Should You Memorize Your Speech Or Not?

Beginning public presenters meet many difficulties and one of the most common problems is the issue of remembering whole content of the presentation. There are several approaches to this, including reading the whole text, speaking freely and looking at notes from time to time, using PowerPoint presentation, and memorising whole speech. Each of these will be to some degree helpful, and each has it’s own advantages and disadvantages. In this short article I’d like to explore the last approach – memorizing complete presentation text.

This is probably the most difficult approach. It requires lots of preparation work – much more than with other methods. Firstly you need to write the whole speech word by word. This arises the first problem because most of us don’t write the way we speak. It takes a lot of mental energy to really write entire presentation word by word. We then need to memorize it – this part is actually much easier then the previous one.

Another thing you should be aware of is that with this approach you’re likely to put all your concentration on worlds instead of the ideas behind them. And this may make you sound somehow bland. This just is far away from the natural way we speak.  And if at some point you’ll forget one world or sentence of your memorised structure, you risk you’ll lose ‘the flow’. And you’ll probably lose sense of control and end up seen as unauthentic and way too formal. You don’t want that.

What I suggest is to think about content of your speech inside out, create a logical structure for it, and then remember main points and crucial ‘sound bites’ – important expressions that show your points. That should help you much more, and keep you natural at the same time.

What You Dont Know About Stress

Stress is a serious problem of western civilisation. Most people doesn’t know there are two kinds of stress. One of them is what we typically think of – negative tension that makes us less effective, destroys our self-esteem, and is really unpleasant. It’s called distress. But there is another type of stress that is really pleasant. It makes us feel extremely excited, and fills us with positive emotions. It’s called eustress. It makes us ready for new challenges, and gives us a lot of energy.

What is really interesting is that the chemical reactions that take place in our brains are always the same. There are exactly the same hormones released when we feel frightened by a dog, and when we feel joy of a ride in your new car. And they often cause the same symptoms, like pounding heart, vertigo… What differs is our perceptions of these symptoms.

What it really means? That what we feel (anxiety or excitement) depends on who we perceive the situation. If we’ll be able to change our perception of a given situation, we can easy change how we feel. And the ‘bad stress’ (distress) may disappear. Good example of that we can find in public speaking. Many people believes that if the speak they need to be perfect, know all the answers, and be the number one expert on the World to be accepted and appreciated. Therefore speaking in public is extremely stressful event for such people. And solution in many cases is quite simple. It’s enough to realise we don’t need to be perfect, to add significant value to the audience. Then just focus on this value, and how we can add it. And most part of fear may disappear, or even change into excitement. It all depends on what we believe in. This is what all soft skills trainers and online masters in counseling say -change your perception and wyour experience will change too.

Distress make huge damage to the health and condition of nowadays people. It adds to the depression, heart attacks, and is a hidden cause of many other diseases. The high level of negative stress is  such common problem, that everyone should find the difference between these two kinds of stress, and do something to turn the bad one into the good one.

The Right Mind Frame for Public Presentations

What you believe in and what you think about yourself is extremely important in public speaking. It plays crucial role in your success or failure. So it’s important to become aware of few key facts, and keep them in mind. Let’s explore that helpful beliefs a little more.

First thing is to know exactly what you want to accomplish and focus on that. This means you don’t really need to have the answer to any questions that may be asked. Always remember what your role is and stick to this. This is common mistake of public presenters that they think they need to be perfect when they get on the stage. And that leads them to enormous stress. Nobody was ever perfect, nobody is and nobody ever will be. Just focus on your task, and if you can complete it, you’re good enough.

Second thing is to become aware that you can not expect to satisfy all the audience members. You can not think you can really influence them. Don’t expect too much from yourself. There will be various people there, some of them will like you and what you say, and others will not. And you can do nothing about that. Don’t try to be liked by everyone. Just do your job, and be sure you’ve added some value to most of the listeners. This will do.

Another thing is to be aware that you have been chosen to speak for some reason. Someone decided you’ll be the right person to give this presentation. Someone believes you’re competent and will you do the job. Don’t forget about that – others see you as competent professional. So you can see yourself this way as well.

The last tip is to simply focus on your audience. Think about them. Think how can you add value to them. This should be your focal point from the very beginning. And what’s good about it is that when you focus on them, you can not focus on yourself at the same time. And when you can not focus on yourself, you can not feel stress any more.

