From Self-Doubt to Standing Out: The Secrets of Outstanding Speaking

I learned my craft as a speaker a long time ago, but I still continue learning and practising every day. That’s the thing about any talent: you have to practice if you want to excel. 

 

I was also lucky; I learned my craft in the days “BP” – Before PowerPoint. You might think that PowerPoint makes it easier to write and deliver an outstanding speech – but I think it makes it harder. 

 

PowerPoint is, in my experience, the reason why so many people in business have become utterly boring speakers. So I have made it part of my life’s mission to change that, especially for women, for whom becoming an outstanding speaker may be the key to overcoming gender inequality in the workplace and being a success.  

 

Let’s start by getting a definition sorted. What do I mean by an Outstanding Speech? Well, I don’t mean that you have to be able to get up in front of thousands of people and compete with Tony Robbins or Les Brown or Oprah Winfrey or Brené Brown or any top-level professional speaker. 

 

You don’t need to be anywhere near that good to rate as outstanding, you just have to “stand out” from the crowd, and given that the vast majority of business presentational are… how can I say this politely… mediocre, being outstanding is not so hard. 

 

In my view, your speech is Outstanding if, after hearing your speech, the audience (or at least some of them) 

 

Those don’t seem like tough objectives, do they? But how often is there no real message or call to action in a speech? You might be wondering why it’s important that the audience remembers your name.  Well, if it is a good speech, we want people to talk about it, follow you on social media and tell their friends and colleagues. 

 

The reason that most people fail to achieve these basics is that they never planned to achieve them in the first place, which is why, simply by reading this article, you are going to be streets ahead. 

 

That’s the goal – now let’s look at the three basic rules to achieve them. 

 

Rule 1 - Learn to love yourself 
 
 Rule 2 - No PowerPoint until after the speech is crafted. 
 
 Rule 3 – Have a Clear Single Message and Call to Action.

Rule 1 - Learn to Love yourself. 
 
 Lack of self-confidence is one of our greatest challenges as speakers, and that is especially true for women.  When I changed gender, I started working more with women in business groups.  I couldn’t understand why so many women were reluctant to speak in public or even chose to remain seated while presenting. 

 

The more I looked into this, the more I realised that the social conditioning a woman receives throughout her life often undermines her self-confidence and sense of being good or great at what she does. This is one of the key reasons why women have a hard time competing with men at work, but it can be overcome. 

 

Self-confidence is all about loving yourself. It’s hard to love yourself if you don't respect yourself; if you aren't sure how good you are at what you do; if there’s a subconscious message in your brain saying, “I don’t like who I am, so why should the audience?”  

 

It’s that self-doubt that causes people to start to panic as soon as they stand up to speak, and it’s the root of imposter syndrome. We all need to erase self-doubt, and we do that by replacing it with self-love. 
 
 Step 1 – Tell yourself why you like yourself.  

 

When you get up in the morning, go to a mirror, look yourself in the eye and say, “I like myself because….” Tell yourself what you like about yourself, with as many reasons as possible, and if you have to – LIE!!!  

 

I like myself because….I’m happy

I like myself because….I’m resilient

I like myself because….I’m a good listener

I like myself because….I’m a great speaker

I like myself because….I’m empathetic

I like myself because….I’m successful

I like myself because….I’m a compassionate parent

I like myself because….

 

And keep this going for about a minute – every morning and anytime you have a minute to yourself. Convince yourself that you really are OK, you are worth listening to, you have value, your ideas can help people, and you have earned the right to be confident in yourself. 
 
 Step 2 – Create a Moments of Triumph Book. 

 

Get a scrapbook or folder and start collecting evidence of all your “Moments of Triumph,” all the good feedback you can you can find.  Photocopy all your certificates, copies of reports from any event where you did well, testimonials from clients, friends, and anyone who writes to you and says, "Hey! That was great, thank you, you have really helped me." 

 

Have you set up a new club or business, it’s a triumph. Lost 28 lbs at Weight Watchers - put the 4 silver sevens in your moments of triumph book, together with an after picture. Went to an event and looked great, get a picture.  Ran a successful exhibition stand - get a picture. 

