What Actually Makes Someone a Great Public Speaker? | 002

If you're tired of hiding your brilliance behind

stage fright scripts or playing it safe, then you are in the

perfect place. This is the inspired speaker podcast, and I

am your host, Danielle Benson, professional rebel voice coach,

and your guide to speaking with confidence, charisma and zero BS

around here, we don't chase perfection, we choose

connection. So grab a hot beverage, warm up those vocal

cords and get ready to fall wildly in love with the sound of

your voice. Let's get inspired.

Welcome to episode two. I am so glad that you decided to

continue to listen to my podcast. Thank you so much for

being here before we get started. Let's just check in,

check in with your body, check in with your knees and your

pelvis. Make sure they're nice and loose. Release your

shoulders, release any tension in your neck and your jaw, lift

your sternum and breathe deeply into your belly. Now we're here.

I'm not going to start every episode like that, but it's a

good practice, so maybe you want to just saying it's a lovely way

to just get present, because that's what I want to do with

you today. I want to talk about presence and my philosophy,

because you are very kind to listen to my story and who I am

and how I got here and why I do what I do in the last episode,

and in this episode, I'd like to talk a little bit about how I

approach what I do and what my philosophy is, because there are

a lot of speaking coaches out there, but, you know, we're all

a little bit different, and I might be a little bit more I

might be a little bit more different than most. So I want

to make sure you know what you're getting into before we

continue this journey together. So I'd like to tell you a little

bit about how I work and what I believe a good speaker is, and

how we get there and how I can help you, you know, on this

journey with me, because the thing is, speaking, isn't

complicated. It's actually incredibly simple. But simple

doesn't mean easy, and we tend to like to really over

complicate things, because it's a way of distancing ourselves.

It's a way of not stepping into our power. So my speaking

practice, my philosophy, is extremely simple. The way that I

work with people is quite complex, because every human is

different. We all manifest our fears and our insecurities and

our defense mechanisms in different ways, in our body, in

our psychology. We're all different. But the concept, the

basic core concepts, are quite simple, presence, listening,

being there for your audience, trusting them, being authentic

and transparent so that you can connect. These are not complex

ideas. They're basic, they're foundational, but they're not

easy, and we want to make our script super complicated and do

all these things because it's a way of distancing ourselves from

the real thing we need to be doing, which is being present

and engaging and honest with our audience. And so I'm going to

walk you through my three steps that I take people through only

three my three steps that I take people through to become

successful speakers. Within those steps, there's a lot of

complexity, but the steps themselves are quite simple. The

first thing you need, and this is foundational, the first thing

you need to do as a speaker is get into your body, if we are

speaking from our head or from our throat, if we are

disconnected, nothing else works. What do I mean by that? I

kind of hinted at it when I was telling you about who I who I

am, and how I got here. But essentially, what I mean is we

need to embody our message, we need to live inside the body.

You use your body as a mode of expression, instead of a

transportation system for your brain. A lot of us use the body.

We work on the body, but we don't live in the body. We don't

inhabit it. And that's, I don't know if you can kind of grasp

the difference, but that's the huge shift we need to make,

instead of seeing our body as something that does for us, that

moves our brain around, that we work on living in the body,

allowing Our consciousness, our awareness on the inside, to

express itself through the body. Now there are a lot of practices

that I have to help people get there. It's not a switch. You

can't just go, oh, now I'm in my body. There are, there are

things that we need to do to help people to get there. It is

eventually something that you can just step into. Uh, or just

breathe yourself into within a second or two. But it's not

something that necessarily comes easily if you've never done it

before. So I have a lot of practices to ground the breath,

to ground the body, to align the posture, to build your

proprioception. That's your internal sense, like your right

and left, up and down, hungry. Those are like internal senses.

So to build that awareness, so that you're speaking from that

place, that is the first, number one, most important thing. If

you're not connected to yourself, you can't connect with

your audience, because there's nothing to connect to on the

other side. You gotta be connected on both ends for there

to be a conversation. So if we can't connect to ourselves,

first, if you it doesn't matter if you connect to your audience,

because they have nothing to connect to. So that's step one,

getting into your body. Step two is you have to speak. You gotta

get good at speaking. A lot of speaking coaches, a lot of

speakers, a lot of you know, industries will teach you that

you become a good speaker by creating a good script. You

don't become a better speaker by writing. You become a better

speaker by speaking. There is a lot of complexity that goes on

with the refined motor skills that it takes to speak, to

think, and turn that those thoughts into words is quite

complex. Language is a complex thing. We get a whole part of

the brain dedicated not to vocabulary, not to grammar, but

to the motor skills that it takes to speak. It's something

we have to practice. It's a skill like riding a bicycle, you

gotta practice it. You can't expect the first time. You know

if you're going to do the Tour de France, you don't want to be

you don't want that to be the first time you get on a bicycle.

