Big Bold Benefits

We all buy into benefits, and feel compelled to take action based on benefits. When you tie big bold benefit statements to people’s primary motivators you can drive action.

There is an art and a science to this of course, because hitting motivating buttons across an entire audience is more challenging than working one-on-one. However it can be done and deliver rich rewards.

Lessons In Motivation

I recently had a lesson in motivators and action. There was a role I decided I would not take on. Everyone was giving me the same answer about what I’d miss – a piece of paper essentially.

Their response made me more determined not to do it!

Then I heard a speaker who linked the role to my primary motivators – being the good of the members and being able to have a direct impact upon member experience as a bridge between the organisation’s leaders and the grass roots members. Within five minutes he had me on my white stead, sword outstretched ready to champion the cause!

Hitting Motivation Drivers

What I will always remember is how one person hitting my motivation and drivers changed my course dramatically.

I can remember many other occasions and can also remember a team of mine volunteering to come in an hour early, unpaid, to learn more about problem solving, thinking and their jobs. When you hit motivations head on you can inspire extraordinary action.

Base Instincts

At the heart of all motivation is the same base instincts

• Safety
• Security
• To belong and be accepted
• To be acknowledged as special and unique

This is something we work on tapping into together because it doesn’t matter whether we are talking business or pleasure if you don’t hit the motivating buttons you won’t inspire with the sustained energy drive that will result in action.

Learn to Inspire

Anyone can learn to inspire others. It begins by connecting to your own passion and through that passion connecting the audience to theirs.

Inspiration Starts With Self

Success requires you to feel inspired because it is the first step to inspiring others.

Your audience need to tap into your energy source. They need to be carried along by your passion and excitement. This is again where my search for meaning in science and shamanism can be drawn on to teach you to connect you to your source of inspiration for any speech.

Ownership

Owning your speech, is owning your cause, owning your connection, owning your emotion and consequently owning your audience.

I don’t mean in any evil sense, of course! However the power of persuasion lies in your connection and delivery. This is something you can learn.

When we work together we work on your skills

• building rapport with the audience
• using body language and rapport to shift energies
• your ability to carry the audience with you into inspiration and drive ownership

Ready for greater success when speaking? Let’s talk!

Why Would You Expose Vulnerability?

Have you ever seen a great speaker – the type of speaker who seems to reach into your chest and take your heart in their hand?

I have, and the reason they affected me was because they were completely open to the audience.

They gave everything they had. They risked exposing their vulnerability and in doing so created a deep connection through their communication.

Life Laid Bare

When a speaker lays their life bare through their stories and conveys the rawness of authentic emotion they can create a deep emotional engagement with their audience.

As an audience we will have experienced that emotion. We will relate to it. We will feel it. We will engage with it.

Learning Authentic Communication

Anyone can do this. However it is not an easy path for all because it requires us to connect with our own deep emotions. With our breath. With our voice.

My knowledge of physiology from my B.App.Sc – Biomed days, coupled with my exploration of shamanism, healing and meditation place me in a unique position to take you to that place where you can easily communicate true emotions.

When we work together we do more than craft speeches – we work on authentic communication skills and creating a platform for emotional engagement with your audience. When you’re ready to take your presentations – business, or otherwise – I’m ready to work with you.

Learning to Engage an Audience

There are two simple secrets to engagement that can make a huge difference and won’t cost you thousands in public speaking courses – SMILE and MAKE EYE CONTACT!

Never underestimate the power of a smile and eye contact. They can draw your audience in and make them feel like you are talking with them – not at them.

Release Your Inner Actor

Your actions on stage feel much bigger than they appear to an audience.

For many it can be a struggle to overcome those feelings of awkwardness – but it can be done. There are many ‘games’ we can play to overcome feelings of discomfort and help you be comfortable

• in your own voice
• in your own skin
• being a bit larger than life when required

When we work together to learn to engage an audience I teach you to become a performer who delivers your best to your audience every time.

This is bigger than just polished public speaking, or speech writing, this is about using everything you’ve got to create a meaningful connection.

