With public speaking there are several techniques that can take a scared novice through to competent speaker quickly and easily.

Structure
A lot of speeches are awful simply because the speaker didn’t put enough time into preparing the speech. Without this forethought speeches easily get off track and very boring.

A basic structure that will carry you through every informative speech you will ever give as a beginner is this:

1. Tell them what you are going to tell them - introduce what the speech is about. This is essential because most of us are very poor at contextualizing. If people have to figure out what the speech is about then by the time they’ve done that much of the message is already lost.
2. Tell them - give the body of the speech in a short and precise manner. Wherever possible, tell it like a story. Outline the things involved, describe how they interact together and what the final result of that interaction is.
3. Tell them what you’ve told them - summarize what the speech is about. Briefly go over the key points once again and emphasize your conclusion again. By doing this, if anyone got lost or stopped paying attention part of the way through, they can still get a lot of benefit from what you have said (and they will appreciate you doing this).

Practice
After a lack of preparation on the structure of the speech, the next worst mistake that most people make is not to practice and rehearse the speech. As a beginner, this is essential. Without practice, speakers tend to meander and either go way over time or else cut it inappropriately short because they can’t remember what they are supposed to say.

Once you have structured your speech, you can write it out in full if you wish. Next reduce the speech to a few keywords, phrases or concepts that will convey the essential points of the speech. Often what we write doesn’t sound so good when spoken so practice describing and explaining these concepts verbally. Make a note of the time that it takes you to go through the speech at a moderate pace. Shorten or lengthen the speech to meet the time requirement. It’s always better to go slightly under time rather than over time.

When you are familiar with the speech and can remember the structure and the key points, stand in front of a mirror and practice the speech. This might feel awkward to begin with but you need to see how you look when you give the speech because this is how the audience will see you.

Voice
Speak loudly, speak slowly and speak clearly. We naturally speak better when we are upright so practice standing up. Breathe deeply from your abdomen and not from your chest. The deeper breathing will relax you naturally too.

Stance and Gestures
Stand upright with your feet shoulder width apart, or more so if this feels comfortable for you. This will give you a stable stance and conveys a confident posture. If you have a tendency to slouch then use the ‘tea bag tip’. Imagine that a piece of string is attached to the top of your head and that someone is pulling it up, like a tea bag. This automatically gives you good posture and a tall stance.

Along with speaking loudly, slowly and clearly, see if you can use natural gestures to emphasize the meaning or importance of key points in your speech. Again, do this in front of a mirror. You need to see whether your gestures are bold and confident or feeble and half-hearted.

When practicing at home in front of a mirror, I recommend doing some extreme exaggerations of voice, stance and gestures. You can really push to the boundaries of your capabilities in a safe fashion and in doing so you will notice that some of what you do actually looks, sounds and feels much better than how you would do it normally. Grab hold of those points and tone them down a little bit so that they feel comfortable. You have now improved your capability and your competence - well done!

Backup Preparation
This is something that few people do but it can give you a whole lot more confidence prior to doing a speech. What you want to do is to think about what might go wrong and then prepare for it. On one level you can think about what you would do if the whole thing turned into a personal disaster. If it did turn into an embarrassing failure how you would handle yourself afterwards?

The best thing to do is to accept the result and to quickly commend yourself for having the courage to start and then forgive yourself for not doing well on this particular occasion. You might replay the event over and over again in your head and you might feel bad about it but look for what you could better the next time around.

If it all goes wrong and you can’t remember what you are supposed to do because you feel too nervous then here are a couple of things you can do:
Stop and pause and check your notes. Imagine yourself taking the time to reset and to get with the game plan again so that you can continue in the best possible fashion.
If you think it will take you more than a moment to compose yourself again, then being honest and explaining yourself is often the best policy. Say something like, “I am sorry but I’ve lost myself. I need a moment to recover.” This is a courageous thing to do and people will respect you for it. They know what it’s like to speak in public and they will be on your side.
Imagine yourself doing this and recovering gracefully and then practice them when you practice your full speech.

