The 4 things that will transform your speaking forever.

I learned a lot of lessons along my journey as a professional speaker. And many of these lessons I teach now in the speaking and communication trainings I give as well as through the free public speaking course I offer through 10xSpeaker. I don’t believe you need to know everything about speaking to be a powerful speaker.

Some people will try to arm themselves with everything they can get access to before going out there and starting to deliver powerful speeches that move people and drive action. I believe the best way to learn is through doing. And I also believe that knowledge means nothing unless you apply it. What’s the point of knowledge in your head if you don’t do anything with it? 

So I decided to distill everything I know about giving a powerful talk down into 4 key components that make up 80% (or more) of what you need to know to get started and deliver a powerful speech. These are the 4 biggest lessons I can give you that will impact your speaking and communication skills the most and have you well on your way to becoming the best speaker you can be. I believe these 4 lessons will be more powerful for you then an A-Z encyclopedia on speaking which will have your reading much more than speaking.

So let’s get started!

Here are the 4 main things that will transform the way you speak from any stage:

1. Your ability to manage your nerves and get over your fear of public speaking.
2. Your ability to remember your talk and present dynamically through story maps.
3. Your ability to connect and build rapport with everyone who is listening.
4. Your ability to leverage story in order to create emotional connection.

So welcome to Lesson one! In this lesson, what you're going to learn are the four things that you need to know in order to become a powerful speaker and give a powerful talk, speech, keynote or pitch anywhere and on any stage. 

It's so important that you know these things because they are key to you having a voice and to you gaining the courage and confidence to get up on stage and drive results both at a personal and professional level in your organisations or own business as an entrepreneur. Your ability to present and get your ideas across is foundational to driving your results and your growth or your company's growth.

I'm Chris Baldwin, the founder of 10xSpeaker and my job is to get you up on stage, so that you give a powerful presentation and drive more results. And these four things are going to help you get there. So let's get started with lesson 1 and touch on the first thing, because these four things are literally going to 10X your ability to speak. 

The very first thing for many of us is overcoming our fear of public speaking and getting comfortable with managing our nerves on and off stage when we get asked to speak. If I asked you the question "do you get nervous when you have to get up on stage?". A lot of you say yes. I know because I've asked this question many times at 10xSpeaker training days and it's often up to 90% of the audience who raises their hands and says YES! I get nervous.

So what we're going to cover in this first module is how to manage your nerves. Not to get rid of them because you don't want to get rid of them, nerves are beautiful. They're beautiful things, because if you can manage them well and with the right mindset, if you're getting ready for the stage in the right way, those nerves turn into excitement and they create the energy and the persuasion, and the conviction you need behind your words. This will captivate your audience and have them hanging off your every word. Nerves are a great asset for you to have and manage well.

So what we're going to cover here is really how to overcome the fear of public speaking, by really understanding that the bigger the stakes, the more nervous you're going to get. The more important it is, the more nervous you are going to feel! So nerves become key to growth, because you're going to be taking on bigger and bigger challenges, and the nerves are a clear signal you are doing the right thing. What you want is the ability to manage them well, so that the nerves turn into excitement because they are scientifically proven to be the same emotion and release the same types of hormones in our body. When you learn this, your fear of public speaking goes away and your excitement about public speaking starts to take over.

The second thing that we're going to be learning is how to never, ever, forget your speech again. You'll never have to memorise your speech and you will always be able to remember it from the stage, because we're going to use a special technique, and that technique is called story mapping.

When I started to use this technique it completely transformed the way I presented from the stage. Story maps are basically a map of stories from beginning, middle, and end. Similar to mind mapping but for stories. These stories make points, and it’s an image in your mind that you remember instead of words and sentences or bullet points on a slide. You need to get away from linear thinking with linear slides and linear text and start remembering in terms of stories and points so that the slides are now going to enhance your story and stop controlling you. You now control the slides.

This technique is going to enhance the experience for the audience and you'll be presenting in a very dynamic fashion that will add a new dimension to your presentations the audience will highly appreciate. And if the tech fails and the slides don't work, you're going to be able to say, “no problem” don't need them, and just give a powerful talk regardless of technical problems. Plus, it's always going to allow you to finish on time, and that's the beauty of that story maps. You can always finish on the second, with a no problems attitude. 

In the third section, what we're going to be covering is how to build rapport. But how to build it in a specific way that you're able to connect with everybody in the room. You can use it to connect with one person, and you can use it to connect with 1000 people, all in one session! That's called broad spectrum appeal. How to appeal broadly to anyone in the room or everyone listening, even through a video or webinar. It works both in the physical and the digital. You can use it in videos and it helps videos go viral. 

Many of the viral songs and speeches that you've heard in the past through live or video, which I will reference in the course have used a very specific pattern in creating broad spectrum appeal that makes the person speaking very charismatic, it's called the charisma pattern. And when you apply this pattern to your talks, you can connect with everyone. 