Powerful Communication

Communication becomes powerful when you connect with and captivate your audience.

If you are ready to make your life easier by engaging audiences with more effective communication – talk to me (Belinda) on 1300 887 595.

Don’t stick me with your labels.

Living a life under label is living with limitation.

Sure labels serve a purpose for identification but they are misused to divide, to isolate and to put us into boxes that make other people comfortable. Labels are used to prevent us from thinking. They stop us questioning beyond the superficial.

Labels are often by their very nature superficial – where you come from, what you look like, what you do. God forbid you should be a bit “out there” – we’ll just slap you with a label and it’s back into the box with you.

They are used to create elite minorities bloated on false praise and separated from the masses. There can be no questioning – labels are used to prevent it. Questioners are labeled racist, anti-semitic, or a bigot of any persuasion. Questions therefore shut down by labels.

Labels are truly dangerous ideas when implanted into susceptible minds. Children being labeled as problems needing medication. Children being labeled as hopeless and without value from their first footsteps. Yet we wonder why they grow up to participate in extreme risk taking behaviour with complete disregard for their own life or the life of others. Could it be we replaced hope with a label?

Labels stop us from thinking at every level, making labels the ultimate no brainers. Labels are the unthinking man’s tools to create a fragile, f^&*ed up future.

In my usual fashion I jumped in, said I’ll speak and thought about it later. I hadn’t been to the Soapbox competition, didn’t know what happened, what types of rants were delivered or any of the details.

After a bad week of grumpiness, in which I was challenged to stick to my new found confidence and boundaries in business and life, I was over it before it began. Despite the grumps I had trouble finding a rant – no trouble ranting – just finding a rant worthy of an audience eluded me.

That is why I pretty much chose to shoot myself in the foot. This is a competition where the winner addresses 1500 people from the stage of the Concert Hall that night – as part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

I had difficulty rehearsing a rant – didn’t know how it ran so just went armed with an idea. There was a microphone but the details and explanations weren’t explained and it wasn’t adjusted for every competitor.

That is why I chose in my grumpiness protest to just speak rather than speak into the microphone. Suffice it to say I didn’t make it into the finals. I comforted myself however by having achieved my aim with a number of people in the audience coming to tell me how much they liked mine.

Oh how very populist of me to satisfy myself with my appeal to the audience but not playing by the rules.

A much cleverer protest rant would have been to step right up to that mic, offer a controversial and topical rant about the difficulty of meeting expectations when expectations aren’t explained etc etc and actually trying to win.

Instead my actions ensured I threw the contest. Whether my rant was good enough to go through if I’d used the microphone well – I will never know! What I do know is the rants that caught my attention and that I thought were best were not necessarily the best users of the microphone and the majority didn’t make the finals.

When you have an opportunity in life it is always best to take it. Don’t throw it. Don’t make a silly stand that everyone else is oblivious to because you feel angry or frustrated. Do the best you can – a winning rant in this case would have been a far more powerful position to leverage!

My battle was the reverse public speaking fear – private speaking! I could address an entire restaurant on a topic off-the-cuff but sit me next to someone I didn’t know… Terror – if they didn’t start the conversation I was screwed. Nervous, anxious, heart racing type stuff.

In the last month I have had a few wins in the speaking stakes.

Winning Speech #1 & #2

On August 25th Ashfield Toastmasters held their Club Table Topics and Humorous Speech Contests.

Drumroll please….
…I won them both! Yeah for me and super yeah because by the night of the contest I wasn’t even sure I’d enter.

Table topics is

impromptu speaking for those who aren’t familiar where you are given the question on the spot and asked to speak for 1-2 minutes.

You have to make 1 minute to be eligible but if you go to 2.5 minutes you are disqualified. The challenge is to come up with a clear, concise, rational and well reasoned response.

The contest question was “If a genie gave you one wish, what would it be and why?”.

This was not a favourite but basically my answer was unlimited wishes because I am a fast starter who tends to jump in and act later. Knowing that quality about myself I know that with one wish I would act and have to address the well thought out consequences later.

