5 Tips To Improve Your Public Speaking - How To Speak Professionally - Speech Speaker Tips
Hi!
I'm Antonio Centeno, the founder of Real Men Real Style.
Today, I'm going to be giving you five tips on how to improve the way you speak.
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I really find that when someone purchases the e-book, they take action.
Guys, if anything, watching my videos, it's great reading my articles even better, but
you really need to take action on this stuff if you want to improve your life.
Having said that, this is a response to a question I saw on the comments awhile back.
Someone was asking me, "How do you speak the way you do?
You come across as really natural.
It seems like you were born that way."
I really want to throw that fallacy right out the window.
Guys, I practice a lot.
If you go back to my earlier videos, I don't think they were that great.
I was talking really slow and I've since, I think, become much better in front of the
camera, but even before that, for years, I have been trying to improve the way I speak
in front of groups and audiences because I feel it's really important.
I think in high school, I remember reading something about how public speaking is the
number one fear that people have.
I was an introvert.
I was really quiet in high school and it was hard for me to get up in front of a group
and talk.
Presentations were not my strong point, but I realized that if I was going to do well
with what I wanted to do with my life, I need it to be able to get up in front of people
and talk.
I've frozen up in front of groups.
It's happened in times.
I really wish I could go back and help myself, but these are five tips I have found that
have really helped me improve the way I present and I speak in front of others.
1.
Practice
There's a reason why I'm putting out so many videos.
This is because I've really got big expectations for myself and where I want to take my channel,
my business, and a lot of these videos I do, I look at it, is practicing for where I'm
going.
I know we've put out well over 200 videos, but what you haven't seen are the hundreds
and hundreds of videos that haven't made it simply because I didn’t feel they were good
enough.
Let's just say I practice a lot and if you don't practice, if you think you can wing
it, you're really setting yourself up for failure.
There was a guy named Pat Flynn.
I follow him over at Smart Passive Income and I know he spoke recently at Blog World.
He went through the entire process of how he practiced again and again, sometimes in
front of his -- I think he's got a two-year-old son now; that was the only audience.
But when he got up there and he gave his speech at Blog World, guess what?
All of his presentation props failed.
They couldn't get it going, but Pat just looked forward and he kept going because he knew
his presentation by heart.
When you practice that much and that doesn’t even bother you, people are just going to
be, "Wow!"
so practice, practice, practice.
2.
Listen
Now, there's this great saying, "We've got one mouth, two ears, so you should listen
twice as much as you should speak."
Believe it or not, guys, I read every single comment that comes through and I do pay attention
to what you all are saying.
I've been trying to adjust.
I know you guys are screaming for visuals, but because I don't have a full-time audio
tech person, it's still a ways off before I have visuals in all my videos, but I am
listening and I'm trying to adjust.
I'm trying to make things better.
Listen to your audience.
I know it may be hard when you don't have an audience at all and that audience may simply
be your brother.
It may be your kids.
It may be your parents, but listen to them and adjust a bit.
Now, listen with a great enough soul after you start doing it a while because you're
going to find that not everyone's opinion is right, but definitely be listening to people
because at the end of the day, those are the people you're trying to reach.
3.
Record and watch
This is kind of related to listening in practice, but if you've got a video camera and most
of you guys have one on your phone, if somehow you can record yourself, record it and watch.
It's going to be painful because you're going to see just how good or how bad you really
are, most likely bad because we are our worst critics, but if you can get it up to a point
where you feel pretty good about the presentation, you really want to do this because you're
going to start seeing that you use probably a lot of crutch words, and crutch words are
"umm", "like", "or".
I use crutch words.
I think my favorites one is "at the end of the day", if you haven't heard me say that
probably a hundred times or more in my videos, so record and watch.
4.
Be honest with yourself
Don't try to live in this dream thinking that, "I'm the best."
Yes, we all think it.
In fact, what are the stats out there, that 80% to 90% of us think we're above average
and if you think about that, that just doesn’t work out.
Only 49% of us can be above average and most of us think we're really above average.
Be honest with yourself, but realize that if you're honest with yourself, if you're
willing to go that extra mile, there's no traffic on the extra mile.
Just look around.
How many people are going through the extra effort to put out content in your profession?
How many people are getting up at 4:00 in the morning, work until 10:00 or 11:00 at
night, really putting out and becoming a leader in the industry?
So remember, there's no traffic on the extra mile.
5.
Know the subject and know your audience
This is really about you taking the time to do the research.
Before I did any of these videos, guys, I've written hundreds of articles.
It's why I can talk about this stuff.
I mean, I work full time as a custom clothier, so I see the clothing every single day.
Because I know the subject, I can talk very well about it.
Now, don't let that hold you back if you feel that you're just getting in this.
When I first started off, I didn’t know anything about this industry.
Go back five years.
I was just graduating business school and I did not have a custom clothier.
I wasn't a custom clothing expert or a style expert, but I've worked to transform myself.
And literally within a period of five years, which is relatively a very short amount of
time, I've been able to build up the brand I have.
Okay.
Last, I did talk also about the audience, so you want to know who you're speaking with.
I judged at the Venture Labs Investment Competition down in Texas and I have a lot of people presenting
me business ideas.
I felt one of the big things that these people messed up on, is they didn’t realize the
audience they were going for.
One of them was a great presentation, but they had a video which was aimed and was really
risqué.
It was a minute long and they've only got 15 minutes in that presentation.
I really felt they should've kept that video like at 15 seconds.
I was looking around and I was the youngest guy on that panel.
Most of them were like 50 to 60-year-old guys, and they were just in shock and awe that they
were showing us, let's just say, very interesting party photos from Southern Cal.
It was a great business, by the way, and I really love their business idea, but that
one video, it was like, gosh, you've got to know your audience a little bit better, so
know who you're speaking with and build the presentation or how you're talking to them.
Last bonus one, number six, I didn’t even talk about it or didn’t tell you I was going
to give you this one, but carry notes.
A lot of people wonder how do I talk for so many minutes without cutting up these videos.
Well, really I've got a little bit of a teleprompter.
Well, it's not really a teleprompter.
It's a whiteboard which has the points laid right out there, so occasionally you'll see
me look over.
That's because I don't memorize this stuff.
I try to do so many videos right now that I need this to be able to go to, but if you're
giving out a presentation, perhaps you can have a whiteboard in front of you, but what
you can't have are the notes in your back pocket.
Now, hopefully you won't have to reach back there and pull them out, but if you get lost,
if you lose your voice, if something happens, you can just excuse yourself, pull them out.
No one is going to hold that against you.
We're all human beings.
Okay.
So hopefully that helped.
I wish you guys the best and let me know on the comments what you guys think of this.
It's a little bit outside of the style arena, but I think it applies.
I've got a gentleman, he's a speech pathologist, and we're going to be talking about possibly
forming an entire business that would be aimed towards helping men speak better especially
as more and more men are looking to get up in front of groups.
It would actually probably gear towards women as well, but it really would be about helping
people get rid of crutch words, speak in a more authoritative tone and voice so the fact
that you've got an accent or that you sound perhaps -- I'll just use another quick example.
I had a good friend, a medical doctor but he had, let's just say, a very Southern Californian
accent.
I remember when he would talk it would pull down his credibility because he used so many
crutch words even though he was an incredible surgeon.
It would just make him not seem as professional whenever he was speaking in front of a group,
so I'm curious.
If you guys think there's room for something like this, go ahead and leave your thoughts
on the comments.
I will see you guys in the next video.
Bye-bye.