If you can truthfully say to yourself, “Whatever happens, I can handle this,” then you have created a safety net for yourself. You can go ahead and give a speech and know that you have given yourself the best chance of performing well through thorough preparation.

In part three, we’ll take a look at how to prepare yourself prior to the speech and how to perform the speech well.

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A fear of public speaking affects many people because the results of a bad performance create some of the worst feelings you will ever experience: humiliation and shame. It feels like the eyes of the world are upon you, judging you, scrutinizing you in every detail and it can feel very intimidating. You can’t help but imagine that if it all goes badly wrong then people will laugh, point and throw rocks at you. It’s natural to feel that way, but thinking about those bad consequences is a large part of what causes a speech to go bad in the first place.

Generally speaking, when you give a speech most people want to hear you and they want it to be good because a good speech can be useful, entertaining, and even inspiring. Your audience will be supportive and receptive at the beginning. Most people know that public speaking can feel very daunting and so most of them will be thinking, “Rather you than me.”

An audience responds to the manner in which you present yourself. If your body language is confident and if you speak clearly and loudly then that will carry you a long way in the minds of other people. If your speech is well-structured then it will be easier to engage the audience and keep them focused. When an audience is interested and engaged they will reflect back with attentive body language.

When a speaker looks uncomfortable and speaks poorly and is disorganized in preparation then the audience will pick up on all of this and they will reflect this back by looking bored. They will fidget and lose concentration. They will look vacant because their minds have wondered off onto other preoccupations.

If you, as the speaker, respond to a bored audience with hesitation and a faltering performance then the whole thing can fall apart quite rapidly. It is your responsibility to develop the skills necessary to carry off a good performance when speaking and the good news is that all of those skills can be learned and developed.

Your fear is supported by a belief that states something like this, “If I stand up alone in public and speak in front of people, then I will definitely end up humiliated and embarrassed.” The connection between cause (public speaking) and an effect (humiliation) that will occur 100% of the time is entirely imaginary. You can overcome your fear through performing public speaking a sufficient number of times so that you build up a stock of good results. When you do this you can change the belief and say to yourself, “If I stand up alone in public and speak in front of people, then I will definitely give a good performance and come away with a successful result.” Your good results will prove that your belief was unfounded and the fear will shrivel up. It might not go away completely because uncertainties will always exist, but you can overcome those butterflies through a reliance upon technique.

You can generate great confidence through having great competence at whatever it is that you set out to do. You attain great competence through learning about the theory, methods and techniques in the chosen field of endeavor.

The essential techniques that will carry you through every informative speech that you could ever wish to give will be covered in part two of this article.

Related articles:

Antidote to Perfectionism

Guaranteed: Self-Confidence

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Anger is a volatile emotion that actually creates physiological changes in the brain. A part of the brain called the amygdala swells up and puts us into fight, rather than flight, mode. It’s a primitive survival response. Once this occurs it becomes difficult to exert conscious and rational control over our reactions.

A lot of destructive results can come from anger. It can cause people to say awful things about other people, even loved ones and in the extreme it can lead to physical violence.

The best way to deal with anger is to never let it happen in the first place. It is possible to completely eliminate anger and angry responses from your life. It all comes down to understanding the mechanism that causes anger. Once you understand it, you can change the mechanism, or change the input to the mechanism and get a different output. Through understanding and applying this, things that once caused you to go berserk can end up causing no more reaction other than a raised eyebrow.

The Anger Mechanism

Anger occurs because a desire that you have is not fulfilled. In your mind you have a mental rule where a condition, or set of conditions, must occur or else something ‘wrong’ has happened and the response is anger. Implicit in the rule is an underlying reason for making such a rule in the first place. The rule is then followed by the response to take, should the rule be broken.

For example: A person must never steal from me, because it takes resources from me. If someone steals from me then I feel anger and I fight to get back what’s mine.