 

DO YOU GET THE PICTURE!! 

 

Create a book of all the positive and wonderful things that have happened in your life, all your successes, no matter how small and keep it going.  Then before you have to speak - get the book out and read it.  Remind yourself why you deserve to be on that stage.

 

Learn to love yourself and the audience will love you as well. 
 
 Rule 2 - No PowerPoint until after the speech is ready 
 
 PowerPoint tends to make people lazy.  We are all busy, but if you get out PowerPoint the day before the presentation, write your notes in the form of slides and then proceed to deliver them at the rate of one every 30 seconds, reading most of them out, is it surprising that the audience is near comatose by the end, and can't remember a thing.  

 

And how can anyone expect the audience to respect them, when they have shown the audience so little respect in the first place?
 
 PowerPoint is great if, and this is a BIG IF, you have visuals and useful information that is best conveyed visually. A friend of mine, Cathy O'Dowd, was the first woman to climb Everest from both sides. She talks about Teamwork and illustrates her talk with her experience of teamwork under the duress of life-threatening conditions while climbing Everest. She uses lots of slides, mostly awe-inspiring images of her expeditions as she takes the audience on a dangerous journey to the top of the world. That is how to use PowerPoint - not lists of words and unreadable quotations. 

 

The big problem in starting with PowerPoint is that we tend to dump all we know into the slide deck. Lots of notes and bullet points that make it almost impossible for the message to be clear. 
 
 So shut the laptop, write the speech, then ask, “Does this speech need visuals, and is PowerPoint the best way to do that.”   Perhaps there is a better way to convey the message. 

 

You will be amazed at the alternatives. Perhaps you can use a prop, or a volunteer from the audience, give the audience a worksheet or get them to do an exercise.  There are so many ways to involve the audience creatively to get a message across that are a thousand times better than a PowerPoint slide. 

 

Be creative with your visuals and involve the Audience.  I will be addressing this, and how to write great speeches in more detail in future articles – so make sure you sign up for updates.
 
 Rule 3 - Have a Clear Single Message and Call to Action. 
 
 Let’s look at the problem we all face as members of the audience at any meeting, conference or summit. 

 

Information Overload. 

 

There may be 8 – 12 speakers plus both formal and informal networking - every day.  If each speaker shared just one great idea that is still too much for us to take in and definitely too much for us to act on. But they don’t have just one idea – so many speakers try to cram everything they know into a single 30-45 minute presentation – 

 

“…and tip number 15 … “   NO!!!  

 

There is no chance that I’m going to remember any of those ideas if you rattle through a list of great ideas. You might make notes of them all – but I know what happens to those notes. They will end up on a shelf with all the other notes you have taken over the years… and never looked at again. I have a shelf of conference and meeting notes dating back more than 25 years – I don’t know why I keep them because I seldom look at them, and when I do, I discover that I wrote the notes so quickly that I can’t read my own writing. 

 

To try to help, the speaker might have a handout of their PowerPoint slides or a workbook which you fill in during the presentation. Lots of virtual speakers do that.

 

The starting point for all great speeches is the message. TED talks have helped us understand this.  “An Idea that Needs Sharing.” One single idea shared in less than 18 minutes. Why one idea?  

 

Why is it so important to have just one message?  Because if you are attempting to inspire me to change my life, I can only cope with making one change at a time.  The reason New Year’s resolutions don’t work is that we set too many major goals for change. 

 

And that brings me to the final point I want to address in this article. Why do we want to deliver a speech in the first place? It’s because we want to, in some small way, “Change the World”. But change is difficult; it’s uncomfortable; it takes effort. That is why we make changes one at a time. 

 

If you look at great speeches, Winson Churchill, J F Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., there are clear single messages. 

 

What is the change you want people to make? 

 

That is the question you need to ask yourself when you start to write your speech because that will give you your speech title and your call to action. And your speech is largely about how you inspire and convince people to make the change and the action they should take to enjoy the benefits of the change you want them to make. 

 

I hope you have found these ideas helpful. If you click this link and sign up to join the Speakers Ecademy, you will receive regular articles and tips on how to become an outstanding speaker and craft and deliver remarkable, memorable speeches.