You want to be really good at riding that bicycle first. You

want to know it inside and out. And so by becoming a good

speaker, that's how we get that confidence level. That's how we

build our practice. I don't want to teach someone to be really

good at delivering one particular script. You're not a

good speaker. Then you are then a person who is really good at

performing one particular script. That doesn't make you a

good speaker. You're a good speaker, if you can speak on

anything at a moment's notice, from your heart, with limited

preparation or no preparation. I know that sounds scary. It

sounds scary because we've been doing it backwards. We've been

teaching you to write it, first memorize it, and then perform

it, or write it and then half memorize it and then perform it,

which is almost worse,

this idea that you need to write something, memorize it, live

with it, take though it's so well that you take all of the

life out of the words that you have slaved over and perfected,

and then somehow try and inject that life into it again, so that

when you get up on stage, finally, maybe weeks later, in

front of these people or on camera and saying the words, it

sounds like it's the first time you've ever thought of them,

that's a lot of work. I'm a classically trained actor. I

know how much work that is. It's different if you have a

playwright who has spent years slaving over every comma, over

every pronoun, over every word, then you get it word perfect

because there is a reason that I say it is there instead of its

there's always a reason in good writing, that's part of my job

as an actor, is to figure out why that is, and that becomes

part of my memorization process. And I do I have to get to a

point where the words are boring because I know them inside out,

and then I have to find them again. And that's a lot of work

to find them again so that they feel fresh, so that I can be

present with the audience that is so much work and also no

offense to you, but you're not a playwright who's spending years

holed up writing this script. Who is to say that the person

you were three weeks ago when you were writing this has a

better idea of what to say than the person you are when you are

standing in front of this audience, taking in their their

vibe, their energy. You've spoken to the you know, the

organizer, maybe you've spoken to a few people in the audience.

You've been mulling over this for a while. Why is the person

in the past more qualified to make decisions about what you

say than the person in the now who has more information? I have

more information now than I had then. Why am I trusting that

person instead of this person? It's a very good question. You

are the writer when you're a speaker, and if you're not re.

Searching something brand new, and you know that is a slightly

different thing. But if you're speaking about something that

you know if your content is part of your everyday life or part of

your philosophy or part of who you are, you know it better now

than you did three weeks ago, because you've been living with

it, and you've been thinking about the context, and you've

been talking to people, and you've been mulling it over, and

hopefully you've been speaking it out loud, and you've seen it

from all these different angles. And what if something happens

when you are live, speaking on camera or on stage? What if you

get an idea that you never had before, and it's a great idea

and you want to share it. Do I share it? Do I choose to go off

script and share the idea and then risk it being difficult to

come back? Or do I ignore it and lose out on this amazing idea?

If I am comfortable improvising, if improvising is my default way

of doing things, I just incorporate that idea and keep

going. What if someone in the back is being really annoying on

their phone? What if a bird flies into the room? What if

there's an alarm and you have to stop and start again? Life is

chaos. We don't know what's going to happen. The more

flexible you are, the more agile you are as a speaker, the easier

it is for you to recover, the better you are as a speaker, at

the skill of speaking, not at the skill of memorizing a

perfect script, but of actually speaking and connecting and

being present with people rolling with The jokes and the

questions, slowing down or explaining something when

everyone looks confused. Listening to your audience is

something that you can only do in the moment. You can't do that

beforehand. I like to use the imagery of driving a train

versus learning how to drive a Landover. A script is a train

track, and you can go fast, and you can go efficiently, but as

soon as that train goes off the rails, you are screwed. Land

Rover. You can follow the track, you can go off, you can explore

the river, you can come back. You can Oh, there's a big hole

in the road. I will ignore that, and I will go over here, and you

become accustomed to going off road and coming back. So if you

forget what to say, if you're on a script, you forget what to

say, Oh, I'm so flustered I have to go back to my notes,

emergency, catastrophe, if I'm used to improvising. And I

forget what to say. I am so accustomed to recovery. I barely

notice, and I just go, oh, I wasn't what to say. Oh, say this

instead, and off we go. It's seamless. It might be noticeable

by your audience, but if you're enjoying it and you're staying

in the present, you're not in denial. We're not pretending it

didn't happen. They come with you. And sometimes, sometimes

that's the goal. I had a client who was so scared of speaking,

she she really hid behind her script. And we got her to the

point where she did a she did a presentation, and she messed up

the like third thing she said, she pronounced someone's name

wrong or something. I can't remember exactly what she did,

but she was doing a presentation. She was very

nervous, she was very tense, and she messed up. And instead of

freaking out, she laughed, dear, let's do that again. And just

started again. Recovered beautifully. The tension in the

room broke because she'd started very tense, and everyone was

like, Oh, this is going to be another awkward presentation.

