. In part one, we talked about how a great communication coach can help you improve your communication skills more quickly. Next, we showed you a few simple things that you can do to shut down a heckler or someone who is peppering you with negative questions. In part three, we gave a number of ways to build trust and rapport with your audience. Then, finally, last week, we covered a few conflict resolution tips. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/how-to-gain-enthusiastic-cooperation-from-your-audience/

A Few Simple Ways to Avoid Conflicts when Presenting Your Ideas to Groups

When you stand up to speak in front of a group, yes, we want to appear confident. However, of equal importance is the ability to build trust and rapport with your audience. Your audience will not believe you unless they first trust you. In this session, we are going to give you a few, simple communication skills that will help you build solid trust with your audience. Incidentally, these same skills will help you build trust and rapport within any relationship. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/building-trust-with-a-group-using-good-communication-skills/

If you practice great presentation skills and focus on designing your presentations on what your audience needs and wants, you will likely not have much trouble with hecklers. However, it only takes a single mad-at-the-world heckler to quickly turn your presentation masterpiece into modern art. So, when you are rudely interrupted, you will want to have a strategy that calms the heckler and makes you continue to look like the expert in the room. One of the more recent occurrences in social media is the birth of "internet trolls." While internet trolls and hecklers have a couple of things in common, such as mean and offensive language, internet trolls are able to hide their real identity in fake online accounts. The majority of them aren’t really mean in real life. Hecklers, on the other hand, are braver in a way that they’re confident in attracting negative attention to themselves without masking their identity. Online trolls can be ignored. Ignoring a heckler while giving a speech is not so easy, though, and can cause you to lose credibility in front of your audience. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/4-strategies-for-handling-hecklers-while-giving-a-speech/

A good communications coach (formal or informal) can help you identify communication strengths and weaknesses. Years ago, I was having coffee with a colleague. He mentioned that he had just had a session with his "personal coach." During the session, this coach helped him lay out, in pretty god detail, so strategic goals that he should be focusing on. Between you and I, the whole discussion seemed weird to me. Honestly, I thought that this "coach" was, most likely, a con-artist. I had heard about these people who had never really accomplished anything in their lives, but who paid for some weekend certification to get a certificate to become a certified life coach. After he mentioned his session, I, in my sarcastic way, told him, "Man, I could have told you that for free." It's funny, because, I guess I'm a skeptic by nature. So, if you are trying to sell me on the value of something new to me, you'd better have some solid proof. Interestingly, just six years prior to that conversation, my communications coach had helped me increase my financial success by almost double. I just didn't realize that she was a "communications coach." I had been working for an oil company. At the time, the price of oil was at rock bottom, so chances of advancement were slim. In fact, my company had just started laying off people, and I was one of the last guys hired. I had spent four years getting a university degree that was specific to the oil industry, so I was terrified about what I was going to do for a living. Out of desperation, I ended up taking a three month leadership development course. The instructor for this course was not a fly-by-night teacher who gained her experience from a seminar. Instead, she was a highly successful business person who had also trained with some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the area. She was able to shave years off of my learning curve. In fact, less than a year after finishing her leadership class, I changed careers and quickly been promoted into management. I was making more money in my monthly bonus checks than I had made at the oil company. The funniest part about that conversation I had with my colleague was that, if I had never met this leadership coach, I would not have ever been at that table, having coffee in the first place. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/a-good-communication-coach-can-help-shore-up-communication-weaknesses/

So how do you create an online training course that people don't hate? Six months ago, we set out to recreate the online version of The Fearless Presentations ® Course. To be blunt, when we started, I just assumed that we would just update the videos of the old version, make it look prettier, and be done. However, the more we updated, the more opportunities that we noticed. I think my biggest obstacle at the beginning was my preconceived notions about online training. SHOW NOTES: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/online-training-best-practices-that-supports-your-in-person-training-sessions/

The world is constantly changing. In the past, businesses thrived when they created a single new product or idea and brought it to market. Today, though, business thrive by adapting to and adopting best practices that are constantly evolving and changing. One thing is for certain, if you stay still or rest on your laurels, you will fail. The world of training and employee development is also evolving. If you are training and developing your employees the same way that you did 20 years ago, 10 years ago, heck, even just a couple years ago, you are likely falling behind many of your competitors. In this episode, we are going to delve into some modern examples of training and development programs for employees. We could call this 2019 Training and Development Models, and the title would be quite descriptive. BLOG: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/modern-examples-of-training-and-development-programs-for-employees-2019/

