Hey hey hey powerful public speakers in the making. This is Ryan McLane from public speakingpower.com. And today I want to talk about motivation and more specifically help you through motivation and how you can stay motivated at public speaking. Because with any skill that we are trying to learn, it takes practice. It takes practice and it takes some more practice. So how can we stay motivated enough to keep practicing, keep doing it, keep improving, keep getting better? So this is going to be a quick one today and I just want to share a couple of things that have motivated me over the last couple of years and some other things that keep me motivated and some of the lessons that I’ve learnt. If you like this podcast then why not subscribe and leave a review on iTunes and you can get access to our free crash course on how to become a better public speaker overnight. Just head over to www.publicspeakingpower.com/podcast to get free access to all of that there.
So, motivation and habitual motivation. I think one of the best examples that I’ve ever heard when it comes to motivation actually came from Michelle Bridges who is a fitness instructor in Australia. And my wife was doing her online Fitness Courses, it was – I can even remember how many days but you know 60 or 90 days to getting fit and she was watching these videos and I was on in the background as I was reading a book or something and Michelle Bridges was talking about motivation and she was saying that doing exercise can be similar to having a shower for you. I’m guessing that most of you don’t need to be motivated, to be pumped up, to be amped just to have a shower. Okay, you get dirty and you need to have a shower otherwise as you stink so the motivation is there because: a) it’s habit and b) it’s a cultural thing. If you stink then no one’s going want to hang out with you. So we don’t actually really need to get motivated to have a shower. It’s something that we do. It’s something that happens every single day. Michelle Bridges was then relating this back to exercising and saying that once you become good at exercising and once you do it regularly it becomes like that shower for you. You get up in the morning you need to exercise. It’s not something that you need to get motivated to do. It’s not something that you want to do or may not want to do. It’s kind of something that you have to do. It is part of your regiments. It’s part of you being who you are. It’s part of you being normal. It’s part of you being ready for the day. And I think the same approach can apply when it comes to learning any skill, be a public speaking, or anything else is that if you want to get better, if you want to get really good then you have to do it a lot and it has to become a habit for you.
One of the best tips that I have ever learnt about how to wake up early in the morning was rather than necessarily being pumped, being excited for it, putting your alarm across the end of the room so that you have to get out of bed and all that sort of stuff which is all well and good was a strange tip that I heard and I have applied before which has really worked and what it is when you are not tired during the middle of the day, when you are just hanging out what you do is you do practice and so you go and you lie in bed and what you do is you set your alarm for let’s say in two minutes time. So you lie down, you close your eyes, you’ve got your alarm set, your alarm goes off and you practice your routine. You turn your alarm off, you get up, you put your pants on, you walk out of the room. And then what you do is you go back in you do it again. Take your pants off, hop back into bed, set your alarm for another two minutes or one-minute and then close your eyes. The alarm goes off, you get up, turn your alarm off, put your pants on, walk out of the room. And you just repeat constantly, constantly, constantly and so then what happens is when your alarm goes off in the morning at 6:00 a.m. or 5:00 a.m. or 4 a.m. or whenever it is that you want to get up. It’s not a decision that needs to be made to say, “Oh I don’t want to get up today. It worries me all my life it’s so hard. Oh I really need that extra hour sleep because I really have a hard day of going to the beach today and you I just need that extra hour sleep. I don’t want to exercise, and so on. You know all those things that go through your mind.
