How to Enjoy Public Speaking
Make public speaking and presenting something you look forward to, online and in-person. In this course, you change your relationship with public speaking. It’s about how you engage with your material and your audience.
You will learn to:
· Choose what state you want to be in
· See how you have set yourself up for failure in the past and instead regularly set yourself up for success
· Think on your feet, and field questions and comments, in ways that enhance your presentation and create a safe space for the audience
· Recognize and respond to those fears, concerns, or triggers that used to derail you, so that you can handle whatever comes
· Understand and communicate the value you bring and the value in your message, so that the important messages land
· Connect with your audience
· Come across as confident and be seen and heard in the ways you want to be
Most courses try to give you pointers about the details - where to look, what words to use, how to pitch your voice, rhetoric techniques - and they also help you become willing to present when you need to. They are focused on overcoming the fear many people have of public speaking, but stop there. Those are useful things to do. But they leave so much on the table, both in terms of presenting well and in terms of enjoying the experience. And when we enjoy something we engage with it richly and often enough to keep mastering the craft.
This course takes a different approach. It is about learning how people who enjoy presenting do it. When someone does something very well, they often love to do it. They choose to put effort and care into figuring out the craft. To make public speaking, or presenting, into something that works for you, there is so much we can tap into, regarding how you think about it, how you see yourself and your role, how you show up to the event, how you engage with the audience, and much more, such that you can enjoy it more and thrive with it.
Many people emerge from this course having transformed their relationship with public speaking and presenting in wonderful ways, including those who came in as absolute beginners to experienced speakers.
What level is this for?
I have had people at all levels take this course, from a person who was uncomfortable with any one on one conversation, to managers who are called to present and prefer not to, to business owners who want to improve at marketing themselves and their work, to sales professionals and seasoned speakers with no fears left who may have been publicly presenting every week for 20 years. The reason it is appropriate for this wide range is because you learn to recognize and address your own unique triggers, you tap into your own unique value, you connect with the mental and emotional states most useful to you, and you learn to make use of your own resources to be adaptive in the moment and drive yourself and your audience towards what you see as success.
The lessons in this course are tools that I use every time I present because they are always relevant to my new context, new level of mastery, and new audience. I have been professionally speaking since 2000 in a range of capacities, to tens of thousands of people - public high school teacher, Ivy League professor, NLP trainer, scientific conference presenter, executive education through top tier leadership development organizations, trainings and presentations within global fortune 100 organizations including private sessions with C-Suite executives, conference keynotes and panels, news interviews, TEDx, emceeing events with 40,000 viewers, including global audiences from all continents but Antartica, and my favorite of all - small workshops like this one.
Where do these lessons come from:
1. NLP – NLP excels at providing tools for choosing your mental and emotional state. It is ideal for identifying resources you have within that you can apply in new ways to resolve the challenges at hand. And it provides the structure for learning how others who do things well do them so that you can model their excellence. It thus has a wonderful toolkit for learning how people who enjoy public speaking do it.
2. Behavioral science – psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive therapy have a great deal to offer about how we can get in our own way and how we can adaptively course-correct before we do as well as after we do. From my experience as a PhD in Psychology, a scientist, and professor, I draw when appropriate from these lessons. They provide wonderful guidelines and tools for creating a relationship with public speaking, with yourself, and with your audiences that make public speaking something we can enjoy mastering and excel at.
3. Experience – I love to teach, to present, and to speak publicly. This love has grown as I have studied NLP, learned from the behavioral sciences, observed others whom I admire as speakers who enjoy their craft, and applied the tools of NLP to identifying what it is I and others do who enjoy this craft and who find the kinds of receptions they want from their audiences. From more than 20 years of practice and study while speaking professionally, and through developing this course over time with many cohorts of students, I have distilled these lessons.
When taught virtually, this course occurs across 4 weeks, 3.5 hours each time. Zoom links provided upon registration.