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, how do make them to want to work with you or to buy things from you. One of those secrets about scarcity. You need to create scarcity, when you speaking. So by that I mean there is only a limited appointment 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 doing 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 ran a business that is in premiering feel. So I like people to feel so that they have been selected to be part of my club, so other ways you can do this if you are giving a talk like you are having 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  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.

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. To you Speaking Success! 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

Hi I’m Celia Delaney and I help people to improve their public speaking. So here is today’s free speaking tip. One of the things I see people doing a lot is not being heard at the back, so they are unable to project their voice well even in quite a small room and so their voice sounds really thin and quite often uninteresting because it simply just doesn’t have enough energy and volume to it. So I want to talk to you about how to do that today.

Now a big part of that is vocal warm up and if you head on over to my website celiadelaney.co.uk there you’ll find a vocal warm up you can download, which you can do in the car or at home and it takes about 5 minutes and that will help you to get your voice louder and more supportive. But when you’re actually in the moment a lot of it is an energetic skill and part of that is about how you’re thinking. The mistake I think people make is that we are so used to speaking to people one-to-one and about this distance, that this is the only distance that we throw our voice to so you’re looking at the person at about this distance and that’s just as far as you go.

When you speak to a group I want you to think about throwing your voice to the back of the room, to the person at the very back. People at the front will be able to hear anyway but the people at the back need to be reached. So sometimes when I’m coaching people I get them to, as their speaking actually walk across the room to the back row and speak to them directly and then come back to the front where your speaking and see what it’s like to actually message those people.  Think about if you were going to throw a ball and you needed to throw it just to the person right in front of you. You would just do a little underarm throw wouldn’t you, It wouldn’t take a lot of energy but if you’re going to throw it to the back of the room you need to properly throw it as an over arm throw and I want you to be the same energetically. So lift your chest up, lift your chin up, physically really step forward and think about the edges of the room and have that as part of your consciousness so that your voice is coming out of your body much more deliberately than if you were to shrink it back down and talk to people intimately on the front row.

Now when you get really clever and start to suddenly vary it up, you start to say, “Hey everybody it’s great to be at Wembley!” and then you say, “Oh hi how are you?” at the front row and that makes you look like a really experienced speaker.

So that’s today’s free speaking tip. For more head on over to my website its www.celiadelaney.co.uk

Here’s to your speaking success and I look forward to speaking to you soon.

Well how about “Speak like no one is watching”?

Communicate with your audience as if they were your closest, most intimate group of friends. Think about how relaxed you are when you know you are with people like you or think you are funny. Remember the feeling of when you are telling a great joke or story, and everyone is hooked on it and roars with laughter at the end. Or you are reading to your kids and they are gazing at you, soaking in every drop of excitement, not wanting it to end. THAT’s what it feels like when you speak well to a group. I promise you, it does, once you relax.

So take yourself back to a time like that: see it, hear it, feel it…and speak like it.

Remember that these people are here because they want to hear what you have to say. They are here to listen to your advice, your perspectives, your presentation. They are here for you.

Hi I’m Celia Delaney and I help people to improve their public speaking. So here’s today’s free speaking tip. It’s really important to make eye contact with your audience in order to be more engaging.

Now, I’ve got three tips for you today. The first is you don’t want to be looking at your slides too much. A lot of the time when you see people presenting you’ll see them turning around, let’s say this is my slide behind me, and basically talking like this. This means you have your back to the audience, it’s not very engaging. Also researchers at the University of California in the last couple of years have been looking at this and they say it causes cognitive overload if you read exactly the same things that are on your slide. Because if you imagine it acts just like an echo for people actually they can read faster than you can speak so they’re ahead of you. You know what that means? It means they’re bored as you’re speaking as they have already read it for themselves. So don’t look at your slides if you’re going to look back, look back and read them in silence then turn back and deliver things to people preferably not exactly what’s on there. You need to elaborate, so don’t read your slides.

This leads me onto golden rule #2, which is only talk to humans. You should never be speaking while you are looking at an inanimate object. That means your slides as we’ve just seen or your notes. As soon as you start to talk like this to your notes, it’s really not that interesting for the people watching. Watch out for going down at the end of sentences. “There’s a really thrilling thing I want to tell you all about today (looks down) that were about to launch a new product today called…” So you see how the temptation is there to be looking down to read the next thing. Well you have to get confident about reading in silence. Same as with the slides it’s like that with the notes you have to look down, then look back up and deliver what you have just read, it’s called sight reading and it’s a really great technique to develop. So don’t look at inanimate objects while you’re speaking, talk only to humans.

