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.)

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.

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.

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.

The secret to being a great speaker? Get a life!

Hi, I‘m Celia Delaney and I show people how to speak to promote their business.

So, today‘s free speaking tip is about being interesting as a speaker. Now I go back to my acting days and to my coach who worked with me back then and he always said “You know, you‘re only as interesting as your own life” and he said “Go to work on your self-that‘s the most important thing you can do in  life.”

And I really agree with him: I think that speakers are only as interesting as the experiences that they‘ve had. So one thing I want to say to you today is to go out and make sure you‘re living your life to the full, because it‘s really going to show up in your speaking.

If you‘re just burning yourself out working, you‘re not going to have any interesting stories to tell people and you‘re not going to be in contact with the rest of the world. I talk all the time when I‘m speaking about the things that I‘m currently doing, like at the moment I‘m learning golf – my husband‘s very keen on golf (i.e. I am a golf widow!). I got married a year ago, I do lots of stuff with my family, just all kinds of things. Whatever is in my life, I use it to make stories out of, but the point is I have a life. I‘m socialising, I‘m dancing (I dance salsa), I find that this is where the story is going to come from: it‘s often in social time and not in work time. So it‘s a great excuse to go out and party!!

Go out and enjoy yourself, develop hobbies, develop skills and most of all, develop stories.

So that‘s today’s free speaking tip.

I‘m Celia Delaney, head on over to my website www.celiadelaney.co.uk for more tips. See you soon.

Now I’d like to point out that I didn’t wear my voice out – after all I do teach how to preserve your voice! What seems to have happened is that I had a slight head cold, and it was lingering by the time I went into hospital for a minor operation. It seems that the breathing tube that pushed the cold down and caused an infection of the pharynx. So it’s true what they say – hospitals make you ill!

So what should the learning be here? To be honest, I’m still trying to work that out, but here’s my thoughts so far:

1. The most dangerous number in a business is 1. One computer (crashes), one person (ditto), so I was really glad that I had built up team over the last 18 months and so I was able to delegate phone calls and training to others.

2. My clients are really nice. They didn’t mind that I had to rearrange a webinar, a coaching session and two days of training that week and that made me really appreciate the people I choose to serve.

3. Always have a contingency plan when you speak: I was due to give a talk at our Professional Development Club on the Wednesday evening, but instead my friend, Phil, gave it for me. I always write out or record my talk for this very reason – so that someone else can pick it up and do it, or at worst, you can watch my rehearsal video!!

4. I love speaking and I really hate email. So I’ve vowed to phone people more, now that I know what it’s like not to be able to.

5. Prioritise fiercely. Why wait until you have to? Losing my voice meant I really questioned everything that was in my diary. I hope it’s a habit that stays with me because it’s really easy to get sidetracked by nice requests that aren’t strictly the best things for me to speak at or train on.

What would you do if you lost your voice? Have you got some backup plans? What would you do differently?

Lots to think about! Speak soon,

Celia

p.s. My husband likes to make out it was bliss that I couldn’t speak…but he missed it really.

Related articles

• Why do I keep losing my voice? (zocdoc.com)
• A Worship Leader’s Lost Voice (yahwehssong.com)

What are YOU doing to stand out as a speaker or even as yourself? You don’t have to be whacky…but you should be distinctive. Who wants to do business with someone they can barely remember?

 I’ll give you a few examples of some ways people are able to stand out:

• Your accent e.g. you went to Sandhurst and you sound like it – it helps, it makes sense to people because it is congruent or you went to Sandhurst but you have the thickest regional accent going – it helps because it’s incongruent

• Physique – are you in a minority in some way in your country? Very tall or very short, very fat, minority ethnic background, disabled? Perhaps that particularly stands out because it’s surprising e.g you are tall & Japanese. You need to capitalise on it – point it out and give the audience permission to remember you for it.

• Your clothes – if you are creative, or old-fashioned then people will assume your offering is too – is that OK with you?

• Your business card – what about getting some really good ones done that are different in shape or texture? (I still harbour a desire to get velvety ones done) Mine currently open up like a book.

• Your story – are you making enough of where you’ve come from? People want a hook to remember you by. For me it’s actress, for you it might be military, athlete, rock star… if you look and sound like that it helps.

• Your title – do you have one? I call myself ‘The SpeakingSuccess coach’ so that other people will (hopefully) call me that too. ‘She’s the… ‘ or ‘He’s the…’ is one of the most powerful ways you can stand out.

• Your hook – what’s your main claim to fame in your niche? Do you say it every time? For example in interview skills I have a 100% track record of getting people the job. You know it’s ‘hooky’ when people go ‘oh!’

• Your angle – do you bring a fresh twist to an old theme? My angle is that I teach speaking but specifically with an eye on sales – my type of speaker training is all about persuasion & influence. What’s your angle?

With all of these things, if you don’t know what makes you distinctive, think about how someone would describe you when you’re not there – spot these chefs:

‘Celebrity chef…you know, the one that shouts at everyone.’

‘You know, The Naked Chef…what’s his name?’

‘Famous chef…makes weird things all the time – using bunson burners’

‘Who’s that chef? Huge black guy, really tall, massive smile?’

Don’t be afraid of boxing yourself in – just accept this is how the human brain works…if an audience can’t ‘place’ you inside of a blink, they’ll just forget you because it’s too hard. You can always surprise them later.

One of the things I teach people is how to get tangible sales when they do a talk.  So that means that I am actually asking people to take action on the day.  They have something in the back of the room they want to sell or they are asking people to sign up with them to take a package or any other kind of product or service.  Now it can be a bit strange when you start to do this, and you can get a real variety of results.  You might get no sales at all or you might get one or two or you might get very surprised and suddenly convert 100% of the room.  It does happen if your offering is right and people really like you, but I want to encourage you to celebrate wildly whatever those results are.

One of my clients Nick Allison who has a video on my channel on youtube, which is celiadelaney channel, said to me “oh whoo hooo I got two sales from my talk” after we had worked out how to do a sales talk for him.  I thought that was just a really good attitude to have.  So just whoop whenever you get a sale.  If you can get two, you can get twenty.  If you can get twenty you can get two hundred, so don’t get disheartened.  Think about what you did well and what worked and what worked well for those people.  Start to find out from them what were the things you did for them that made them cross the line.  These are called the pareto motives.  This was the economist that came up with the theory of the 80/20 rule.  So 20% of what you do will yield 80% of your results.  So try to filter out what was the 20% of what you said that was most persuasive and just ask the people that bought and you will get to know over time.  So be really pleased with a sale or two sales because that means you can do it again and then next time go out and do it even better.

So I hope you have enjoyed this speaking tip today.  It’s really, really hot here in England.  It is just boiling and it is right at the end of September 30^th of September can you believe it?  So, I’m off out to the garden. I really wish you all of the best with your speaking success.  I look forward to speaking with you soon.  Do head on over to my YouTube channel celiadelaney and my website which is www.celiadelaney.co.uk.  Bye for now!

Does it ever put you off when the audience looks bored or disengaged when you speak? Well, learn here why that is, and what you can do about it:

1. The crucial thing to grasp about audience behaviour
2. The one thing you must do to keep them engaged
3. The one biggest MISTAKE I see speakers making when worried about audience behaviour