This was trumped by my partner the next morning who simply answered – another genie. Of course that is a very reasonable answer because all the genie’s of my childhood fairy tales grant 3 wishes!

The Humorous Speech

I do not consider myself a funny speaker. I can be spontaneously funny in life and enjoy being a clown but a funny speech is a very different beast.

My tendency is to be too serious and pick big, weighty topics – even if addressed from a lighter side – but be continuously funny in a speech…

That is why I drew on my experiences in my first job in science – milking bull ants. The speech was entitled the good the bad and the ugly. It outlined how I came to be milking bull ants when, faced with the question of what I would do for the rest of my life, I answered “save the world from disease’ with all the wisdom of an eighteen year old.

The Good was the potential of the project to synthesize an antibiotic that could knock out Super Bugs.

The Bad the fact the potential antibiotic didn’t just knock out the super nasties but pretty much every bug. Plus the unusual occupational hazard of bull ant stings.

The Ugly the thought of being found face down, jeans around my ankles being stung to death by bull ants. OK a somewhat unusual fear I grant you – but when I had a bull ant in my jeans at work I raced into a room, locked the door, dropped my jeans and got the thing off me – only to realise I had my jeans around my ankles in the bull ant room. If there was one escapee, could there be more.

To me Good, Bad, Ugly is a metaphor for life and how we choose to see it. If we choose to see the funny side and laughter is the best medicine maybe we can save the world from disease after all.

Winning Speech #3

At the Sunshine Coast Internet Marketing Meetup in Maroochydore I delivered a presentation entitled “Living The Nightmare, ah Dream.. DREAM”. It was to assist people in the IM space to avoid the biggest pitfalls that can turn the dream into a nightmare.

Having experienced most of the issues that can arise I felt well qualified to speak. It was well received and there has been some work arising from it which is always an advantage.

Winning Speech #4

On Monday 26th September Toastmasters Area 48 held the Area contest for the humorous speech and table topics.

It is where the Club winners in the area come to compete against each other. I am pleased to say I won the Table Topics and placed second in the Humorous Speech.

The Table Topic “Life is full of challenging moments…” gave me an opportunity to twist the question from challenging moments or a wealth of opportunity.

The winner, Stephen Licciardello, spoke of growing up with his Italian mother and it was a very funny speech. Mothers are obviously great fodder as a Chinese woman told tales of her mother coming to visit!

Stephen and I go on to represent Area 48 in the Division Contest on Friday October 7th – where all the area winners compete for the right to contest the District (basically all of NSW and the highest we can go in this contest).

All up it has been a busy speaking, but fun, month.

My big tip for winning speech contests – don’t take them or yourself too seriously just go in it to have fun.

But what are they afraid of. If that is you – what are you afraid of.

Fear Insights

I’ve had a funny week which included some insights into fear. They started with that question “What are you afraid of?”

The fascinating thing was that once we worked through the “I don’t know” and “if you did know what would it be” stuff… I realised that the thing I was afraid of was what I already had.

I was afraid on the deepest level of being ‘alone’. Alone not lonely – having no one around for support and feeling isolated and alone when big things happen in life. That is something I have already experienced in my life.

Therefore what was I afraid of – that already existed and has already been experienced.

So Focused On Fear

Isn’t what I described above, so often what happens. We become so focused upon the fear that we fail to realise the thing we fear most is actually what we already have.

For example I have heard answers like “I am afraid of not being perfect”. Well one of us are perfect and face judgement about that every day. Most often that judgement is our own against ourselves. As a perfectionist when you speak people are never as harsh about you as you are about yourself.
Not being perfect is where you already are.

If it is bigger about being afraid of letting people down it is a fear on a different level. Again though what happens when someone wants you to and asks you to speak – when you can’t you let them down. Your fear actually creates the very thing you fear.

“I’m too embarrassed” Isn’t it embarrassing to have people work so hard to cajole you, encourage you and support you to speak only to let them down but not giving it a go?

