How To Become Better At Public Speaking–Practice.

by in the category Personal Development

656339_83604184

[Image from sxc.hu]

I was recently at an event called BarcampKL 2011 and before you ask me if it was an event where I learned to drink beer, the answer is ‘no’:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants who are the main actors of the event ~ Barcamp.org

image

I was there as a participant, sponsor and speaker for the 100 or so people who showed up over the 2 days and through sitting a range of presentations (including one on the anime series Gundam, one about kitchen cleanliness and more structured ones such as the talk by the Mozilla team) and talking to the different attendees, I learned a great deal about the different styles of presentation,  public speaking as well as mentalities present on the day.

It’s Easier To Talk About Something That You Love

The way speakers were chosen (except for the sponsors, who got pre-arranged slots) is by a ‘volunteer and vote’ system, where you write down what you want to talk about, stick it on a wall, and people will vote up the talks they’d like to listen to. Since there was plenty of time and space to give talks, almost every topic volunteered was given the chance to speak, one of which was a guy who talked about the Japanese anime (aka cartoon) series called ‘Gundam’.

You Talk More Passionately And Relaxed

As an avid anime junkie myself, I could appreciate talking about something that I was personally interested in and when I attended the talk, you could see it showed through the speakers presentation. He spoke with enthusiasm, a smile on his face and looked very relaxed – something that you usually don’t associate with public speaking.

In addition, the audience rides off your enthusiasm and energy, because it’s pretty hard to talk unenthusiastically about something which you love – just try it. Love watching football? Try talking about your favourite ever game and see how easy it will come to you.

You Know Your Stuff

When you have a hobby that you do often, you usually know a lot more about it than most people who may do/ watch/ experience your hobby on a casual basis. This makes talking about it in-depth much easier than any other presentations you’ve had to give in the past.

Try talking about your favourite football game again, I bet you could name the final score, the scorers, location and even how they scored right?

Don’t Get Caught Up In The Technology

This title could have easily read ‘Don’t Get Caught Up In The Service/ Method/ Skill’ but what I mean is that no matter what you are talking about, no matter how much you love what you do, it doesn’t mean it’s the only way to do what you do.

A great example of this is when I went to a talk about a certain programming language I had only heard about but never really knew much more about it than that. I talked to the person holding the talk and told him that I run a WordPress Design company and wanted to know more about his programming language.

He replied to me that ‘Wordpress Is NOT Programming. It’s more like dressing up Windows and throwing things together to make it work’.

Unfortunately I have noticed this as a trend amongst hard code programmers, where their pride in their technology becomes similar to those shutters that you use to keep horses from looking to the side, they only look straight ahead.

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you’re looking down, you can’t see something that’s above you. ~C.S. Lewis quotes

Be Prepared

There beats nothing in keeping yourself calm than knowing your presentation or topic by heart. Just watch most if not all the speakers on any TED Talks video and you can see that the majority of the speakers are speaking from memory.

  • Practice your presentation in the mirror till you can do it without your notes
  • Time yourself as you speak out your whole presentation so that you don’t overrun your slot
  • Practice to friends and family and see what questions/ comments they have on your presentation so that you can anticipate what your actual audience may ask
  • Have a backup of your slides on a thumb drive, just in case your laptop dies

If you’ve got any other suggestions, why not share them in the comments below?

Practice Makes Good, More Practice Makes Better, More Practice Still Makes Almost Perfect

Let’s face it, there’s no such thing as the ‘perfect’ presentation, only as good as you possibly could have done on any given day. But what helps you achieve that fine tuned level of relaxed, almost seamless delivery of your materials is simple – practice – a lot of it.

The main 2 reasons I joined this Barcamp meetup was to network with like minded individuals and to practice my public speaking, something which you don’t commonly have a chance to do in your day to day work life.

They say public speaking ranks higher on the ‘fear scale’ than death, which shows how hard it is to be truly good at it without overcoming this fear, and the only way to do that is to practice, practice and practice.

Looking for free events to practice presenting would be a great start, such as:

  • Barcamp, Webcamp, Wordcamp events
  • Toastmasters
  • Speaking corners (in London there is a park where you can stand on a chair and just speak your heart out)
  • Volunteering for school/ university events
  • Show and tell for your kid’s school
  • Volunteer to conduct the next departmental meeting
  • Youtube (since you’re still presenting but not looking at a crowd of people)

It’s not that hard to improve your public speaking skills, it just takes confidence in yourself, talking about something that really interests you, being well prepared and some healthy practice to be able to deliver that fluid, interesting, engaging presentation that you’ve always wanted to.

The Power of Perseverance, a Key Business Mind Set

by in the category Entrepreneurship

[Image from sxc.hu]

The main failing point for many new businesses or first time entrepreneurs is not having the staying power to tough out the bad times– and bad times there will be.

