Speaker 1: Hey, what's up guys? Today we are going to tackle one of the most highly requested topics on this channel, which is how to become a better public speaker. Now this is actually perfect timing for this topic because last month I went down to South Carolina to give a talk at a conference called FinCon, where I talked about building a YouTube channel, something I'm pretty passionate about. And actually this month I'll be going to Vermont in a couple of weeks to give my first paid speaking engagement. So speaking is becoming a larger part of my life, and while I'm not a professional speaker, I do have a lot of experience speaking in public and I've gained a lot of insights and skills over the years through practice. And I want to help impart some of the knowledge I've been able to gain to you so you can become a better public speaker technically, and also start to calm some of the nerves and anxiety that you might get when you have to get on stage in front of a bunch of people. So to that end, I've got nine specific public speaking tips for you this week that can help you become a better speaker. The first one is to pay very, very close attention to your rate of speech when you're on stage. Most inexperienced speakers tend to speak a lot more quickly than they think they're speaking, and that's because when you're on stage you have all this anxiety and you have all the material up in your head and you're just trying to get through it as quickly as possible because the number one thing you want to do is get off stage to where nobody's judging you anymore, right? But the problem is, this isn't YouTube. The people sitting in the audience aren't looking at a bunch of other tabs and they're not liable to click away after two minutes. They've sat there and they've dedicated some time to listening to what you have to say. So if you can slow down and give them some breathing room, then they're going to be able to contemplate what you've said and more easily follow along with what you're talking about. Also, your rate of speech isn't the only thing you can control to make your speech better. You can also employ strategic pauses to highlight certain points. Now there's a lot of speeches that I've watched to study to become a better speaker myself, but there's actually a fake one that I really, really like and want to use as an example here, and it's this 2023 TED Talk that the producers of the movie Prometheus put out as an advertisement for the movie. And in this TED Talk, Guy Pearce's character is talking about cybernetic individuals and basically his ambitions to take over the world. When I watched this, I thought it was a fantastic piece to study for public speaking because he employs these pauses so dramatically and so effectively. So check that video out after you watch this one and start to learn from it. Now another thing Guy Pearce does amazingly in that video is my second tip, which is to pay attention to your body language. And this is important for two specific reasons. Number one, your body language forms a large part of the nonverbal communication that complements the verbal communication of your words. The way you hold yourself, the way you're poised, your posture, the way you move your hands and gesture to highlight certain points, these all go hand in hand with the words you're speaking and can help to complement and drive home those points. But the other reason is that the unconscious body language that a lot of inexperienced speakers have is something that can harm you. We have a lot of nervous tics. For example, when I was an inexperienced speaker just starting out, a lot of things that I would do, I would put my hands in my pockets, and I guess the camera's fixed right there, but I can try to show you, right? I put my hands in and out of my pockets over and over again while I was speaking, and I would also pace around the stage really distractedly, kind of moving, and I wasn't really consciously pacing and using that to effect, I was just doing it unconsciously. So these are things that you can control to both not distract your audience, but also to help bolster your points. My third tip is to consciously try to improve your ability to make eye contact with your entire audience. Now one thing rookie speakers do a lot of times is they'll fixate on one section of the audience, and they'll stay there during their entire speech because they're nervous. But the problem is there are people over here and over here, and your entire audience are the people you're addressing. So you want to make sure you're trying to make eye contact with each and every single person during your speech. Now I know it can be difficult to make eye contact when you're already nervous about being on stage, so you can employ a classic speaker's trick, which is to simply look over the heads of the people in the back row who are far enough away that they probably won't be able to tell that you're not looking them directly in the eye. But I do want to challenge you. The next time you have to make a speech, if you're feeling nervous and you find it difficult to make eye contact and you want to employ this trick, I do challenge you to at least try to make eye contact with a couple of people throughout your talk, because this is something that gets easier to do over time, and it will make you a more engaging, effective, and more human speaker. Now speaking of practicing that eye contact, the fourth tip is to, in general, practice. Practice, practice, practice, and when you think you have practiced all you could potentially ever practice, do it again. The idea here is not to practice your speech until you get it right, but to practice