Often, you will be unconscious of the specific terms of the rule, as many rules form subconsciously. However, once you question your anger and analyze your responses, you will find that this structure of rule, reason and response always exists.

The depth and intensity of the anger that you feel is directly related to the nature of the desire, how much value you attach to it, the extent by which the rule was violated and the immediacy of the event. Sometimes events occur that are so shocking that they can send you berserk, as this little story demonstrates:

I was in a bar some years ago and had drunk too much. As I was leaving I made a foolish comment and the bouncer in the bar literally jumped upon me and pinned me to the ground and started cursing me and seemed all fired up to give me a beating. I was totally shocked and backtracked and managed to wriggle out of the situation and I left.

Although I got out physically unharmed, I was in a furious rage. For me, a sacrosanct rule that no one must carry out physically violent actions upon me had been violated in a manner that was totally and shockingly overboard as a response to what I had done. I tramped up and down the street and ideas of revenge swept over me. I even went as far as to pick up a brick to hurl through the window. Fortunately I considered the downside and the consequences and the futility of such an action, but I really had to exert massive will power to accept the indignity, drop the brick and move on.

The occurrence or threat of actual physical harm is mercifully very rare for most us. However, many people get angry over relatively trivial issues, for example, if you open the door for someone and they give no word or gesture of thanks or appreciation, that can cause anger, but it’s a minor offense in the grand scheme of things.

Many people also get angry over issues that they simply cannot control. For example, if someone cuts in front of you when you are driving then that is alarming, but you can’t control the other person’s action and it’s an event that is already in the past, so getting angry only harms you.

If you find yourself frequently angry then you can take control and eliminate anger by identifying the rule and the reason that sets up the anger mechanism and change either one of them so that no angry reaction is generated. When you get good at this, you can eliminate all useless, trivial and destructive anger from your life.

How You Can Take Control

The next time that you get angry, try and isolate yourself before responding. Once the amygdala is enlarged it takes at least 30-minutes to calm down and during this period rational control is very hard to exert. Counting slowly from 1 to 10 really is excellent advice, but if you feel like responding by lashing out in some way, either with words or actions, then shout the words out where you can’t be heard, or take out your anger on an inanimate object, or write an angry letter (but whatever you do, don’t send it!).

Once you have calmed down, think about the event that caused you to react emotionally with anger. Identify the specific thing that ‘should have happened’ or that was ‘wrong’ and write it down. Work out the rule that was broken.

Once you have the specific rule written down, consider whether it is a good rule to keep hold of. Good rules to keep are ones that protect you and your loved ones from immediate or long-term serious harm. Bad rules are ones where triggering events are always outside of your control, where other people have no idea what your rule is (so they break them without any awareness of them), where it’s always too late to do anything about it, where the angry response is out of proportion to a trivial cause.

Next think beyond the normal knee-jerk reaction to identify what’s really at stake and what the real reasons for action are. For example, if you open a door for someone and they show no appreciation, then question your reason for helping out in the first place. If you do it because you are naturally generous and helpful and because you get pleasure from it, then realize that when you open the door you are totally congruent with yourself, i.e. you would do it even if you knew in advance that the person would not thank you. If you open doors because you want recognition and gratitude, then you are doing it for the wrong reasons. Those benefits should come as an occasional byproduct of your generous action and not as the purposeful desire.

Rewrite your rule and your reason and your chosen reaction, e.g. I prefer it if people show appreciation for me when I open the door, because it’s polite and it demonstrates reciprocity. However, if it doesn’t happen then I don’t mind, because I have acted in accordance with my good standards and I thus fulfill myself.

In the case of someone cutting in front of you: I prefer it when the people around me drive safely and don’t take alarming risks, because this lowers the risk of accidents. However, it occasionally happens that people make mistakes, so I accept that I can’t control that.

