Thank you to volunteer Doug Bralsford of Auditel who has let me coach him on video so you can learn from his mistakes! I hope I’m not too harsh, Doug!
(Doug has a great track record by the way of analysing the cost base of companies and showing them how they can save money.)
Have you seen the sketch by comedian Stuart Lee where he pretends he is on the phone to an estate agent while live on stage? The whole sketch is based around him trying to have the conversation while doing a gig and reporting on the gig to the imaginary sales person on the other end of the line. Of course a lot of the humour comes from him talking about the audience to his supposed telephone correspondent, but also from the suprising and unexpected fact of him answering his phone at all during a gig.
It reminds me of an exercise we did a lot at drama school in my clowning class (a noble art, as I realised when I had the privilege of watching the Russian clown, at the Old Vic in London). In our class, we had to invent our own ‘Boris’. Not the Johnson kind (although he would do just as well with his ability to disrupt proceedings), but a huge bear of a man, who would appear whenever we were flagging and poke us in the ribs, tap us on the shoulder or try to whisper something in our ear. He was entirely imaginary, and therefore invisible, but his purpose was to reignite our energy if the act (or ‘game’ in clowning parlance) was losing its way.
So what does this have to do with public speaking?! Well, the way this works for speakers is that they become very good a changing tack suddenly, as if someone had given them a new instruction, if they know it’s not going all that well doing their prepared material. Just think how helpful it would be when you are dying on stage, for someone to come on and just tell you the right thing to do next. That’s what Boris does. He is a simpleton at heart, he doesn’t complicate things, he doesn’t judge or criticise; he just helps. And he knows what the audience wants next.
In some cases (in fact in most cases) humour can fix it, so go with your gut instinct and relax a bit, have a chat with the audience, go down and see how they are getting on, use their real names and get some rapport going.
And then ask Boris what he thinks you should do next.
I saw a video on YouTube recently of a deaf girl who had a hearing aid fitted for the first time and she had never heard her own voice…when she hears it, well watch this:
Isn’t that amazing? We take the sound of our voices so much for granted but they can be very beautiful. Record yourself and listen back – find out what’s good about your voice: Is it deep & rich? Do you have a great laugh? Is your accent considered sexy? Most of the time when people hear themselves they cringe…and yet they are happy to speak all day long. So as well as appreciating it, just think about one thing you might change about your voice – is it too high? Do you have a strong sibilant ‘s’ (a very pronounced ‘s’)? Is it croaky? If you want to change something and don’t know how, post a comment here and I’ll answer it for you.
Russell brand was recently asked by a member of the press, “how are you?” meaning how he felt about his divorce. He replied, “I’m quite well, thank you. Are you asking because of recent events? You are making the mistake of seeing time as linear. Kurt Vonnegut will tell you that if you imagine reality as experienced simultaneously, events become redundant.”
I am a big fan of physics – buy me a glass of organic wine in a bar late at night and let’s talk about the universe, time and particles until the wee hours. I am purely am amateur, untamed by such inconvenient things as facts, but I have read the interesting bits of Bill Bryson’s The History of Everything and am happy to take his word for it. So at the risk of weirding you out completely I want you to ponder this: what if everything is happening at the same time? Your experience of that may speed up or slow down but that doesn’t change the fact that everything has already happened. (You’ll have to grapple with ideas of predestination for yourself here.) What would this mean for your speaking?
What if the beginning of your speech was already the end? You’d be warmed up by then, people would be applauding, you’d be making money from sales, you’d be at home with a cup of tea, relaxing. So why not infuse the beginning with the sensation if the end? What would it be like if your talk was backwards? What if, in the middle, you were at the height of your powers – the person that you are going to be in five years or have been before?
Excited? You should be – imagine if you could access future as well as past experience. Yippee!! Welcome to Phase 2 of the human experience.
Have you tried my free video series showing you how to avoid The 7 Biggest Mistakes I see people make when Speaking? http://www.secretsofspeakingsuccess.com/7mistakes
Hi, I‘m Celia Delaney and I help people to improve their public speaking, particularly if they want to promote their business through speaking. So, today‘s free speaking tip is all about persuasion. One of the things I teach people is how do you persuade the audience to take action i.e. how to make them to want to work with you or to buy things from you. One of those secrets is about scarcity. You need to create scarcity, when you are speaking. So by that I mean perhaps there is only a limited number of appointments that you have or there is only a limited number of books that people can buy today (if you are doing book signing today).
But there are other ways of introducing scarcity as well – that’s just numbers. The other way is exclusivity, so people have somehow to meet certain criteria in order to get in – so this offer is not open to everybody.
I use this a lot because I run a business that is in premier in feel. So I like people to feel that they have been selected to be part of my club. So ways you might do this if you are giving a talk, is that you can have a VIP book that you put people in. “If you’re interested in being in my VIP programme, then I will put your name down in this book”. And then later you can have a conversation about it. The other thing you might want to have is application process to say to people ‘I take on 6 private clients a year, and you need to apply so I can ensure there is a good fit in terms of what we’re doing’
You might even be straight forward about criteria like income. Often coaching programs are expensive, so you might say your client needs to be earning at least 60k per year or you need to be seven-figure business to get in to this.
So think about the ways you can make it even more scarce and limited in terms of supply (numbers) or exclusive (people need to meet a certain criteria in order to get in). And I can tell you, people will be more hungry for the thing you are offering than if you are just offering limitless supply and anybody can have it.
So have a think about it when you will be structuring your talks this week.
Have you tried my free video series showing you how to avoid The 7 Biggest Mistakes I see people make when Speaking? http://www.secretsofspeakingsuccess.com/7mistakes
Look forward to speaking to you soon.