your speech until you can't get it wrong. And this is because mastery helps to get you through any anxiety you're feeling. As we talked about in my test anxiety video, anxiety can actually block your brain from making connections. So the more of a concrete grasp you have on your material, the more likely you're going to be able to get past those anxiety blockers, get the thoughts out of your brain, through your lips, and into the ears of the eager audience. Also, mastery is important because when you're getting something right in your practice situation, it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be able to get it right in the more stressful situation where you're addressing real living, breathing, farting human beings, right? So make sure you practice until you know your material cold. Now on that note, you might be thinking, well, my speech teacher told me not to memorize my speech. And in general, I do agree with that piece of advice, but I want to drill into it and give a little bit more of a specific opinion on it. So in my mind, you should not write your speech out like an essay and try to memorize it word for word. If you do that, you're going to sound unnatural, you're going to sound robotic, you're going to sound, well, like you're reading. But I do think you should write your speech out in the form of bullet points, have the main points listed out, have any details and facts and statistics and figures you want to cite written out, and memorize those so when you get on stage, you don't have anything in your hands, except maybe a presentation remote or a prop, and you can recite the entire speech from memory because you know your points cold, you know exactly what it is that you need to communicate to your audience. Now another final note on practice is that practice works for individual speeches, but it's also something that's going to make you a better speaker over time. So if you feel like right now your public speaking skills aren't at the level you want them to be, the best way to get better is to simply speak again and again and again. There's an organization called Toastmasters where you can get with other budding speakers and people who want to improve their skills and actually get up and give speeches in a non-threatening environment. You can take a speech class at your school, which I definitely recommend you should do, and you can also do things that aren't really public speaking, but just things that give you performance anxiety. If I'm being honest, the thing that has helped me become a better public speaker the most is running my podcast and my YouTube channel, because each and every week I have to create something where I'm speaking to an audience. Yes, my actual public speaking experiences have contributed to my skills, but I've done way more videos and way more podcasts, and those have helped me as well. If there's something that gives you performance anxiety, whether it be dancing in public or doing karaoke with your friends or something, anything that gives you a little bit of anxiety up front, but then afterwards you realize that the world didn't end, even though you did it, that's going to help build your confidence and decrease the amount of care you have, what people think, and those improvements will all feed back into your speaking ability. My fifth tip is also related to practice, but it's a little bit of a technical improvement you can make to your practice, and it's to do exactly what I'm doing right now. When you practice, take a video camera with you and film yourself. This is what I would do every single time I had a speech in college. I would go find an empty classroom, and with my first few runs I wouldn't videotape it because I was just trying to get the material down in my head so I memorized it all, but once I had the material down, then I would film myself doing each and every take, and afterwards I would watch the take, review each aspect of my performance, and pick out the things that could be improved. This is a huge upgrade over just practicing for an empty room because you're not always aware of the things you're doing. Maybe you have a nervous tick, maybe you're looking back at the slides too often, or maybe you're pacing too much, but the tape doesn't lie. So if you can watch that tape, see your mistakes, you can know what to correct, and you're going to be able to practice more effectively and maybe have to practice even less than you would originally need to. So tip number six is to know who your audience is, and by that I mean realize the people in your audience will most likely fall into one of two categories. Number one, over here you have the people who are rooting for you. They want to see you succeed, they're invested in your topic, and these are your champions, like your fans, right? And over here you have the evil people who are going to laugh at you and throw tomatoes at you and curse your family for all eternity, right? Or not. Over here, actually, you have people who are bored, and that's not because of you, it's because their minds are elsewhere, they don't want to be there, they'd rather be off doing something else, and whatever you do, if you perform badly, if you perform really good, or if you're more in the middle and just doing a mediocre job, it's likely that that's not going to have much of an effect on them at all. Now, you do want to get the most number of people possible into that former category of the people who are really invested in your topic, and that's what the other tips in this video can help you do, but I want you to realize that the people in that latter category, the people who just don't care, they don't