These tips above are the basic rules of  what I call ’inner game’ of speaking in public – the most fundamental elements of your mental attitude. Contemplate them for few minutes, and you’ll se your next presentation in completely new light.

How To Start Presentation

For many people out there, the main difficulty of public speaking is with the problem of starting their presentation. They often just don’t know how to start and that amplifies their fear of public speaking. And the way we start is very important in public speaking. I may help us sway our audience from the very beginning, or it may destroy our image from the very first minute. So finding the right way to start should be the crucial part of our preparation process. I’ll briefly talk about popular ways of starting presentation down the article. Just pick one of them and give it a try.

First: start with a vision. Try to show your audience members some long term perspective for the topic you’re talking about. Make them imagine what can happen in the future, what they may accomplish. Or what bad things can happen if they’ll not take action. Send them into the future, and make them feel they’re really there. This will set frame and reference point for whole your presentation. You may refer to this vision later on.

Second: tell them what you’re going to tell them. This is quite popular way of beginning public speaking events. In my opinion it’s not really good, none of really well done presentations were started this way. But still, if you have no idea how to start, and are afraid that your speech will turn into total disaster, this may help you make mediocre presentations. If this is good enough for you, this may be the option to pick.

Third: start asking questions. Instead of talking from the very beginning, try engaging them into the conversation. Ask them what they think first. This will make them more active, and more responsive to you’ll say. Only then say what you know. And remember to refer to what they said somehow later along the way of your speech. Show them you remember what they said.

Fourth: Start talking about something you know they agree with. This technique is especially good when you’re talking to people that you know will disagree with something you’ll tell. It’s good to show you have something in common at the beginning.

These four techniques above are just basic ways of starting. They may be especially helpful if you’re just starting. Still you don’t need to stick to them once you feel more self confident. Experiment, and after some time I believe you’ll find your own way.

Public Speaking is Like Sports

Public speaking is like sports. If you’d done everything to prepare yourself, you should succeed. If you have done proper research about your audience members, exploration about the topic, planning of your agenda, you should do well. But you may be wondering – is there something else you can do? Actually there is one more thing. Just like in sports – the last stage of preparation is the warm-up before you go for actual performance. Despite all the long hours of training, sportsmen need some warm-up for their muscles. And it’s just the same with public presenters. Despite all the preparation, and time spent in front of the mirror, they still need the warm-up for their communication ‘muscles’ – in other case they’ll often experience public speaking anxiety to some degree.

How to do this? There are many methods that can be helpful. I’ll list some of them below. Just pick the ones that suit you the most, and give them a try.

First thing is to do something for your primary tool – your voice. When you’re in private, do some purring. Or try emitting different emotions when speaking the same thing. Say ‘Monday’ with joy, and then with sadness, and with compassion. This will make your diction and modulation more flexible.

Talk to somebody lively. Tell a joke, or some story with dynamic plot. Do big gestures, and change tempo, and emotional state. Talk, talk, talk.. keep talking for few minutes. This will activate the parts of your brain, that need to be active during presentation.

Do some physical exercise. Few knee-bends will put you into more active state of mind. Body is strictly connected with mind. You’ll easy get rid of ‘presentation paralysis’ just by doing something physical. This will turn the ‘communicative mode’ on, and it will be much easier to start talking lively.

Make some quick visualisation. Before you start, envision what you do and the positive reactions of listeners. See how self confident you look, and hear how powerful your voice sounds. Do it for half a minute, and this may give you nice kick of positive energy.

Doing all these exercises will help you to start with a kick. And good start is the fundament for good performance.  First impression will work on your favour then. If you’ll be at high state of energy, it’ll be easy to move audience from the very beginning. And if you’ll make them interested at the start, there is a chance they’ll really remember what you’re talking about.

Public Speaking Is a Dialogue

Public speaking is a dialogue, and you should always remember about it. It’s a dialogue because you speak and audience responses with their reactions – questions, gestures, and how much attention they pay to you. Everything they do or not do is a response to what we say. So we should observe them, what they do, how much their interest do we get, do they chat with each other. Thanks to that we’ll be able to adjust ourselves to the situation. We’ll be able to change style of our presentation so that it fits the current situation. And so our pitch will be much more dynamic.