If you do the previous practice then what happens is it is not a decision it’s something that you habitually do. You rollover, turn your alarm off, get up, you put your pants on, you walk out the room. And so rather than it being something that we need to be motivated for, it is something that happens naturally. And so for me the same is starting to happen with public speaking and this podcast. I decided to do a daily podcast partly because it was blowing up, the podcast was getting loads of downloads and feedbacks from you guys but also for the fact that if I want to improve, if I want to get great then I need to be doing this every day. I need to be doing this constantly and for my business and for my life it’s something that I want do regular. It is something I’m passionate about. Communicating is something that I am very passionate about. So if I want to get better I could do it once a week and it might take me ten years to become great or if I do it every single day, if I do it multiple times per day well maybe I can speed up that loop and maybe I can get there just that little bit faster, seven times faster really than if I was doing it once a week. And so for me now getting a podcast out has kind of become habitual and more and more as I do it it’s becoming habitual and if I haven’t put out a podcast for the day it feels uncomfortable like I haven’t had a shower. And so the other day when I made a podcast and put it out – I filmed one when I was bush hawking with the kids because I knew I just had to get one in and another one I made at night time even though I like to post and schedule it for the next day so it goes out at the same time. If I haven’t done that or haven’t had the time when the day comes I might not. I need to get one out today, I need to do it and so I just do it. I get it done. I post it when I post it as long as it’s on that day. So it starts to become this habit for you.
So rather than I think trying to get motivated for your public speech, trying to get amped up, trying to get pumped up, trying to get super excited, look I think these are all really good things to do before an important speech. I think they’re really good things to do to be prepared, to be excited, to give a great presentation but you find and I was just listening to an interview on Solopreneurhour which you can find over at www.solohour.com with Pat Flynn talking about his public speaking experiences. I am going to try and get him on the show hopefully I can get him on to interview him. But he used to be completely nervous. He used to hate public speaking. He was really scared. He would wrote-learn his speeches. He would spend hours in his hotel room before the event and the night before the event dressed up in his full clothes practicing his speech over and over and over and over again and in this conversation on Solohour the podcast I think it’s episode number seven, the interviewer asked Pat, “If someone was to say to you get up in front of an audience and give a speech on social media or public speaking or internet marketing or whatever it is do you think you could do it?” And Pat was saying, “Yes, now that I’ve had so much experience, now that I’ve done it so much I’ve got this archive of stories that I could then draw upon and I could give a great presentation without any preparation, since I know a lot about marketing now a days and I can even use resources from sites as the Indexer for this as well.” And so I think when it comes to being motivated for your public speaking, when it comes to be pumped and amped up top for a presentation that you are going to give that is all well and good, but if you can make it habitual if you can make it something that you do over and over. It does not have to be in front of a crowd. It can be just be by yourself and record yourself. You can do it by yourself. Do in the shower. Do it on the toilet. I don’t care but get in the habit speaking. Get in the habit of practicing public speaking and then it just becomes something that you do. It’s something that’s second nature; it’s something that’s not scary; it’s something that you don’t have to be motivated for.
And so I think my biggest motivation tip is rather than trying to get motivated, rather than trying to get amped look for ways to make something that you want in your life habitual. Look for ways to make it just something that you do second nature like driving a car. A lot of us now have been driving for so long that is just second nature. I can drive an hour and a half and I hardly notice that I have even driven anywhere and my subconscious mind just takes me wherever I need to go. And so the same skills can apply to motivation, guys.
And so hope that this has helped you. If you guys want more tips on how you can practice public speaking in private. Let’s say you’re not ready to get up in front of a crowd. You are not quite ready to talk in front of your friends or family and you want some tips you want to be able to honed your skills at home in the privacy of your own home without getting up in front of people then I have a course for you. So just go to www.publicspeakingpower.com/private and you can read all about that course there. I have for twenty-one different activities, step-by-step guide on how to do these activities that will boost your confidence in public speaking, that will help it become habitual for you, help you get motivated, help you become more fluent, help you become better and all of that good stuff. Head over if you’re interested to www.publicspeakingpower.com/private and you can see all the details for that their.
So thank you so much for listening in guys. I hope that this has helped to give you some ideas around motivation. I know that these tips have really helped me and are helping me in my life and that I will continue to make things that I want to do habitual and look for ways to do that. And so until next time, keep practicing guys, keep becoming powerful public speakers. You are powerful, you are great and you can become a great public speaker so don’t give up keep trying, keep learning, keep practicing and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.
