My first public speaking experience that was memorable was in my 8th grade French class where I was doing my utmost to explain the mating habits of a praying mantis in French (they eat their partner once done with them!) to a class room of English-speaking pre-teens. Everyone ignored me. I then stopped everyone in their tracks by starting to draw on the board behind me, the actual mating process and the eating that ensued thereafter. I haven’t stopped wanting to arrest people in their tracks when I speak since then.
I’m so passionate about being a captivating speaker and teaching people how to get clients from a good speech that I put together my first ever full day public speaking training bootcamp.
In the video above, I talk about the 3 fundamentals of Public Speaking success:
What’s the audience’s pain?
Why are the people in those seats? What pain can you help them with today? With me, it’s usually about getting more clients and figuring out a marketing plan to get there.
What’s your solution?
There are a million ways to help the same problem but your audience is interested in findng out what you did in the past to help clients with similar pain and what their results were. If you tell interesting and relevant stories about how you helped another client with the same pain and all the wonderful outcomes of your actions, you give people a chance to find out how they can also benefit from your help.
Entertain me
If you do the above two and don’t entertain people in some way–then you’re missing the entire reason why people came to see you talk and not picked up a book. They want to connect with you as a human, they want to hear personal stories and they want to be inspired and amused. The shortest way to anybody’s heart is to make them smile or even better to make them laugh. Even if you’re not a comedian or an entertainer, tell a story of your past that made you smile. Make sure to link it to the audience pain and your solution and voila–you have a captivated audience!
Need more chicken soup for your biz? Follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook or connect with me on LinkedIn –and let’s talk!

Related articles

• 6 Things You Can Do To Get Better At Public Speaking (hbculifestyle.com)
• 6 Things Comedians Can Teach You About Public Speaking (openforum.com)
• What is the role of emotion in public speaking? (publicwords.typepad.com)