Oh, no, I have to sit through this. She made a joke, she

messed up, she joked about it. Everyone laughed. They were with

her. It was the best presentation she ever gave,

because she was finally relaxed. She wasn't trying to pretend to

be perfect. She wasn't hiding behind this facade, she was just

being herself with her colleagues. Those little

mistakes, those can be golden nuggets, if you know how to use

them. Learning how to speak impromptu is a skill. I have a

script list speaking system that I teach to people. So if you're

curious about that, let me know. But that is number two, how to

speak. And then the third one is where to speak. The business of

speaking, you may not be speaking for sales. You may be

speaking, you know, internally within your company, or, you

know, as a leadership role, or maybe you're raising money for a

charity. I don't know why you're speaking, but it is still a

system. It's still a business, even if it's not kind of

traditional, you know, I'm going out to make sales. Kind of

business, there is a there's a system to it. There is a

structure to it. And so learning how to do that, how to represent

yourself. Of how to put your ideas together, how to create

the context. That is the third piece of being a successful

speaker. And so we only have three steps, get in your body,

learn how to speak impromptu, just the words and your brain

working together, and then the business of it, whatever that

practicality, those logistics are not complicated, difficult,

perhaps, within that there is, of course, more, there's

storytelling, there's resonance, there's projection, looking

after your instrument, but these are all details that we can get

into later, once the system works, there are a lot of

speaker trainers out there who will tell you, there's all these

rules of how to be a good speaker, and you have to do

this, and you have to wear a suit, and you have to move

around the stage, and you have to do you're not allowed to say,

I'm

Ah, there's a lot of rules around being a good speaker. I

have three you need to be seen. People need to see you. You need

to be heard. People need to hear you, and you need to be

understood. If you are speaking so quickly, or you are mumbling,

or your tech is so bad that people can't understand you,

then even if they can hear you, they can't understand you. So

that third piece is really the same as being heard. But you

know, just filling it out, adding more clarity, seen, heard

and understood, that's it. There are best practices and there are

guarantees, but everything else is a choice. It's up to you to

intentionally make those choices if you just break rules because

you're not aware of them, that can come across as sloppy or

disrespectful if you break rules on purpose, that can be part of

your magic, that can be part of your brand, that can speak to

your people. There are some guarantees. I can guarantee you

that if you are present and doing your best and there for

your audience, they will be there for you. If you can be

seen, heard and understood, I can guarantee you that it's when

we just disengage from our audience. When we're we're not

present, we're not transparent, when we're when we're in denial,

that's when they disengage with us. That's when they judge us.

If you are present with them and engaged with them, they will be

there for you. Another rule or a guarantee, interested people are

interesting if you let that interest come out. And this is

where that number one, embody yourself becomes so important.

If you're not embodying your interest, if you have all of

these blocks between yourself and your interest and your

audience, they may not see your interest and you're not they're

not engaged with that. But if your instrument is open and

working and you are interested, it doesn't matter. It doesn't

matter what you're wearing. It doesn't matter how many times

you say, it doesn't matter, they don't care. Those are just

distractions. If you are interested, you will be

interesting. If you find what you're talking about exciting,

they will be excited with you. There's this contagious empathy

that happens between a speaker and their audience when you are

present and connected. As long as you're present and connected,

they're with you. So don't worry too much. Don't worry about the

packaging. Allow yourself to be in service. Get out there. If

you don't start, if you don't begin, there's nothing to

improve. And I can help you. I can help you identify your

strengths and your weaknesses. In fact, click on the link that

I provided for today's episode. It's a speaking coach in your

pocket. So you this little mini me that you can carry around,

not quite but it is a version of me with my best practices and

kind of answers to some of the most common questions, the most

common conundrums, the most common challenges that speakers

come up against. I've made a list of all the things that

might get in your way and what to do to help you get over them.

So click on that speaking coach in your pocket, and I've got a

whole bunch of suggestions and help for you, because you will

you'll identify, oh, I do this and I don't like it. Great,

let's improve it. Oh, I'm actually quite good at this.

Great. Let's solidify that. Let's lean into that. You are

unique. You don't want to be just like everybody else. The

old fashioned way of robotic speaking is gone. The age of

robots is over. We don't want boring robotic speakers anymore.

The age of the messy, authentic human is here, and I am so glad

that it is because I am a very messy. Be authentic human, and I

bet you are too. So go out there. Be real. Don't pretend to

be more than you are. Start small, improve in increments.

Use my speaking coach in your pocket, and I think you'll be

surprised by how good you actually are when you just

follow your heart, listen to your instinct, trust your gut

and let yourself be inspired.

Thanks for listening to the inspired speaker podcast. If

today's episode sparked something in you, I invite you

to take one small, courageous step, practice, speak, share, if

you'd like support turning that spark into a full on speaking

mastery Blaze. Then come join me at the inspired speaker

academy.com. Remember your voice matters. The world needs to hear

it, because confident speakers change the world, one story, one

stage, one moment at a time until next time. Keep shining

your light and keep speaking your truth.