 Hey, welcome back to my channel guys. I'm so excited that you're here and we're on a little bit of a different topic today. So I'm glad that you clicked and that you're here to join me because we're going to talk about being a confident speaker. If you are new to my channel, I generally talk about what it's like on my journey from the US to New Zealand and living here for the last eight years. And I will continue to make videos about that, but I'm going to expand into other areas that I know and then I love to talk about so I can continue the passion and make interesting videos that I think you all will love and will apply to whoever's watching this. And so I'm excited about this video. Let's dive in. Speaking confidently is so important in 2023. It just is. With the rise of AI and machine learning and everything's changing and you know what's not changing is you. You being able to communicate, to take your ideas and put them in your context and speak them in your way is so important. Now I can't stand an idea of soft skills being like way inferior to hard skills, hard skills being like those rope tangible skills that you have drives me crazy as a communications professor of 20 years. So today we're going to talk about how to be a more confident speaker and like I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about why that's so important. It just is because if you have a great idea, if you have the knowledge about something, if you don't know how to communicate it, it doesn't matter. It's no good. It's actually like you might as well not have it if you cannot communicate it. Now, obviously you could write it. That's different. You could speak it audibly in like a podcast or something like that. But like being able to share your information well and confidently to a person, to a group of people in a public speaking setting is important. And you just cannot get through life. It's getting easier to get through life, you know, on your phone and just living in your own world and just having this persona online. And that's just going to continue to grow as you know, Web three comes out and everything just kind of explodes differently. But the one variable that will stay the same that a robot or AI cannot overcome is you is you uniquely you and your personality and your everything. So this is what we're going to talk about today. Speaking confidently, I bet you can guess the number one reason why people don't speak confidently. Is it because they don't know? Is it because they don't really want to? The biggest reason is because they have a fear. There's a fear. There's a fear of public speaking. Obviously people sometimes will fear that greater than death, right? Like it's I'm afraid of making a mistake. I'm afraid of being laughed at. I'm afraid of saying it wrong and having to be corrected and like, oh, I should have known it. And so then we don't say anything at all. You know, I've been on social media for years now and I get it all the time. I get things wrong all the time and people are like, you said this wrong or you shouldn't have done this and I thought you're a communications professor. You know, I've heard it all because we're human. And if we worry forever about waiting till we can get everything perfect before we say it, we'll never say it. Like what I said, I'd probably two years ago, I might feel differently because I've grown and changed as a person and that's okay. You've got to stop with the fear of not wanting to communicate, not wanting to share your perspective or just your thoughts on something and worried about making a mistake. Because the reality is, is making a mistake makes you human makes the audience listening to you, whether it's on video or in a presentation or at a meeting at work relate to you better. Because you know what? None of us are perfect and we all know that we're not perfect. We just don't like to portray that to others. So the biggest reason why people are not confident speakers is because there's a level of fear. So my challenge for you today is to just really be honest with yourself, some self reflection and think about like what makes me hesitate to communicate my messages to communicate well at work to communicate what I really think with my friends. Like what is that fear? And another little tidbit from my communications professor world is that when you're speaking in front of people, people have the biggest fear when they're speaking in front of people. And there's a lot of ways to overcome that is actually quite simple. And I've worked with hundreds of thousands of students. And so I've seen it all. I have seen the extremes on both ends. Okay. But like the way to really look at it is we always assume that the person watching us or listening to us is just like it's like we think that they're waiting on the edge of their seat to make fun of us. Don't wait for us to make a mistake to watch us, you know, flap on our face and fail miserably whenever that is not what's happening ever. If you ever notice when someone is speaking and then they forget what they're going to say, if you're watching a play and someone forgets a line, or they start to get nervous. And you know, like that, what does the audience do next time you're in this situation? Look around. What does the audience do? The audience immediately goes like this. They get they get really uncomfortable because they're uncomfortable because you're uncomfortable. Okay. And so how you handle that situation is huge. Okay, it's okay to say like, Oh, sorry, I just lost my train of thought. Let me let me go through my notes and just take a minute to do that. Okay. People don't want you to fail. Nobody wants to watch someone fail publicly or in a meeting or whatever. They don't they don't ultimately want to do that. Maybe you have a few randoms that think it's funny and like to make fun of other people, but we all know it's because they're insecure. Okay. And so just own it and just say, Oh, you know, I, I used to teach a lot when I was pregnant four times and I would completely lose my train of thought. I would completely like have no idea what I was in the middle of saying. And I'm supposed to like sound intelligent right in this class. And it would just be gone because pregnancy brain and just all of a sudden things just leave your brain. And that was all right. So I would just be like, okay, pregnancy brain break. I need to go figure