Perseverance, although somewhat understated in the stories you hear about raging business successes, probably play a bigger part than most people think. But what is it, how important is it and what can we do to bottle it inside us for use later on?

Perseverance – continuing in a course of action without regard to discouragement, opposition or previous failure ~ Wiktionary

Compulsory Perseverance

Ok so that’s a term I’ve made up myself, but hear me out, it’ll make sense when you read it through.

I remember a comic book I used to read about a little boy growing up in a village in Malaysia – when his dad wanted to teach him how to swim, he picked him up and threw him into a lake!

It actually sounds much worse than it actually read in the comic, because the drawing of the sinking kid blinking unbelievably at what his dad just did was pretty hilarious.

But eventually he realized he didn’t have much choice about it and started to kick and pull and kick and pull, eventually breaking the surface to realize that he could swim, well barely anyway.

Putting yourself into a situation where you have no choice but to trycan bring out the best in each of us, why not try joining or taking up something that you’d be committed to doing, whether you’re ready to or not?

  • Volunteering to give a speech at a Toast Masters event to build up self confidence
  • Signing up and paying for a short course on web design, to learn how to create simple websites
  • Inviting a group of friends over to your house for a home-cooked meal to learn how to cook for yourself
  • Taking up yoga even though you’re about as flexible as concrete

Don’t worry about failing, that’s the best way to learn how to do a task better than how you did it the first time.

Habitual Perseverance

I’m sure some of you have heard of plenty of tips to make habits stick, such as to repeat something every day in the same way for 21 days and you’ll build that habit as part of your character.

I can’t say that this works, as I’ve never tried it before, but for each person it’ll probably take a different method.

However, something I do know is that repeating the act of trying and trying again will eventually build the perseverance factor you’ve always wanted.

As an entrepreneur, you’ll probably be involved in some sort of selling, be it cold calling, meeting clients, sales pitches or any number of sales strategies you’ll try just to close a sale. And I’m guessing that the product/ service you’re selling, is probably the same product/ service each time right?

Well that’s a habit of perseverance – after all, in those 10, 20 pitches, not all were ‘yes we’ll buy what you’re selling’ and when you hit those road blocks, you didn’t just stop, right?

It’s not just as an entrepreneur – even if you’re working for a corporation, if you care enough about an idea or strategy you’d like your management to implement, you’ll probably try over and over again to get it implemented – be it talking to one manager first, then another director if that didn’t work and so on.

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer

~ Albert Einstein

Directional Perseverance

One of my friends made a good point about perseverance, in that without direction, it’d be like running down a dead end alley over and over again thinking that you’ll somehow be able to get through without changing anything.

Know Where You Are Going

You’ll need to know where you are going in the first place, or making it past that dead end would just leave you running around aimlessly.

Define goals, short and mid term plans, mission statements, anything to get down into a document where you want to be in 1 year, 3 years, 5 years time.

Be Specific

Ok so you now know that you want to become CEO/ gain 25% market share/ have 1000 visitors a day to your website? Your next step is to define exactly how you’re going to do this.

You can’t just say, ‘here is my end goal, everything in between we’ll kinda figure out on the way there’.

I’ve been guilty of this before and it did not end out well, so make sure you have a very specific plan on what you want to achieve, down to weekly deliverables if you need to.

Now once you get past the dead end, you know exactly where you want to go and how you’re going to get there.

Be Flexible

The ability to adapt, or in the online/ tech world, the ability to iterate and change your course of action depending on the situation is important as nothing is really ‘set in stone’.

In business, things change all the time and the ability to mould what you do around these changes (many times very sudden) will determine how able you are at overcoming problems.

Overcoming problems is key in persevering to your end goal, as the most stressful times for any new business owner or entrepreneur usually is how to overcome problems/ issues in their business.

So instead of running down the same dead end, you now know that you need to go 2 streets back and use a different side road, you know you want to get to your house and you know the exact route you want to use to get there – so much better than running over and over again into a wall isn’t it?

Passionate Perseverance

Doing something that you are truly passionate about makes the act of doing it over and over again until you succeed that much easier.

I’ve had people tell me wouldn’t it just be easier to sell something that everyone needs, like nails or bolts or something like that? Just imagine selling millions and millions of nails – you’d be rich!

Ironically I do know some people who sell nuts and bolts in the millions as a living, but they are truly passionate about selling nuts and bolts, would you be able to say the same?

So choose to pursue a business, hobby or task that you are truly passionate in achieving, something that even if you weren’t being paid anything, you’d want to do it anyway.

Not all the tips above will appeal to everyone, but I’m hoping that you take away at least something useful that you can action on and help you climb over that next hurdle, until you have your end goal firmly in your grasp.

“Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.” ~ Stephen King