It’s a bit of a chore to go through this process, but it does get to the root cause of the problem and allows you to know and understand exactly what is going on. By changing your rule, by changing your reason or by changing your interpretation of the event that sparked off your anger, you can change the mechanism. When you have no rules, or rules that are incredibly hard to break, the result is no anger.

The Benefits of Eliminating Anger

Every desire that you have becomes another opportunity for reality to disappoint you. When you don’t get what you desire, you feel bad. Every time that you abandon or modify a rule to make it easier to manage you simultaneously make it easier for you to be happier and more cheerful. Remember: The people with fewest rules are happiest.

On top of that, anger leads to damaging responses and if that occurs over trivial issues or things that are impossible to change, then it wreaks unnecessary and avoidable damage. That just creates a catalog of human misery and tragedy. That can be eliminated through understanding the mechanism. It’s really very simple. You have no excuse to let anger wreak havoc and damage in your life.

If you are frequently angry, then you have a lot of work to do here, but after a while you stop responding with anger to events. As soon as a bad result occurs and you feel anger starting to rise, you instead shrug your shoulders, or give a little sigh and say to yourself, “Oh well, that’s my reality. I didn’t get the result that I wanted and I accept that. What’s the best way to respond now?”

This is a nice place to get to. Instead of letting your emotions control you (and anger is one of the worst because of the physiological changes that occur), you manage your desires and hence have mastery over yourself. Instead of responding with damaging verbal or physical violence you bypass that reaction immediately and instead tap straight into your personal resourcefulness, where you think ‘What’s next?’ or ‘How can I get that result that I want?’

Related articles:

Detachment - The Key to a Balanced State of Mind

Fundamental Emotion

Interpreting Painful Emotions

The new book, ‘Make Things Possible’ is now available. It details all the things that you need to know to manage your mind and to fulfill those things that you desire. It’s available here: www.makethingspossible.com

A mastermind group is a voluntary collection of like-minded people committed to helping one another by actively working on solving one another’s problems, sharing knowledge of techniques and personal experience and providing mutual support.

The benefits of a mastermind group are many:

• A very real sense of community
• A source of creative ideas
• A means to get different perspectives on a problem that might otherwise go unseen
• An ‘interactive library’ where you can benefit from the knowledge of many people and tap information instantly
• A way of reducing risk when others have experienced what you are about to do and inform you of the hazards
• An extension of your own intelligence
• A reference point for expectations (when you do things alone it’s so very easy to lose yourself but when you can see your efforts and achievements relative to other people it grounds you and you usually see that your results are not half as bad as you would like to make out!)
• A means of gaining insight through clever questioning
• A source of support to tide you through the rough patches

In the book, Buzan’s Book of Genius, by Tony Buzan, he examined many of histories greatest geniuses and he distilled a list of 20 characteristics that he claims define all geniuses. One of these characteristics was to be part of a mastermind group. Many figures in history have been part of what we now call mastermind groups - Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton amongst many others - and the progress and ability of individuals within a mastermind group is accelerated and raised.

When I read that book many years ago, I was envious of these people who had such support. Such resources were lacking in my life and I found it difficult to find like-minded people committed to helping one another, but now, thanks to the power of digital communications and the internet, it is easier than ever before to create your own mastermind group.

If you are a member of a group, organization or some other place where members of your ‘tribe’ gather, then you can propose to set up a mastermind group. Four people is really the minimum number required and any more than eight becomes unwieldy so aim for six regular members.

It is best to appoint an organizer as someone needs to coordinate activities. Your principal mode of communication will be through conference calls. Set a regular date and time get everyone to commit to come together for a minimum of six calls (or once around the group if you have more than six people). This commitment will create a habit of attending the calls. I favor weekly calls of an hour duration, otherwise it’s difficult to hold the group together. If you can, record the calls for future reference and for the times when individual members can’t make it.

In the beginning, set up a group on Google Groups so that you can share resources and post messages to one another. You can write brief biographies and introduce yourselves to one another.