out what it is I'm saying. And I had to look it up again. You know, and that's okay. That makes you real. That makes it like I'm not wasting your time. It's just just just know that people in the audience want you to do well. They don't want you to fail. So just that that little tidbit I'm going to leave with you today. I just want you to know they want you to do well and they don't want you to fail. Okay, so now that you know the importance of speaking confidently and the biggest fear that people have is generally like worried that people are going to laugh at them or that they want them to fail is not true. The next part into becoming a really good confident speaker is something you're not going to like this one is preparation, preparing what you're going to say. I'm telling you that will eliminate most of your anxiety, most of your fears. You actually have to put in the work. Okay, you actually have to like if you're going to give a presentation is write it all out. If that's what you need to do. And then you need to practice. You need to say it. You could videotape yourself and watch your feedback. There's literally nothing better that you can do than that because you will be a harsh critic. You can have somebody watch you and have them give you feedback. Not as strong as you watching yourself and working on improving. And then what will happen is when you give that speech you will actually enjoy it because you know what you're saying. And so you can spend the whole time that you're giving your, your, your speech or your talk on how you're presenting, making sure you're doing good eye contact. Make sure your gestures make sure that you're walking around making sure that you're smiling, you know, all those kinds of things. And so the biggest way to become a good confident speaker is just preparation. Just write it all. I would never go to a presentation with everything written out because you're going to lose your spot when you're talking. You're going to be nervous and then you're going to have to try to find it. That doesn't work. So when you give their presentation, you're just going to have an outline, which you would have prepared. You would have practiced many times saying the whole speech. You would have practiced with all of the words if you needed it at that time. But by the time you give your speech, you shouldn't need that. And you should just be able to go off of an outline. So yeah, that's my next point, making sure that I'm moving on. And then all of a sudden you're going to enjoy this process. Now this doesn't just have to be in a public speaking setting. This could be just at a work meeting. This could be an impromptu speech that is the most common type of speech. Could you tell us why sales are down? Could you tell us about the new product that we're coming in? You have to kind of stand up and say something. Can you be prepared for that? Yes, you can. That's probably a whole nother video on that. But just knowing that you are prepared will make you 100% more confident. People give up on doing a speech or doing hard things because they don't want to put in the work, right? We all know this even just like with weight loss, right? We know that we need to go work out. We need to go to the gym. We need to put in the reps. We need to put in the time. And it's the same with speaking confidently. And so that the more that you do that, the more that you practice, practice, it becomes easier. And you will probably have to practice less because you just do it all the time. Like I didn't write this out. I am literally just talking from my head. I thought about what I wanted to say. I thought about what my goals were. And I said it because I've had a lot of practice talking about these exact topics. Okay, so now that we know why it's important that we can overcome the fear that we need to be prepared, the next part is like, let's kind of get into the actual details, okay? It's your body language. It's your voice. It's what you're able to think about because you are prepared. Because you're prepared for the speech. Now, while you're giving the speech, you can control what you're doing and you can think about that. In fact, this is a little tip that I always give my students is that when you are writing out your speech outline, draw pictures or write words that represent the things that you tend to forget. Like if you tend to not smile when you're speaking, draw smiley faces all over your speech or your outline. If you forget to move, you know, like just write move really bold. Every time you just say I'm glanced down at that paper, you're like, oh yeah, I need to keep moving. I need to, you know, I need to be engaging and I need to make eye contact or eye contact. I've seen people draw shrubs, big eyes on their paper, okay? So it's important how you present as well, okay? So your body is important and your voice is important, okay? And if you have a really good voice and not a good body, it sounds great. If you have a good movement, but like your voice is very monotone and nobody wants to listen to you. That's also not great, okay? So we need to work on this and these are skills. These are skills that I would probably go in depth with you if you want to do that comment below and I will create videos on how to do that because I would love to see everybody be confident speakers, you know, because you have something important to say and we all want to hear it and we all want to hear it from your perspective and nobody has your life experience and your perspective and your feelings about everything. And so you need to be able to communicate that even if you're just out at dinner. This being able to say, this is my perspective on maybe this controversial topic or speaking to some current event that happened and you can just speak confidently because you've learned kind of the thing. So let me just give you some basics of body language. So I think the easiest way to sum it up is that you need to be you, okay? If you have a monotone voice, there are things that you can do to, you know, raise it, raise and lower your pitch. But if that's you, I would say that's not horrible. There are other things that we can work on like your body language, your gestures, your eye contact, your engagement with your face and all the muscles in your face. There's a lot of things you could work on, but at the end of the day, you have to be you, okay? You