Welcome to day #7 of our “Overcoming Your Fear Of Public Speaking” Crash Course.
Ryan: Hey, this is Ryan McLean from PublicSpeakingMan.com and congratulations on making it to Day 7 of our Overcoming Your Fear of Public Speaking training course. Now we’ve gone through a lot of different steps, talked about analyzing your fear, talked about different ways to practice, talked about preparing and things like that. This whole training course is designed to help you feel confident when you can get up in front of people and deliver your speech and give your speech with confidence and really if you have confidence then half of the battle is done for you. Ninety percent of the population is too scared to get up and speak in front of people, too scared to make their speech really good and to put in that practice and to become a skilled public speaker.
Record Video of Yourself
So you’ve made that step. You’ve gone through this training program and I just want to say I’m really proud of you. I’m really glad you’ve come this far and made it to Day 7 and we’ve got a really great lesson in store. The number one way to practice, this is what I use every single day practice my public speaking and get better at it. Obviously I’m not perfect you know no one’s perfect at public speaking, but this practice technique I think will help you more than any other apart from actually getting up in front of the crowd and speaking in public. And that is making a video of your public speaking but we’re not going to make a video and chop and change and do some edits. We’re going to do a full run through of your speech.
So we’ve gone through the steps of writing down your speech. We’ve remembered your speech word for word even though we don’t want to do that on the day. So we want to remember it word for word, but then we want to actually understand our content so well that if something happens then you know we can change very quickly. We’ve talked about coping strategies for the day. We’ve talked about what to do when you’re in the situations and something goes wrong when your PowerPoint slide all of a sudden stops working or someone interrupts you or all these things that cut off your flow. How can you go off on a tangent and come back? We’ve discussed all those things, but what we really need to do now is to get you confidence speaking your speech and also getting that important feedback that we need to understand how well we’re doing
So this is one of the most important things I’m going to ask you to do and this is something that you should do on a regular basis if you want to become a better public speaker. We’re going to make a full length video and we’re going to do our whole speech in that video. So for me I use my trusty iPhone 5. That’s what I’m filming on right now. There’s digital cameras. You can use a Samsung phone or an Android phone. You can get like a Flip Mino. You can get an iPad. There’s all different sorts of things that you can get and you can use to make a video, but you will need a video capturing device. You can use Handycam. I don’t know if they still exist or not maybe they were just back in the early 2000s when I was a kid and playing with those things, but use your smartphone. Get a tool. Set it up.
You can get these little tripods. I’ll put a link to them underneath, but you can buy them off eBay. They’re like $5-$10 or something like that for smartphones and they’re like maybe this big and what you can do is actually put your smartphone in it and set it up on a table or something like that. It’s not a standalone tripod. You can’t go into a field and start using it out there, but you can use it in homes. Set it up on a table. You can use it in your bedroom. Set it up in your closet pointing at you or set it up wherever you need. So I will put a link to that underneath so check those out if you’re interested; otherwise, sometimes I’ll just use books to prop up my phone or different sorts of things like that.
The reason we want to go all the way through is because on the day you’re not going to have a chance to stop. You’re not going to have a chance to go, “Oh, sorry.” Press pause. Edit and we’ll start again. On the day you’re not going to have that opportunity, and by going the entire way through and pushing through those awkward moments when you stuff up and you go, “Oh, my gosh. I can’t believe I said that. Oh, I’m so frustrated.” And forcing yourself to push through those moments you’re actually going to become a better public speaker because on the day despite how much you memorize your speech, despite how much you know your content, despite how confident you are dealing with distractions and things that could come up, you are going to stumble. You are going to make mistakes. You are going to say ums and ahs. You are going to forget your train of thought, and you’re going to get stuck at parts in your speech and by doing your speech all the way through and not actually expecting it to be perfect, but just doing it naturally and the way that you would on the day, you’ll actually start to realize I have trouble at this part. So how can I get through that part without it being awkward, or without being stuck. So you’ll start to recognize so we’re not going to film it just once. We’re going to film it multiple times and you’ll start to recognize those points in your speech where you’re having a lot of trouble, where you’re fumbling over your words, where you’re getting, what’s the word, anxious or you’re getting just put out of place so you’ll start to recognize those.
