Hi guys this Ryan from publicspeakingpower.com and I wanted today to give you guys some more thoughts on being an authentic public speaker. So I am not sure whether you listened to the podcast yesterday or not but if you haven’t I do advise you to go back and have a listen to it. I went on a massive rant about being an authentic versus being a polish public speaker and the frustrations that I have with some public speakers who are probably considered the greatest in the world but who just don’t seem to be authentic and the love that I have for the public speakers that are authentic. And what I want to do today is just give a couple more thoughts on that and just expand upon what I spoke about yesterday.
And because yesterday I spoke about passion versus polish and really came down to being authentic verse being polish and I think yes you can have both but I think being authentic is the most important thing that you need to do when it comes to public speaking and I think that’s because we have had a change in culture where people don’t necessarily just want to learn about a topic, people want to trust a person, people want to connect with the person and people want to learn from a person so yes they are interested in the topic but if they just wanted to learn about it they could go and read a text book but who read text books these day? College students, high school students, nobody outside of college or high school really reads a textbook and so people want to learn from real people and they want to know that the person that they are speaking to they can trust because we’ve all had experiences where a business that we have dealt with or a friend that we have dealt with has displace their trust and we’ve lost that trust in them.
So now with the fact that the Internet has so much transparency, the fact that there’s so much content out there I could learn about public speaking from so many different people. I could learn about investing in property from so many different people. I could learn about being a great dad from so many different people and from so many different companies as well but who I choose to learn from will come down to firstly who I trust that the information that they give is good and then probably secondly the types of content they deliver and how I can get access to it and the price that it’s for. But trust is that big thing. Trust is that massive issue and it’s something that I think we pay not enough attention to and something that we need to pay more attention to – that trust and authenticity.
And so yesterday I said I go against polish and I go against not following a script but following a step-by-step how-to guide to being a public speaker. I believe in overarching principles of public speaking but when it comes to exact ways to do things that’s where on a bit iffy. And look I may be naïve because I am still learning on his journey of public speaking but I think when it comes down to the principles of a public speech, a principle is something like have a great introduction. That is a great principle but when you get into specifics where someone says you need to ask questions in your introduction that is the best way to do an introduction. Well, that I’m not so sure about. Have a great introduction yes because I understand that you need to draw the audience in but a great introduction for you is different to a great introduction for me and the way you want to deliver your speech and who you are delivering your speech to verses how I am delivering my speech and who I want to deliver my speech is going to be very different.
So the why we introduce ourselves, the way we introduce our speech or what we want to talk about the topic is going be very different and so I agree with the principles of having a great introduction, use stories and all these sorts of things but I think when people get really granular and really specific and say okay you need to have a great introduction here is the way to do it. That’s when I think you should have alarm bells going off in your head. Here is a way to do it definitely no. Here is a way to have a great introduction. Here are a couple of ways to have a great introduction. Here is a couple of different things that you could do and you could try them out for yourself and see what works.
But I think when it comes to learning about public speaking I think we need to constantly be analyzing and it helps if we are public speaking all the time. It helps if we are constantly speaking in front of people or constantly even speaking ourselves we can analyze what works well and what doesn’t. So what I really wanted to get at in yesterday’s podcast which I don’t feel like I had covered enough I really enjoyed it. I really think that it’s a good podcast. I really think that the message was clear and needed to be said but I think what I missed about it was the fact that ….oh man I lost my train of thought now…sorry guys. Leading up to this big crescendo and then it just died off, can’t remember …and I am going to pause it and see if I can remember. I stopped pausing and I really couldn’t think of it so if it was really good I apologize or it was probably just another rant.
So I just want to give a couple thoughts now on being an authentic public speaking and what that means. And firstly I think that it means being yourself. When I was interviewing Tim Reid from Small Business Big Marketing he is a professional public speaker and the bulk of his income comes from public speaking. And his biggest tip and the biggest takeaway I took from that interview with him which you can check out on the podcast if you like go to www.publicspeakingpower.com/timbo and you get access to that there.