are not going to enjoy something and if I try to make you like me, okay? So what I like to do with students is work with who they are and do things that make them happy and helps them communicate the way that they want to communicate because at the end of the day, if you're pretending, it won't last very long. So be okay with who you are. Let's just start there, okay? And then we need to think about how, you know, how we're using our voice. Are we speaking loud enough? Are we making eye contact? Do we have gestures? Talk the basics, the basics today, okay? We need to have good volume if I can't hear you and you're doing an amazing speech and you're saying amazing things and you're even, your delivery is amazing. But if I can't hear you, what good is that, right? And eye contact. Can we talk about eye contact for a minute? People think like, you know, I mean, what was I taught in speech class in high school? It was look in the back of the room and find a spot in the back of the room and stare at it. Don't do that. Don't ever do that. Or they say, look at everybody in the room and then they just go do, do, do, and then done. And then they don't look at anybody the whole time they looked down at their paper. Okay, let's just, let's think about this logically. If you want me to listen to you, you need to look at me in the eye. If you don't, if you're not willing to look at me in the eye, why should I listen to you? I'm telling you that eye contact gets the most confidence. It shows that you're confident. It says, I know what I have to say. I'm excited to share it with you and I hope that you're excited to. So eye contact, very important. And gestures. So let me give you some tips on gestures. Okay, for when you're speaking. Elbows in, you know, you don't want to wave planes. We're not waving planes, but we're doing elbows in. And what I recommend for most people is to do what's comfortable for them. Now I am probably on the extreme of gestures. I do a lot of gestures because that's my personality. Some people are only confident with their hands down to their side. And that's okay. It's not as good as having some gestures. Sometimes you need to step out of your comfort zone. And that would be a whole other topic we could dive into. But like, just be you as long as your hands is a very basic level. As long as your hands are not distracting, you're fine. But be aware that you do a lot of distracting things. I mean, this is probably the number one thing I tell my students. They're like with their hair. They don't realize they're doing their scratching. So weird thing on their back. I've had people like kick their feet, kick their feet in the back the whole time. They don't realize because you have like these nervous tendencies when you're speaking. And so just be aware of that. So eye good eye contact, having some gestures, making sure that you're loud enough. These are some basic tips to get you started into speaking confidently. Now the final area that I want to talk about in terms of speaking confident is engagement interaction. Okay. When you're speaking, you are not alone. Unless you're talking to the camera like I am right now, then I am alone. And then that's a little bit easier. But there is so much feedback that you can get from the room that you're speaking in, whether it's large or small or just your family, they're telling you. Cause you're non-verbal speak louder than what you're actually saying. So when people are like, you're seeing a lot of this, maybe they don't understand what you're saying. Maybe you're getting too in depth and you need to take a, take a few steps back. When you're confident in speaking, you are prepared in your speaking. Then you're able to adjust what you're saying to meet what is clearly a problem in the audience. Or if people are walking out or maybe I'm saying something that is not sensitive enough. And I'm not realizing it. Like you can adjust actually on that speech, but just if you're prepared, then you're able to do that. You're able to be more aware and adjust to the audience. Now, one of the biggest fears that come with public speaking is I don't want to ask her questions. What if they ask me a question? I have no idea what to say. And I get stressed about like the honest spot. Now some people are great on the spot. And some people are just really not, you know? So if you're just like, if it literally puts you over the top, then, you know, go ahead and say, if you have questions, you can contact me here, maybe have it up on a slide. That's fine. But it is good if you're comfortable with that is to ask for questions and because you don't need to be afraid of it. And the reason why you don't need to be afraid of it is because nobody in the universe actually expects you to know the answer the second that they ask. Okay, it's, we don't live in a world of we have to memorize everything. It's called Google.com. Oh, yeah, that's right. How many times at dinner do you? Oh, yeah, what's the name of that? Google it, right? Because nobody is expected to know everything off the top of their head. So if someone asks you a question while you're speaking at the Q&A section and you like actually have no idea, that's what you say. That is a great question. I actually am not totally sure how I would answer that. And I want to look at a couple of things before I answer that question. So can you email and I would love to have a discussion and, you know, we'll dig deeper and I'll get back to you on that. Or if you have a classroom, then you can just tell them the next week. Just do that. Like there's no fear in it. Just be honest. Oh, there's a concept. Be honest when you're speaking and just say, I actually don't know. That's a great question. I will have to get back to you the end. It's fine. Everybody was like, oh, okay, it's not unreasonable. Like you don't have to know everything off the top of your head. That's really that easy. Well, I hope you enjoyed this video. I really enjoyed doing it. And so please comment below with like what communication questions you have or what other videos you'd like to see. Or if you want me to dive deeper into any of that, if that would be helpful. Or if you want to learn how to communicate in a particular situation like a situation with a manager, situation with a spouse, I'm happy to help with that. Comment below, subscribe, like this video and I'll see you next week.