I want to talk to you about a great way to become a fabulous speaker without practicing speaking for no particular reason. I’m up on the roof of my house. I live in a motorhome, and it’s really high up here.
Anyhow, while I’m up here, I’m talking. Before I started recording this blog, I was talking to myself. People who see me think I’m crazy because I’m always talking to myself. But this is how I develop the skills of being a good speaker.
Well, there’s lots of other things too; however, one of the ingredients, one of the secret sauce ingredients, is I talk to myself all the time. I don’t just talk to myself like, “Hey Dean, what are you doing?” I practice presenting while I walk around and do stuff. I might be doing laundry, might be driving in the car, but I practice in two ways.
First of all, I pick a topic, and I go and present about it. And by doing that, I get really good at finding the words of the moment.
Secondly, I ask myself a question as if an audience asked it, and then I answer it. These two things give me a tremendous amount of power to be able to just come up with the things, as myself authentically, as me, not presenter me, not overly eloquent, scripted me, but me.
So you’ve got somebody sitting down in front of their computer, and they are typing out what they hope they would say. You’ve got another person who’s thinking and thinking and thinking and thinking about it; they’re trying to hear it in their head. You know what I do? I put it out through my mouth. Brain into mouth. I can record it if I want. I usually don’t. I usually just speak and speak, and then I take notes on what I spoke about, and then I try it again.
If you create your presentation speaking, you are practicing the presentation. You’re using the final output venue instead of using something supportive, something pre-speech. So if you were to learn to be a good violinist, you’d play the violin. You want to be good at the piano, play the piano. You want to be a good speaker, speak.
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