The Art of Public Speaking

The course of human history and personal destiny has changed more by the spoken word than by the written word. Many of the major turning points in your own life were when someone said something to you that affected you so profoundly that ever afterwards your thinking, your feelings and your actions were different.
There is nothing more important for you than to become really, really good at the art and science of expressing yourself in words to other people.

I’m going to share with you some of the most important ideas I’ve learned in the art of public speaking that you can use, starting immediately, to become more effective and more persuasive in your interactions with others.

At my seminars around the country, people often come up to me and say, “I would like to do what you do. How do I get started?”

Whenever someone asks me how they can become a public speaker, I always refer them to the book Eloquence in Public Speaking written by Dr. Kenneth McFarland. McFarland, who passed away in 1985, is also known as the “Dean of American Public Speakers,” and in his book he didn’t talk about methodology or technique at all.

His central message, which influenced me very strongly when I began speaking publicly, was that the key to eloquence is the emotional component that the speaker brings to the subject.

To put it another way, the starting point of being an excellent speaker is for you to really care about your subject. I watched Wally “Famous Amos” give a talk years and years ago. He started with very little and built up an extraordinarily successful chain of chocolate chip cookie stores. He has since devoted much of his time and money to helping people who are less fortunate, especially those having problems with illiteracy.

He is not necessarily an accomplished public speaker, but the talk that he gave was absolutely excellent. And the reason was because he spoke from his heart. He spoke with a deep concern and compassion about the needs of people who couldn’t read. His eloquence came because he really cared about his subject and everyone listening could sense that emotion even though his structure and his style may not have been as polished as someone who had spoken for many years.

Part One of Public Speaking

So the starting point of the art of public speaking is for you to pick a subject that you really care about. It is for you to think through the subjects that have had an inordinate impact on you, the subjects that you would like to share with others because you really, intensely feel that others could benefit from your knowledge. Let’s say, for example, that you feel that people could be far more successful in life if they learned how to be more understanding of others. You have found, in your own life, that the more you worked at understanding where others were coming from, the more effective you were in interacting and communicating with them. Because of the impact that this knowledge had on your life, you feel that others could benefit from learning and practicing what you have learned and practiced.

Part Two of Public Speaking

The second part of public speaking, the real core to the subject, is preparation. Preparation is more important than anything else except caring about your subject.

Ernest Hemmingway once wrote that, “In order to write well, you must know 10 words about the subject for every word that you write. Otherwise,” he said, “the reader will know that this is not true writing.” I personally feel that, in speaking, you must know 100 words for every word that you speak. Otherwise, your audience will have the sense that you don’t really know what you’re talking about.

It’s not unusual for a person to spend many hours, days and even weeks, preparing for a talk. Whenever you see a professional speaker who gives a talk that seems almost effortless, you can know for sure that it was preceded by enormous preparation.

To prepare for a talk, the first thing you do is write out an objective statement of what you wish to accomplish as a result of this presentation. If it’s a 10 minute presentation, or a 10 hour presentation, the statement of your objective is the same. It’s the answer to the question, “Who is my audience and what effect do I want my talk to have upon them?”

So here is my advice to you. Pay any price, spend any amount of time, overcome any obstacle, but make a decision, right now, that you’re going to learn to speak well to other people. It could be one of the most important decisions you ever make in assuring your long term success in your career.

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From My Mentor,

Brian Tracy

You Must Create and Make Use of Your Quiet Time

The era of ‘work hard and get success’ is past. Now, it is work smart and get success. Some people will disagree with this still maybe because of their misconception about ‘working smart.’ Let me try to clear this: the era of intense physical labour to get things done is now fast fading away. This is the hard work that many people believe in. Now, we are in a period of the great mental involvement to acquire success. This is working smart. There’s however a twist to all this: mental work is really hard work. Get me? Working smart entails putting all your mental faculties to great task. You push them until they give you what you want. This is by no means child’s play, but its better and accomplishes so much more than physical labour.

Someone said that necessity has often being referred to as the mother of invention and if that’s so, creativity is the father. Every one has a level of creativity in them right from birth but you can get much out of your creativity only to the extent that you use your creative tool- box, your mind. All you have to do is find out the right methods to employ to get this creativity out of your mind.

You cannot however get the best of your mental faculties, that’s talking about the mind, brain, conscious and subconscious if they do not get the right atmosphere of absolute quietness; solitude. It is so very unfortunate that most people do not have any quiet time when they have to sit and dig into themselves and activate the immense power of their mind. This I have been practicing and it has been giving me great results.

The most important part in the process of getting in touch with your feelings is to begin to practice solitude on a regular basis. Solitude is the most powerful activity in which you can engage. Men and women who practice it correctly and on a regular basis never fail to be amazed at the difference it makes in their lives. "Men and women begin to become great when they begin to take time quietly by themselves, when they begin to practice solitude", said Catherine Ponder. It is by no means an easy task but it would be everything to you.

Go through the biographies or stories of most if not all of the world’s great and famous achievers and you will discover they had a particular period when they retreat to spend time with themselves. They spend time with their imaginations (dreams) seeing them come to be in the physical. This concept of use of the mind called visualization aids greatly of the desired goals.

Let me explain the power of visualization with this story that has not stopped amazing and inspiring me since the first day I read it: Two basketball teams of equal ability were asked to practice shooting. One team went to the court every day for two weeks to practice while the second group only practiced their shooting by visualizing it; of course in the quiet (emphasis mine). At the end of two weeks, both teams were brought to the court to contest. Guess which team did better; the team that only visualized their shooting.

This is was possible because it is the mind that sends impulses to the brain which in turn controls every other part of the body through the Central Nervous System (CNS). When you visualize, you are in essence training your brain. As you know, during the visualization every thing you do is perfect. And so because this perfect training impulse is sent to the brain, the execution coordinated by the brain is also perfect. Another great example of the potency of visualization is the case of Beethoven who gave the world its best symphony after he had gone completely deaf at the age of thirty- five. He visualized the notes in his mind and I believe he could hear them before playing it out to the world; amazingly without practice. Successful public speakers know and use this concept which accounts so much for their success. They visualize themselves speaking the actual words they would like to say during the real speech over and over again, which is why most of the great speakers that have left a mark never give their speech reading from paper. Ask Dale Carnegie. Am sure you would have noticed the toast of the day, Barack Obama giving great speeches during the election campaign.

The success of your visualization however depends on its frequency. How often you do it? It depends also on it duration. The length of time you can hold that mental picture. Other factors that influence its success are the clarity and intensity. Do you see it as you want it to be? The last factor is the emotion with which you desire it.

If you are going to have to put your brain along with the creativity of your mind to full test, then you MUST start now to create your quiet times. The reason you must do this is that as you run from pillar to post, from east to west, engaged in one activity or the other (which we can not seem to get away from because our universe is so full of them), only the conscious part of your mind, the AWAKE you, is active. The most important and strongest of them, the subconscious is subdued. It is not as if it is not working (as we will be seeing in the next section), only you will not be able to hear it as you battle through the bustles of everyday life.

Culled from my about to be released book The Most Potent Weapon for Success!