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Become a confident speaker in 90 days
Nobody is truly confident the first time they do something. Usually, even after speaking many times confidence is still not there. This is because you get thrown into the deep end or deliver to a tricky crowd which creates negative experiences. But this does not have to be the way – you can choose to be intentional about building positive speaking experiences.
Confidence is success remembered, so increasing the number of positive experiences is critical to overcoming your fear of public speaking and gaining confidence to speak in any setting. You can be intentional by creating what is comfortable to you.
Find your comfortable scenario
Finding ‘your comfortable’ comes at the intersection of:
What you know a lot about
The environment you are most comfortable in
The forum you prefer
There are many forms this could take but crafting out specific scenarios where you are comfortable will remove some of the barriers you have to speaking in public. Repeat your comfortable scenario with different groups, change the topic, maybe even change the forum, from virtual to in-person. Make it easy to build successful memories of speaking in public – this will be what you come to remember when you have a presentation to give at work, or a conference to speak at.
Essentially, keep getting the reps in until speaking in public becomes your autopilot. Something that you can do with the right preparation, in front of any audience. This will take time, and constant practice is required. Getting reps in your comfort zone can turn you into a confident public speaker.
Use the nano speech
Most people open their public speaking with an agenda but this is awful practice. Don’t state what you are going to tell them, then tell them, then repeat it at the end to summarize. This is common but is incredibly disengaging for your audience.
Instead, you need the nano speech - a simple open, body, close structure that can last 10 seconds or 10 minutes. Open with something that peaks interest. If it is a conversation this is simply raising a new topic. If a presentation, open with a story that will capture attention, create curiosity and build connection with the audience. Or, at the very least let the audience know the problem you are going to solve for them or why they should listen to you.
In the body, you deliver your main points. The key is to be able to deliver your main point in one sentence. Any longer and it is not clear enough. You can then beef up your main point with stories to make it memorable.
For the close, most speakers just throw it away and ramble. This confuses the audience on whether it is finished or not. You don’t want this outcome. You need a call to action, which might be the first steps they need to take, or a call to conversation if you need a decision from them.
There is one thing your close should never be: unplanned. Plan your close to maintain engagement from the audience. Use it to put the cherry on top of the cake.
Stack reps for 90 days
Lots of reps early on in your speaking journey build the foundations you need to become a good public speaker. When learning any skill, it is easy to get to a certain level and then the repetitions plateau. Maybe you don’t speak in public for a while. This happens to all of us.
If you have no speaking confidence, daily reps for 90 days is the trick to become a confident speaker. Use the nano speech to craft your rep, start in your comfortable environment and start changing different aspects as you grow in confidence. By day 30 you will be speaking for 5 minutes rather than 30 seconds, and be comfortable approaching and asking people questions. By day 90, you will have so much success remembered that you will be a confident speaker.
Without recent speaking reps it is easy to become rusty and feel out of sorts on your first presentation back. With a couple of recent reps behind you it is easy to pick up again. If you have an important speaking event coming up such as a big presentation at work or a job interview, get the rustiness out of the way and intentionally build in some recent reps.
Getting the reps in will create your ‘success remembered’ to be able to regularly deliver in all environments. This could still be daunting as you may want to wait until you are the perfect speaker to start getting the reps in, but the perfect speaker does not exist, and nobody else expects perfection from you either.
Start small and scale up
It is easy to overegg public speaking in your mind. You build it into this big thing that cannot possibly be done with ease. Yet, when you break it down into its most basic form, public speaking is just a conversation. Maybe there is more than one person in your audience, maybe there is not. Either way, you have several conversations daily and it is something you know how to do comfortably.
Seeking comfort before scaling is not always necessary but it increases your chances of building successful memories speaking in public. When you are comfortable, you are relaxed, and being relaxed makes the talk more conversational which is always better for the audience.
Engaging a room of people can be tough, especially when there are conflicting views, and you are trying to reach a decision. Often it can be harder to speak with 5-10 people in a room compared to 500-1000 people in a room. If you scale up from having a conversation with one to being able to facilitate a room of people comfortably, you will have no trouble speaking in front of hundreds or thousands of people. The scalability is real – building those small reps in the early stages is important as they set the foundations for dealing with a large room of people.
Think of it as a ladder. The further each rung is apart, the harder it is to reach the top of the ladder. Speaking with confidence is the same. Using the small rungs of the ladder will get you comfortably to the top, rather than going from level 0 to level 50 in one go. The efforts you put in through your structured conversations will provide you with that remembered success, and compound over time and turn you into a confident speaker.
Actionable takeaways
Define your most comfortable scenario and plan your first rep using the nano speech. This will help you create your first success remembered.
Commit to 90 days of nano speeches to build solid foundations as a comfortable speaker. The confidence comes from your consistent successful reps.
Once you feel comfortable in your scenario, scale up, and start changing the segment of your venn diagram.
That's all for today!
As always feel free to reply to this email or reach out @liamsandford as I would love to hear your feedback.
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Liam Sandford