What most newbie presenters are lacking is the courage to stop talking. They usually speak to fast, and don’t stop for a moment until they’re finished and can go off the stage. Of course this is partly caused by public speaking anxiety, they experience. And the power of pause is huge. It lets us grab attention immediately. And it gives us sense of control over what happens between us and the audience.

Another good idea is to tell the story and while doing it, play the role of it’s main characters. Be a ham actor. Show hoe they talk, how they move – exaggerate. Show how different these characters are. Contrast is great factor of attractive narration. Think about all the Hollywood movies – there is always strong contrast between most important characters, or between environment where the hero lives at the beginning and later on. The differences attract attention. So show contract. Change your body language, facial expressions, gestures, and voice when you play different characters.

Next thing is to keep eye contact with the audience members. There are different methods for this. Some people just pick one person in the middle and focus on him or her for entire time of the speech. This approach was used by famous singer Luciano Pavarotti. Another method is to imagine the space is divide into few segments, and then spare your attention between these segments. Give people of each segment equal amount of time and attention. Another variation of this is to pick just one person from each segment and keep eye contact just with each of them for some time.

These are just the basic advices to start with. What is really important is to implement them correctly. And for that I recommend practical exercises. The best way is to train in front of a mirror, or with your friends as an audience.

Coping With Anxiety

There are really many methods of coping with anxiety.

They include relaxation and visualisation techniques, hypnosis, behavioral training, anchoring and many others. These methods are good, and can bring you desired results, in some cases really quickly. People differ, so each of us have to find his or her own way. Some techniques will work for you better than others, but for most us these mentioned above will work. I’d like to share with you one more method for dealing with anxiety.

One other method that is hardly ever discussed, is actors training.

This is especially good when you want to work with public speaking anxiety. Choosing this option you don’t really aim in reducing your anxiety. You just focus all your energy on looking as you were free from it. This works near the ‘fake it until you make it’.

You learn to behave like you were completely relaxed.

You train your body to move like it was relaxed, just like actors learn expressing many different emotions, you learn to express self-esteem, and comfort with speaking in public. After some training, your body language will only display signs of comfort and confodence. You train your voice to mimic the tone and modulation those who are confident presenters. And after some time you may realize, that although your fear of public speaking didn’t vanish, this fear is not a problem any more. You learned to live with it.

Sometimes the anxiety itself is only half of the problem,

and the other half is that we can’t stand that others see it, and judge us because of it. This method is a good option for those who tried other methods, and didn’t get visible results. It may also lead to reducing or elimination of public speaking anxiety. In some cases it’ll work like that – thanks to your actor’s training, you’ll see you’re getting better results when speaking, and audiences like you more and more, and that makes you feel more comfortable. This way anxiety may vanish, despite you didn’t work directly with it.

Performance Anxiety

Today I’d like to briefly talk about what public speaking anxiety really is. It is a state of mind and body. Characteristic of this state may vary among all the people who experience it, but there are some common symptoms that appear in most cases. Lets have a look at them.

First thing, the most obvious, is physical symptoms. There are many of them, and in most of cases they include some sort of feeling of weakness. Some will feel their knees are week, some will feel they’re going to faint, and some will even really do. Also the so called ‘escape reaction’ is very common – this is a set of body reactions characteristic to the animal reaction for physical danger. Pounding heart, creeps, faster and shallow breath..

Second thing is the imaginary power of the audience. Person experiencing stage fright will feel the people have the power to judge her or him, and that their assessments is something that really counts. This may be unconscious, but there has to be some ‘seeking for acceptance’ in order to evoke fear. If there was someone who really (also on subconscious level) wouldn’t give a damn about how audience would judge her or him, there would be no chance of stage fright appearing. I don’t recommend ‘not giving a damn’. But realizing that value of myself as a human being is 100% independent on how good or bad my presentation will go.

The third common factor is a sort of negative affirmations or visualizations. Many people suffering fear of public speaking will run a ‘inner dialog’ about how bad are they going to perform. Others will be continuously envisioning the ‘failure’ option of their speech. This often happens partly automatically and partly subconsciously. When they start this negative affirmations or visualizations, they can’t stop. It just woks itself.