So what we’re going to do, Step 1. Set up your camera. Step 2. Press record and film your speech all the way through. If it’s a five minute speech and it takes you fifteen minutes to do it because you stuff up so many times, I don’t care. What I don’t want you doing is getting a couple of minutes through your speech and then stuffing up and then go, “OK, I’m going to start again.” That’s not the idea of this practice technique. The idea is to get two minutes into it, stuff up, fumble, and then find your way again and go, “Where was I? There I was. I’m going to keep going.” Because if that happens on the day, a lot of people don’t realize this, people in the audience don’t get it. They don’t know what you’re going to say. If you’re giving maybe a half an hour presentation or something like that, if you stuff up and take ten seconds, twenty seconds, even thirty seconds to find your place …
Sorry about that stuff up there. My phone actually ran out of space. So that’s exactly what we’re talking about. If you have a stuff up, to fix this and to edit that out, I’m not advising editing, but that maybe took about five seconds of your time for us to get back on track. In the span of things it’s not that big of a deal. So what we want to do is get you used to stuffing up, get you used to going through that. So Step 1 we set up the camera. Step 2 we recorded it and we went all the way through making mistakes and everything, and now the painful part, very painful, Step 3 which is to go back and watch your video.
Get Comfortable With Yourself
Now what we want to do is we just want to get comfortable with ourselves. We want to get comfortable with the way we present. We want to look at ourselves and look at what we like and look at what we don’t like. So we’re going to watch our speech. We’re not doing a full analysis of “Where could I change one sentence to make it sound awesome?” or anything like that. What we’re going to do is just go through our speech and we’re going to look at ourselves. We’re going to look at our body language. Are we doing anything stupid like in U9 when I was thrusting towards the audience. Obviously we don’t want to be doing that so are we doing anything silly? We need to look at our body language and just say if my shoulders are shrugged or I keep touching my hair, we’ll start to recognize those things. Or if you’re listening to yourself and you realize you say um, um, um, all the time or one that I’m really bad at I say, “You know? You know?” So I talk through these things and, you know, I say you know a lot, you know? There, I just stuffed up again. See? It doesn’t matter. So we want to look at ourselves. We want to watch it back. We want to look at those points where we’re either doing something awkward with our body or something awkward with our speech.
As we watch that we’ll get more comfortable with ourselves. We want to identify just a couple of things to work on. Maybe we want to pull our shoulders back and stand up straight. Maybe we want to say um less. Maybe we want to speak faster or speak slower or be clearer with our language. We just want to identify a few of those things and then after we watch ourselves, then we repeat the process and we do it all over again. We film ourselves again and we go back and watch through it.
That is the final tip and this is one of the best techniques. I use it all the time. If I’m doing sales speeches and I want to practice it then I’ll do it to myself on camera or things like this on the website. I won’t just do this presentation. I’ll then go back and I’ll watch myself and I’ll say, “OK, where can I improve, Ryan? Where can I make this better? Where can I improve my speech?” and things like that.
YouTube Upload
Now there’s one final task that I want you to do and this is really, really important. I want you to film yourself and when you’re happy with what you’ve done and you’re happy with your speech and it hasn’t taken you fifteen minutes to do your five minute speech, what I want you to do is I want you to upload it to YouTube. And I’m going to put instructions underneath how you can do that, but basically what we’re doing is we’re uploading the video to YouTube and we’re going to set it not … it’s a private setting so it’s not private so you need to log in to see it, but it’s a hidden link so it’s not going to show up in the YouTube feed. No one’s going to see you, but what it means is you can upload it to YouTube.
You can send that link through to me and then there’s an opportunity for me to critique your speech and to look for ways where you can improve your speech. Maybe you need to change the introduction because it’s just dull and dry. Maybe you need to add some more stories in there. Maybe I can see that you’re doing some little twitch or something like that. I can help you to analyze your speech, help you to make a few tweaks and changes just to make it that little bit better. Now I can’t make your speech perfect for you. I can’t make you a perfect presenter, but I can give you some tips and advice and things like that. So go below. There’s a video below on how you can upload it to YouTube using that privacy setting and then what I want you to do is email that link, the YouTube link, through to me. And then what I’ll do is I’ll go through your video and I’ll analyze it and I’ll give you a few tips as well.
So that’s it for me. Thanks for going through this seven day series about crushing your fear and really overcoming that fear of pubic speaking. Really proud of you for getting this far. I hope you’ve been doing all the practice techniques and all the tips and tricks that I’ve been sharing with you. Love to hear your feedback on the program. Love to hear what else you want to know. So flick me an email and don’t forget. Make that video and upload it to YouTube and send it through to me. I look forward to hearing from you.