matter. So don't worry about what they're going to think when you're creating your speech or when you're up on stage delivering it, because that anxiety isn't worth it. If you get feedback later on after the speech that you can use to constructively improve, that's good, but don't let it worry you in the moment. Then right along, my seventh tip is to focus more on the topic and less on the aspects of your performance when you're delivering your speech, and also when you're preparing. I found through experience that when I'm really invested in what I'm talking about, and more specifically when I'm invested in the transformation I want to have on the audience, I don't care so much about the technical aspects of my speech. I don't care about my body language. I don't care about my eye contact. I'm not even thinking about it because it's become almost as if I was explaining something I cared about to a dear friend, and I want them to learn what it is that I know. So the focus comes off the nervousness of standing on stage and addressing a bunch of people, and it's placed on this is what I know, and this is what I really want you to learn. I'm really excited about it, and I hope that what I say can teach you or persuade you to take some action. Tip number eight, don't have a stupid haircut. What I mean by that is think about your appearance, dress well, and try to make a great first impression when you step on stage. This is important because of the halo effect, which is also known as exaggerated emotional coherence, and it's basically a term to explain the fact that humans make split-second first impressions of people right when they meet them. So the problem with this is that, well, maybe it's not a problem. Maybe it's just a fact of life. What happens is people use those first impressions to essentially fill in what they don't know about the person, and also make judgments about what comes next. So if you get on stage and you're dressed well, you hold yourself well, and people are impressed with you, then they're more likely to forgive any mistakes you make, and they're also more likely to be receptive to whatever it is you're saying. But if you don't look good, then it's gonna be a lot harder for you to convince people of what you're talking about, and those mistakes will be all the more glaring. So first impressions matter. And my ninth and final tip is take a breath. Don't think you need to be perfect. Focusing on perfection is the number one way to trip yourself up, to give yourself massive amounts of anxiety, and to fail. Don't worry about being perfect, just get on stage and deliver the best speech that you can give. There's a book I read in college called Confessions of a Public Speaker by a guy named Scott Birkin, and I highly recommend it if you want to get better at speaking. It's on my essential books list, but there's a passage in here that really resonated with me when I read it. And he says, I don't want to be perfect, I want to be useful, I want to be good, and I want to sound like myself. Nobody gives a perfect speech. Even if you think somebody gave a perfect speech, that person can point out all the errors and all the things they wish they would have done better. So get on stage, focus on doing good, focus on improving over your previous performance, and then just focus on that topic, like I said. Try to enact a transformation in your audience, and you're not gonna care so much about your nerves and your performance. So those are the nine tips I wrote down for this video, but I do have a little bonus tip of sorts for you, and it's to study people who are great public speakers. I have a playlist of videos here on YouTube that I've been building for a few years, and whenever I need to make a speech of my own, I'll go study some of those speeches and try to pinpoint exactly what they're doing that I'd like to improve on with my own skills. So in the companion blog post for this video, I've linked to that playlist, and as a bonus, I've also linked to some of my earlier speaking videos, and just to forewarn you, one of the earlier ones is really, really bad. So laugh at me all you want, I don't care, because I have improved, and I just kinda wanna show you guys that practice does make better, not perfect. So that's it for this video, hopefully it helped you out, and if it did, I just wanna let you know that next week we're gonna follow up this topic with an additional video on how to craft a great presentation, so we'll talk about making great slides and using story and narrative to keep your audience engaged. So if you haven't subscribed to this channel, you can click the subscribe button to get notified about that video and others in the future, and if you liked this video, click that like button to support this channel, and other than that, I will see you guys next week. Hey guys, thanks so much for watching this video, if you wanna get new videos on being a more effective student every single week, you can click that big red subscribe button right there. I also wrote a book on how to earn better grades, so if you wanna get a free copy of that, click the picture of the book, and you can find those speeches in my playlist along with notes and a summary of this video in the companion blog post, which you can find by clicking the orange button right there. Last week's video was over some of the struggles I'm dealing with in my work life and what I'm doing about it, so check it out. Also, you can see a pretty cool skateboarding skillment in that video, which I enjoyed filming. And if you wanna connect, I'm on Twitter, at TomFrankly, that's also my Instagram, and otherwise you can leave a comment below.