This also works similarly when person says something like “what if they don’t like what I say, what if I’ll forget my content, what if someone will ask a question I’ll not be able to ask….” This is also a sort of negative ‘inner dialog’ that focuses on every possible ‘fail’ option. The good way of dealing with it is to simply reverse it: “How would it be if they really liked what I say.. How would it be If I’d speak with perfect flow…”.

These three factors are common elements of performance anxiety. If you experience two of them, it’s good idea to do something with it.

Self Hypnosis Techniques

Self hypnosis can help you with changing your emotions and with learning new skills. This is possible thanks to increased response to suggestion characteristic to the state of hypnosis (and self-hypnosis). What is also helping here is focused mental concentration. For example if you want to use self hypnosis techniques to get rid of public speaking anxiety, you can do that by putting yourself into that state and than using suggestions of you feeling comfortable, self confident and enthusiastic.

I’ve wrote here before about using relaxation and visualization techniques for coping with anxiety. They can be combined with self hypnosis techniques. Before you start your self hypnosis session, you can go through relaxation session (I would especially recommend autogenic training by Shultz at that point). And when you’re hypnotized, you can add some visualization to your auto-suggestions. That means you would not only say to yourself “I’m confident when speaking in public”, but also see yourself in situation on public presentation, and feel confident.

The two factors that make the difference here, are increased suggestion response, and increased concentration on one thing. They make your suggestion or affirmations much more powerful.

How to use self hypnosis techniques?

Fist put yourself into state of self-hypnosis. You can start with technique of autogenic training by Shultz, and as you become more and more relaxed, add suggestions about your state of mind. These can be some of these:

  • I’m more and more relaxed.
  • Every breath I take makes me more and more relaxed.
  • With every breath I take, my body falls into deeper and deeper sleep.
  • My body is sleeping, bud my mind is awaken.
  • My mind is clear and focused.

And similar to these. You can of course invent your own suggestions. If you’re really deeply relaxed, you feel your body is sleeping and your mind is able to concentrate on one ting with unusual focus, this is the sate of (shallow) self-hypnosis. Now you can start using suggestion that you want your subconscious mind to believe in. If you’re working on coping with public speaking anxiety, you can for example say to yourself:

  • I feel comfortable when speaking in public.
  • I feel self confident when speaking in public.
  • I feel enthusiastic, energetic and powerful when speaking in public.

And other similar, that you feel suit your needs. It’s important for you, to have these suggestions prepared in advance. Especially if you’re just starting with self-hypnosis you could have problem with inventing what to say to yourself, when you’re already in the state of deep trance. Good luck!

Visualization techniques

Visualization techniques can help you develop new skills faster, build new attitude and programme emotional reactions. They can also help you reduce your public speaking anxiety. I’ve wrote already about relaxation techniques for anxiety in two posts about two methods – Jacobson’s Progressive Relaxation, and autogenic training by Schultz’. These two can be great introduction into using visualisation techniques. After you’re really relaxed, your body is resting and your mind becomes silent and clear, it’s much easier to envision things that you want to visualize.

The point of using this techniques is that you can see yourself doing the thing that you want to learn, and you can also associate some emotion with the picture of you doing it. So if you for example currently suffer fear of public speaking, you can envision the situation of you giving a speech and evoke positive emotions that you would like to associate with that state.

How to go through such visualization session? Imagine the whole situation, from when you go to the building, see the room, start your speech, go through it, and finish it. Also envision what happens afterwards, the networking, sharing business cards and if you expect some outcome from that presentation (like customer calling you next day) see it as well, as clearly as you can.

Try to see the whole presentation with details. In your visualisation, say what you’re going to say (hear your own voice). Hear the applause at the end. See enthusiasm (or understanding, or whatever you want to see) at your audiences faces. Feel the comfort and self-esteem in your body. The point I’m making here is that you should make your vision as real as possible. Fill it with details, use all senses (not only sight), and include positive emotion (how you’d like to feel). Evoke these feelings in your mind and body, and your brain will associate them with the situation of speaking in public. If you’re relaxed it’s often say simple suggestion like ‘I’m feeling full of passion when speaking to these people’ to evoke positive emotions. Check it.

Visualization techniques can do very good job at learning skills, and public speaking is just like any other skills. So I encourage you to take advantage of this method – it may help a lot.