In this section, you're also going to be learning the three human languages and your natural language and leadership style so this section is not just a section on how to speak and how to give a very powerful talk, it's also a section on how to be a better leader, how to be a better communicator, how to lead your team, how to really get people on the same page, and how to connect with them in such a way that they want to connect with you and know more.

In the fourth section, we're going to be talking about “story”, because a great speaker is a great storyteller. Stories have been around for millions of years and it’s how we've been learning all this time - through story! If you think about it, pre-internet, pre-radio, pre-television, pre-newspaper, pre-everything we were sitting around the campfire, telling stories about what happened that day, and the people listening to those stories were learning through the story so that they could apply that information the next day and improve (and not get killed!). 

Think about the teachers that you've had at school, the ones that you still remember to this day whether it's school or university. What did they all have in common? They taught through story! They gave personal stories and personal anecdotes gained often through personal experiences, and they taught through those stories. The beauty about using story is that it’s a vehicle to making people emotional and to create an emotional connection. 

What you're going to learn is that it's emotions that makes memory stick. Emotion is the glue that makes memories stick. So unless you can make people emotional then the chances that they're going to remember what you say is almost zero. You need to arouse an emotion in the listener and stories are a great way to do that because through story people can relate and through story people can start to build a picture in their head of what's going on so they can relate much better and it drives a lot more behaviour, it motivates and inspires people to take action.

We're also going to cover how to structure a story, and I've actually built a model for that. It's called the FEAR model because we fear telling stories sometimes, especially our own stories. In the FEAR model you will learn a four step process to storytelling, and when you get this right your storytelling ability exponentially improves. 

We're also going to cover how to journal stories, how to find them and how to journal them effectively so you can bring them back last minute sometimes and put them into your story map, so you become really effective and really efficient at using story and storytelling to present your ideas and your thoughts. This will also help you write that book you have been thinking about writing for years! Or maybe you should be thinking about writing? Story journaling will be key for you to do that and write your book and give great keynotes.

So these are the four things that we're going to be covering in my free online public speaking course:

1. Improve your ability to manage your nerves.
2. Improve your ability to remember your talk.
3. Improve your ability to connect and build rapport.
4. Improve your ability to tell great stories.

And we're going to close off this free 10 lesson course with some bonus lessons. 

In lesson 9 you are going to learn how to always win the deal. I'm going to be introducing you to another model I built on conversational flow and how to get the best out of any conversation, sales meeting or coaching session and it literally works every time. I close 9 out of 10 deals with this method, and it helps to negotiate a better deal, to get a higher price for your keynotes, and get better terms for your deal. I'm going to be teaching you in lesson 9  exactly how to do that. When people hear this, they just go crazy and they love it so much.  So you make sure you stick with this course, all the way through to lesson 10, because it's a course that is completely going to transform not just the way you speak and the way you lead, but the way you grow your business and the way you generate value for yourself and others.

In lesson 10, I will describe a path to becoming a professional speaker. I leave the best for last in lesson 10. You're going to be learning about a model that's called the HELP model. It’s a model I developed recently, that is the core to 10X speaker. It's a model that helps you build a plan on how to move forward and how to become a better communicator, how to become a better speaker or even how to become the best speaker you can be and it's called the HELP model. 

It allows you to assess yourself and figure out where you are now and where you want to be and to build a plan on how to get there. It is literally the next book I am writing. And I leave this lesson to number 10 because I want you to get through to lesson 10 as I know these lessons and course will completely transform the way you speak and the way you communicate. It's completely going to transform the way you grow your company and the way you influence clients and partners. And it's going to be very very good for you. 

I'm really really looking to see the results you generate through the content I'm going to be delivering you over the next 10 days in my free online speaking course, and above are the four key and major components that will completely transform your speaking, so I'm super excited for you! 

You can sign-up for the free 10xSpeaker online public speaking course right from our homepage and take the 10 most powerful lessons I can give you right now that will contain the 4 key components we covered above that you need to know in order to be the best speaker you can be. 

I promise you, it will not only “wow” you, it will transform you and set you on a journey to becoming the best speaker you can be.

See you on the other side.

Want a speak peak into lesson 1? Here you go! You can access lesson 1 here. Enjoy :)

So was this useful? What's your biggest challenge as a public speaker or professional speaker? Maybe you have some tips that have helped you? Share them with other fellow public speakers who got to the end of this article as you did! Share them by commenting below.

To your public speaking success!

Cheers,

Chris Baldwin, PhD

Founder 10xSpeaker

Take my free public speaking course on the 10 most powerful public speaking lessons I can give you. It's 100% free and you can even gift it to someone you care about. Go to 10xSpeaker.com where you can signup for free!

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