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But the biggest thing that took away from him was the fact that he said look you need to be yourself because then you don’t have to worry about anything else, you can focus on your content, you can focus on your delivery if you’re just being yourself. So I think the first part to being authentic is being yourself and I think the second part to being authentic is talking about something that you’re passionate about or finding some aspect of what you’re talking about where your passion comes out because I think that public speaking and Jesse said this, Jesse Milani when I did an interview with him as well is that people remember things more when you bring emotion into it. And what I think public speaking is, is a transference of a message and the best way I think to transfer a message is to transfer it through emotion. And I think passion is one of the most powerful emotions that you can use to transfer a message. You can use any sort of emotion, that’s fine but I just think if you are passionate about a topic, if you’re excited about a topic then that shines through and that excitement will rub off on other people. When my associate of two weeks of my pharmaceutical role left and when I talk to my colleagues if I’m passionate about a topic and they are kind of down in the dumps I will be able to bring their excitement level up. Maybe not up to the same level am but that passion is contagious and that passion you can implant into someone else and the same thing goes if I am having a crappy day and they call me and I am all down in the dumps
I can actually bring them down to my level I can transfer that emotion of just distaste or whatever it is it – distaste is not the right word but when you are feeling upset, when you are down in the dumps you can past that sorrow on to someone else and so those emotions transfer whether you like it or not and those emotions shine through, and the more authentic you are, the more they come through and I think you can tell if you listen today and if you listened yesterday the passion that I have for what I am speaking about and the conviction that I have for what I am speaking about. I know you guys can’t see me but if you could see my hands moving, the gestures that I am using, it just feels like this deep conviction that I have that we shouldn’t necessarily believe everything out there. We should be ourselves, we should look for the principles, we should look for the guiding principles and then we should look at multiple ways to outwork those guiding principles and how we can do them better.
So being authentic firstly be yourself. Secondly be passionate or be some sort of emotion. Maybe it can be sorrow. Why not? Be said, transfer sadness to your audience. And then thirdly I think comes back to tell stories the way you tell stories. I have been on YouTube and I’ve been looking at story-telling because I think it is one of the most important things about public speaking but we all tell stories differently. When I’m at a training with my colleague Towan we know the same story, we’ve been in the same stores, we talk to each other, we know the same stories but we tell them in different ways so she might start off with a different way. She uses a lot more detail than I do but if I was to try and use as much detail as she does in her stories I would sound clunky, I would sound awkward and so even though we’re telling the same story we’re telling it differently because that’s part of being authentic and being yourself and so when people say do exactly this that probably works really well for them and that’s probably their way of being authentic but you just need to be careful that you are not taking an exact step-by-step guide because I think public speaking is more of an art than it is a craft.
Yes you can learn the skills. Yes you can become better at it but it’s not a step-by-step manual. You are not building like furniture guys. You are speaking to people, you are transferring a message and every time you get up and speak, well firstly every speaker is different, so you’re very different to me but then every audience is different. No two times when you speak is an audience going to be exactly the same and even him if you’re speaking to exactly the same people. Let’s say you have a community where the same ten people come to your group every week and you’re speaking every week. Your audience is never the same because the mind frame that those people are in, the stage of life that they are at, the week that they’ve had, the feelings that they’re feeling at that moment will be different every single time, it would never be exactly the same. So I just think we can’t get too granular with this, we need to stick to big bitch and we need to stick to being authentic.
I am going to close off here. This has been a bit of a ramble; it’s not been something that’s been concrete. But I think authenticity isn’t concrete. Is it? It’s not something that I can teach you in a step by step guide of how you can be authentic. You know who you are. You know who you are in front of your spouse, in front of your kids, in front of your best friends. You know who you are in the depths if your heart and when you’re alone. So being authentic I guessed is just being true to yourself, being confident in who you are and let that shine through because at the end at the day I truly believe that people want to learn from someone they trust and because of the changing media, the way that we are consumed in media these days people are less likely to trust someone just because they work for a Corporation. They are less likely to trust someone just because they have great public speaking skills but they’re more likely to trust someone if they get those subtle cues that this is who the person is and they’re not just putting on a show for me, that this is actually them. And what those other cues are I don’t know. They are probably subconscious. Maybe I need to get some clinical psychologist on here to discuss some of those subtle body language cues that we use but if you just be yourself those cues will shine through anyway.
So I am Ryan McLean. I am from publicspeakingpower.com. If you want to get more information like this simply sign up for a crash course on public speaking. Go to www.publicspeakingpower.com/podcast and you can subscribe to the podcast; you can leave a review on iTunes chains. Give me five stars if you love it; give me four stars if it’s alright; give me one star if you hate it; whatever you think give me your reviews. I don’t care if…….. I do care if they are crap. I don’t want bad reviews but I love feedback and so if you give me a one-star review shoot me an email as well ryan@publicspeakingpower.com and tell me what you didn’t like, tell me what I can improve. So www.publicspeakingpower.com/podcast and you can sign up and get free access to a crash course there.
So thank you so much guys for listening in. I truly believe that we can all become powerful public speakers and if we have a message that we want to get across then public speaking and being able to communicate that is one of the most important things that we can do with our lives. So until next time keeping you keeping authentic and I will be talking to you guys tomorrow.