“I’m afraid I’ll make a mistake” Wow imagine that – in mid stride in a speech contest I referred to a life changing smile as – a heartworming smile. It was a funny tongue tied mistake that got a huge laugh. A laugh so great we incorporated it into the speech at the next level of the contest. The greatest mistake we can make in life is not to try.

Fear is Self Centred

Fear is one of those funny things. It isn’t real. It isn’t a tangible object we can move, pick up, put down. Its reality is our imagination and feeling of it.

The things we fear are all about ourselves. How people will react to us based on our own judgement and reaction to ourselves. One aspect of that is that the focus is what people will think of us. What’s ironic is that everyone else is so busy thinking about what people think of them they don’t have time to think about you!

Public speaking unlike fear is not about you. Public speaking is about your audience. Public speaking is about giving not taking. What you get out of it is really dependent on what you give to it.

Next time you’re afraid to stand up – especially new toastmasters at a toastmasters meeting – stop worrying about yourself and think whether you have something to say that the other people in the room could benefit from hearing. If so simply stand up and speak.

What? Well if invited out with people I didn’t know I would have been comfortable addressing the entire restaurant but would die a slow, painful death inside if the person sitting next to me didn’t start the conversation. I had one-on-one shyness not public shyness.

Public Speaking Fears

It isn’t about you!

The fear is internal. The fear is about how you will be perceived, what others will think…

Those fears are all about you and they are actually what you think other will think not what others will actually think.

The answer to mastering that fear then is to take your internal focus and direct it externally. What do I mean by that? I mean focus upon the audience and what you are delivering to them not on yourself.

A Speech is a Performance

A performance is about the audience.

What are you giving your audience. That is part of the reason my speech preparation focusing on the message I wish to deliver helps reduce nerves – it focuses on the audience.

When you go out and do it for them. Be the best you can be for them. Do the best job you can for them. You can forget yourself and therefore forget your fear.

Practice Makes Perfect

It takes practice. Everything worthwhile usually does.

I don’t know a performer that starts at the top, at the pinnacle of their art. I don’t know a performance that isn’t rehearsed. Speaking is no different. People are not born as the best speakers in the world. Like everything there are some who display natural talents or an absence of fear – like me – which can make the path easier. Everyone can learn, can develop skills and their progress in many ways depends on their practice.

That is one of the beautiful things about Toastmasters. It allows us to practice public speaking skills in a supportive environment. We can get feedback on what we do well and what we can improve and then practice those.

Public speaking is a process of continuous improvement.

The more you can focus externally on your audience and the more you can practice the more confident you can be.

Approaches to Speech Preparation

There are a number of approaches you can take to preparing a speech.

Some write their speech out word for word.

Some just list out the main points.

Some weave a story.

The Message of The Speech

My speech preparation centres of the message of the speech.

I begin by determining the purpose of the speech. What is it I hope to achieve? Why am I giving the speech – what message do I want to deliver.

From there I simply determine an introduction, 3 main points and a conclusion.

That approach means I can structure the flow by seeing the progress and transition between each aspect of the speech and how they deliver the message I want to impart.

Remembering a Speech

My technique above which is not about remembering the words but the themes of the speech.

It means I can always remembers my speeches. It also means they are most likely always different! If I was to script a speech word-for-word and memorise it my fear would be forgetting one word and then for being lost for the remainder of the speech.

By remembering an introduction, point a, point b, point c and a conclusion I only ever have to remember the main theme. When those themes make use of my own experience and stories it is easy.

Easy Speaking

I have no desire to be remembered for perfect grammar or amazing word choice. I want to be remembered for having touched people in some way, having made them think differently or feel differently. Therefore I don’t apply pressure to myself to be a perfect speaker. I focus on delivering a message, leveraging my own stories and only need remember the points that enable me to do so.

That is how I make it easy on myself as a speaker to structure a speech, and deliver a speech without notes.

It is too easy to put pressure on ourselves. For many public speaking is already something that invokes fears, anxiety and pressure so make it easy on yourself – find the easiest method of preparation and memory for you.