What are the most important qualities of a good public speaker? What makes a great presenter? What are the qualities that allow one orator to get up in front of an audience and memorize the crowd while another fails? Well, science may offer the answer to these questions. When I first started teaching the Fearless Presentations ® classes, I did so because I knew from my own experience that the more self-confident a presenter appears to an audience, the more respect that the audience will have for that presenter. In addition,chapter one of my first book was about enthusiasm, because I knew that out of all of the characteristics of a good speaker, enthusiasm was the absolute, most important. Over the years, though, our instructors have worked with over 20,000 presenters. Some had a natural presence in front of groups. Others, however, had to develop a public speaking skill in order to be perceived as being a great public speaker. Below are the seven qualities of a good public speaker that we have identified as the most important. In addition to our observations as public speaking coaches, we have also added the scientific proof that we also uncovered along the way. BLOG: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/7-qualities-of-a-good-public-speaker-that-every-presenter-should-know-and-emulate/

I was teaching a presentation skills class in Houston this week, and I had two separate participants pull me aside at two separate breaks and ask the same exact question... "Why do I still get nervous when I speak in public?" This question is very common (both during a presentation class, and sometimes, even afterwards). When you understand the answer to this question, though, you have a much better chance of eliminating your public speaking fear for good. The answer has three parts. First, many of the things that we do to reduce public speaking nervousness will actually cause the nervousness. Second, fear, of any kind, can be conquered if you both reduce the risk of failure and have a series of successes in a short period of time. Finally, the way that the Fearless Presentations ® class works is that, as we cover new stages of delivering presentations, the stages get more complicated. So, the process is designed to make participants continually experience higher levels of nervousness, but also allows them to experience a success at each stage. Let's cover each of these three areas in a little more detail. BLOG: https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/why-do-i-still-get-nervous-when-i-speak-in-public/

We just finished a five-part series about How to Start a Public Speaking Career. If you haven't had a chance to read (or listen to) that series, it will help you understand the concepts that we talk about here, much more clearly. In this session, we are going to cover how to promote yourself as a professional speaker. In the earlier sessions, we talked about how to get experience speaking within your current industry. Some of the ideas were to start out as a trainer in your current industry and to speak to associations within your industry. This helps you practice your craft, but, more importantly, it helps you get video of yourself in front of actual audiences. In the last session, we talked about how to create content like blog posts, videos, and books that you will be able to use to market yourself as a professional speaker. So, we are going to assume, at this point, that you have followed the guidelines in the previous session, and you have at least 20 blog posts, 20 podcast episodes, 40-50 two-minute to five-minute videos, and you have self-published a book comprised of 10 of your best blog posts. (If you don't have these yet, make sure to follow the guidelines in Start Your Own Public Speaking Company from Scratch.) Keep in mind that you don't have to have ALL of these things, but the more content that you have, the more professional you will appear to a potential client/customer. We are also going to assume that the content that you have created is in a specific niche within a defined market, and that this particular market needs your content. BLOG:https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/how-to-promote-yourself-as-a-professional-speaker/

This is part five of a five part series about how to start a public speaking career. In the past posts, we focused on how to use public speaking within your current career, both as an income stream and as marketing. We also covered a session on how to become a professional speaker for an established speaking company. In this post, we will cover a few step-by-step items that will help you create your own presentation company. If you want to be a professional public speaker, these tips can help you get started.

We are continuing our series on How to Start a Public Speaking Career, and in this session, we will show a shortcut by working for an organization that is already established. Just as a recap of what I discussed in the first post, the advantages of this route is that the company the speaker is representing has already done the hard work. They have already created the content, vetted the content, and created a customer base. The downside is that the speaker can't create or promote his/her own content as easily. In addition, if the speaker quits working for the company, he/she will likely have to start from scratch to create their own content and customer base. In this episode, I'll cover the pros and cons in more detail. I will also give a step-by-step process that you can go through if you want to become a speaker for one of these companies. BLOG:https://www.fearlesspresentations.com/become-a-certified-speaker-for-an-established-presentation-company/