For the first sessions, focus the mastermind on one of the members problems. The person in the hot seat should prepare information on the problem and distribute it at least two days in advance of the call, so that everyone can start to think about it. If you don’t do this and present the problem on the call, then the other members have to think on their feet and the results are usually of lower quality.

For the next round of calls you can each present a technique, knowledge or story of experience that can benefit the mastermind members. After this round of calls, you can get each member to give an update on personal progress (this doesn’t require a full hour - you might fit three reports into one session). You can then go on and start the cycle again.

Here are some of the resources that you can use to communicate within your group:

Google Groups

Google Docs

Skype - for free telephone calls, including conference calls

Free Conference Call - a free dial in service in the U.S. that also allows you to record calls for free

Wire Tap - excellent recording and editing software (works for Mac, not sure about windows)

If you know of other good resources, then please comment and include a link

I don’t have any off-line friends who have a blog, or who create information products and so it can get kind of lonely, but I am now a member of two mastermind groups in the field of internet marketing and information products and I can tell you that they are wonderful. I can talk to like-minded people about my problems, trials and tribulations. I can help other people to get what they want and vice versa. When you are learning new and difficult things whilst simultaneously carrying out bold projects, it is fantastic to be involved with other people doing the same who are willing to take an hour a week to contribute help, plus you get all of those other great benefits listed above.

In fact, I have become such a great fan of mastermind groups that I’m going to help certain select people by forming some new mastermind groups. I’m going to be offering my new book ‘Make Things Possible’ on the 7th of October. As a bonus for people who buy within the first week, I’m going to set up mastermind groups for those who want to participate.

The idea is for the members of the mastermind group to help each other apply the knowledge and methods given in the book. This means that you are much more likely to follow through, develop new abilities and get some outstanding results.

The groups will be managed by themselves but I will join in and contribute at the start and from time to time as the groups go on. You see, I’m very committed to seeing people benefit from buying the book. However, I am only making this offer to people who are subscribed to my newsletter, so if you are not signed up, then do so now. Use the opt-in box at the top right of this screen.

Additional links of interest:

The 20 Characteristics of Genius

Some people think that it takes decades to become an expert in something. I’ve read some estimates that say that with concentrated effort you can become an expert in any field within three years. I advocate that there is a fast track to become an expert in anything that involves a process. It occurs through understanding.

By understanding, I don’t mean having empathy for someone else and neither do I mean a negotiated agreement on something. I mean having such a total knowledge of something that you know how it works. Most events have a cause and an effect and in between them is some form of mechanism - an integrated system of components that operate together through a process. If you understand the mechanism, then for a given input you can predict the output and vice versa; for a given output you can predict the initial input. In my opinion, human beings are obsessed with prediction. It gives certainty and it removes risk and these are primal, instinctive survival drives, but understanding gives us even more than this.

When you have knowledge of a process, you can perform it and get a desired result. However if the mechanism used does not suit the application, or if something breaks within the mechanism, then without understanding you are powerless to do anything about it. This is the great problem with most forms of education. They convey knowledge of processes but not understanding. Thus when the student can’t get the desired result he or she doesn’t know what to do next. This results in feeling impotent, confounded and inadequate - the very things that we most want to avoid. This might be what Einstein was alluding to in his quotation that imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is inert. The ability to think through a process, using your imagination, is much more powerful.

If you understand the mechanism, then you can adapt it to suit new applications and if anything breaks, or ceases to function properly, then you can repair it. For example, if you have a television set and you know how to switch it on, change channels and adjust the volume, then you have knowledge of a process to get a desired result (seeing a TV program). However if the set breaks, you are rendered powerless to get the result that you want. Alternatively, if the signals to the TV change and it needs new components or adjustment you are also powerless. If you had an understanding of how a TV set works and of all of the components within, plus some rudimentary technical skills, then you can repair the television, adjust it and even adapt it to operate under changing conditions.