Golden rule #3 make eye contact with everybody in the room if you can. Now by that I don’t want you to go looking scared and trying to cover everybody at the same time. What you want to be doing is choosing a section of the room and making eye contact with that section. So you might take this section, then a section over here and then over here. You need to vary it up don’t just go around, you need to chose different points of the room in order to do this well and look at a specific person. People often ask me should I look over everybody’s heads. No it doesn’t work that well when you’re speaking to people. That’s how actors do it in the theatre, they look at the top row and then everybody else can see their face but they’re playing a character. There’s something called the 4th wall that is they’re pretending that the wall of their house is here and that their inside the house. Whereas when you are speaking there is no fourth wall you’re just speaking to people very directly and engagement is about meeting them, it’s about being in a relationship with them so unless you look at them, you are going to lose some of that engagement.

So one person, one thought – One thought, you say the whole thought to that one person and then you look at somebody else and say the next delivered thought to them. Then someone else gets a bit of the thought and then the concluding thought goes to somebody else.

If you can learn to do that it looks very slick and everybody around that person feels like they’re included, because when you’re looking wide enough for everybody to feel like they are being looked at as well. So one person, one thought is the 3rd Golden Rule. No Tennis matches please and no lighthouse.

Well I hope that helps. That’s your 3 Golden Rules on eye contact. That’s your free speaking tip for today and to get more visit my blog at http://www.celiadelaney.co.uk
I look forward to speaking with you soon.

Hi I’m Celia Delaney and if you have ever wondered how to be better at Public Speaking you have come to the right place. Today I’m going to concentrate on microphones. Because I often see people get a microphone thrust into their hand in a business situation and then really don’t know what to do with it and it completely ruins their talk.

Now if you’re sitting there saying, “I never use microphones. I never have to use microphones” think again. Many people I know that haven’t prepared to use it have been asked to use it at an event because their voice simply isn’t loud enough and people are saying, “can’t hear you” at the back. So they are given one of these (microphone).

So I want to show you how to use it, this is my microphone Master Class that I do at my events. So I’m going to share my secrets with you because it’s really important to me that people can be heard. My drama school teacher said to me, “darling, if you can’t be heard you can’t be good” so bear that in mind. Here we go.

This is a normal hand held microphone. Sometimes they will also be called “radio mics”, but usually this is just called a microphone and on the bottom this one’s different because this one plugs in but you would see a red light if the microphone is turned on and often the on and off switch is down there, otherwise it might be on the side. So take a good look before you go to the event, ask the organizer how does this switch on and are you going to hand it to me switched on already and that’s the best thing if you ask them to do that. If you need to check don’t forget that everyone is looking at you and don’t go, “oh how does this work” just look down calmly and click on or look at the bottom and click it on and just take your time. It looks so amateur if you fumble with this thing so it’s on. The other thing is please don’t tap it like this, it’s quite bad for the microphone and you can break it over time doing that. You’ll find if you just breathe, blow into it or start to speak and say hello, everybody then you’ll be able to hear whether it’s on or not and if you say that loudly enough any way people will be able to hear you.

The important thing about where to hold it is that you don’t put it into your air stream let’s imagine if I turn sideways, let’s imagine as I am talking the air is coming out in a triangle shape and that’s my air stream. So if I put the microphone into it what happens is it’s often too loud, it’s an unpleasant sound and also you probably get popping. You know when it goes (popping sound) and everyone goes, eww owww and it’s not very nice over the speakers. That’s because they are putting it into their air stream and usually too close to the mouth as well. You should be holding it below the stream so you want to be holding it here, like level with your chin and if you do a relaxed hand span away at about 45 degrees, so I’ve got the microphone at about 45 degrees under the air stream about a hand span away and my arm is nice and relaxed. I got a bit of air between that and my ribs so I’m not clamped and tense. You want to be careful with that and now I can speak normally.

So you’ve got it in the right position. Don’t look down at it like it’s an alien don’t go, “ohh I hate this thing” don’t try and pull away from it. The idea is you need to keep it in the same distance as in relationship to your mouth all the time. It is your friend not foe. Also as you move you need to move it in the same relationship as you so it stays there as you move. Don’t be tempted to talk away because obviously you’ll lose the sound. The other thing I see people doing a lot is gesturing with it. As they’re talking they’re gesturing ok you have to gesture with this hand, that’s the way it goes. And also think about how many hands you’ve got.  You’ve got two, most people do and you’re going to be holding the microphone with this one which leaves you one to gesture or to hold any notes so if you came with postcards and you were planning to change them over, think in advance am I going to be able to put those on a table or a lectern in order to be able to turn them over. If your absolutely stuck and you have to do it with this hand that’s ok it’s a bit awkward, I would just take the microphone away and stop speaking as you do it, so change and come back to your position.

Anytime you need to withdraw the microphone from its position you should stop speaking. It sounds terrible if you go up and down in volume. So practice at home you only need a hairbrush or something to practice with but just get really comfortable presenting with a microphone.

Okay well that’s my microphone Master Class and your free speaking tip for today so for more go to my blog it’s at http://www.celiadelaney.co.uk I look forward to speaking to you soon.