This, in my opinion, is what it takes to have full expertise. You can develop it very quickly if you focus intently on the cause and effect mechanisms at play in any subject or field of endeavor that you choose to study (assuming that a process is involved, which is not always the case, e.g. a history expert needs to remember facts and those facts are inert, i.e. they are not part of any process). Once you know the mechanisms, then you can predict a future outcome, or reverse engineer it to find an original input. This is the beauty of the scientific method. It seeks to achieve prediction. This is the beauty of a theory. It speculates on cause and effect and is adjusted to suit the findings that come through experimentation.

Once you have understanding, then very often you don’t need to learn more about the subject. Instead you can focus on applying the knowledge in practical ways and then refine the depth of your understanding. You can cut down the amount of knowledge that you have to remember because you know how things work from first principles.

When you understand something then you immediately develop the foundation of competency and adequacy. You can predict results and make them happen. The effectiveness of your results might depend upon the level of motor skills needed that you have, or the depth of experience required for subjective endeavors, but understanding will enhance all of your efforts. For subjects where no new motor skills or long experience is needed, expertise comes instantly with understanding. It’s the fast track to competence.

When you understand something you find it easier to persist with a difficult course of action, because you know that it is possible in principle, it’s just that you have to develop better abilities. You might get frustrated, but you remain confident that a desirable result is achievable. Without understanding you flounder, because you don’t know what it takes to get the result that you want. Giving up is the common result, because you have no idea what will work.

That’s one of the great strengths of the theory that I have developed for understanding how emotions work and what causes them. Once you understand it, then you can predict what emotions you will feel for a given set of circumstances, or else if you feel a lot of emotion, then you can work backwards and identify very clearly what caused that in the first place. If you don’t like the results that you get, then you can change the inputs (in this case, what you desire). Alternatively you can change the mechanism; by developing your own personal levels of competency, you can get the results that you desire.

So, how do you achieve understanding if you don’t have it?

1. Identify the process that you want to understand.
2. Consider the input, or starting conditions, that you want to start out with.
3. From your current knowledge of the process imagine what will happen as you go through each step of the process and thus estimate what the end result will be. At this point you have, in effect, created a theory about the cause and effect mechanism.
4. Carry out the process in reality using the starting conditions identified.
5. Record the final results.
6. If you got the result that you imagined, then you have a working understanding of the process (but it’s best to repeat this several times to ensure consistency of results).
7. If you didn’t get the result that you imagined, then assess the difference between the actual and imagined result and attempt to find out where in the process things began to vary from what you imagined would happen.
8. Adjust your knowledge of the mechanism according to these real results.
9. Go through the above process again. If the result is still not what you predicted then look at the next part of the mechanism where the real result varied from the imagined result. Keep repeating until your knowledge of the mechanism is accurate enough to give you the level of predicted outcome that you seek on a consistent basis.
10. If possible, work the process backwards and see if, for a given output, you can define the original input. If you can do this, then you have a very robust understanding of the process.
11. See if you can improve the efficiency of the output. Use your understanding of the process and the components within it and see if you can change a component, or the process, to get a better output for the same given input.

The above method, is essentially the same as the scientific method and the final step is taken to develop new knowledge of processes. The fewer the number of components, or variables, in the process, the easier it is to gain understanding, so for complex systems, attempt to isolate a small part first and understand that before moving onto another part. I find it a lot of fun to speculate in this way and to test the logic of my ideas. On occasion, you can make remarkable breakthroughs. Once you understand something it becomes a part of you. It changes your thinking, and so it changes your actions and this changes your results. When they change for the better, that’s a wonderful thing to accomplish.

Understanding something strengthens your inner core. It gives you a robust resilience that few other people will ever know, because when events happen, you know what the outcome will likely be and you can use that to your advantage. You will know where to stand to receive benefits and where not to stand to avoid getting knocked down.

Finally, if all else fails, then try Plan B:

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