Transcripts
1. 1. Class Introduction: Hello and welcome to
this short course on public speaking and
confident communication. My name is Ed. I'm an actor, a speaker, and a communication coach, and I'm the co-founder
of Project Charisma. We help all kinds of people from professionals to
business leaders to academics to
overcome their fears and communicate with
more confidence, more credibility, and of
course, with more charisma. In the past five years, I've helped hundreds of different people to
overcome anxieties, get over with phobias
and start expressing themselves in a way that is
authentic and confident. I've also been on my
own journey from having severe social anxiety
around 10 years ago to becoming a
professional actor and a speaker and speaking in front of many
different audiences, performing around the world. Then ultimately being
able to help other people overcome the same fears and
challenges that I once faced. The first thing to
say is, wherever you are on that spectrum from being anxious to being confident,
I understand you. I've been there and I
know that you can take a huge step forward in terms of both your confidence
as a speaker, but also your competence, which is equally important. In this course, what
I really want to do is distill all of that experience
that I've gained in the past five years
as both an actor, a speaker, and a coach, into some of the most
important lessons that I think can
help anyone go from zero to hero in terms of their communication and
their public speaking. Really that boils
down to three things, which is the body, the
voice, and the mind. Whenever I'm running training in person or I'm coaching people, it's these three things that I focus the most attention on. Body, voice, mind. In this course, I'm going
to be breaking each of these areas down
into more detail. I'm going to be setting you
some practical activities. By going through this course, you are going to come away with a really solid understanding of modern effective public speaking
techniques that you can immediately put into action and start implementing
in your own life. Whether you need to deliver
presentations at work, whether you've got a best
man speech coming up, whether you're taking on
a management position and you need to
lead other people, or whether simply you want to be able to
express yourself with more confidence and whilst feeling more calm
and in control. But without any further ado, let's jump right in and get
started with the first-class, which is on body language. When you're ready,
I'll see you in the next video [MUSIC].
2. 2. Common Body Language Mistakes: [MUSIC] They say it
takes seven seconds to make a first impression. If you walk into a room to
deliver a presentation, or you're going in
for an interview, or whatever the scenario, often before you've even
said your first word, people have started making
judgments and assessments about you based on your
nonverbal communication; ie, everything that you're
not actually saying. The way you walk, the way you hold yourself, the way you're looking
as you're walking in, all of these things are
immediately giving off messages and telling
the audience what to think about you. Are you confident? Are you excited? Are you happy to be
there? Are you nervous? Are you someone I
want to work with, or are you someone
perhaps I'd rather not? All of these things are
happening in the minds of your audience
subconsciously before you've opened your mouth, which is why body language is so important and why it's the first thing
that we start with. [MUSIC] What are some common
mistakes that people make? Let's start from the bottom and let's move right the way up. Now, you can't see my
feet on this camera, but so often people who
are nervous will either crossover their feet or they'll stand in a way
that's off-balanced. This is the first thing that
we need to correct for. What I'd like you to do
is stand up with me, find some space in your room, tilt your screen so
you can see me okay, and follow along with
how I'm doing this. The first thing we
want to do is plant our feet hip-width apart, you could say, and make a nice firm basis.
Think of a tree. It's planted deep, its roots
are going into the earth, and even when it's windy, that tree can sway, but it's firmly
planted in the ground. That's what we want
to be as a speaker. We don't want to be
stiff, but we want to be firmly planted on both feet. The next thing that
we're going to get to is our overall posture. Another big mistake
people make is either leaning to one side, being off-balance,
maybe leaning forward, slouching around. All of that is going to give
off the wrong impression. What we want to do
is make sure we have a nice straight posture, shoulders back straight, and we're standing up to
reach our full height. Not only does this give across a more confident impression
to our audience, but it actually allows us
to breathe more properly, which we'll get to later, and it allows us to open up and feel more confident
in the space. Which brings us to our hands, the next thing, what
people do with these. Well, if you're not feeling
very confident or you're not used to speaking
a lot of the time, what we want to do is fold
them, put them in our pockets, put them behind our back, comfort ourselves by moving
our hands like this, or perhaps even hold onto
something as a bit of a prop, which is almost a
defensive barrier between you and the audience. What we want to do
really [NOISE] is use our hands as
much as possible. Remember that public speaking is visual as well as auditory. Our audience wants to see
us as well as hear us, and this is where
our hands come in. Now, gestures are
something that we could do an entire course on. But a very simple trick
is to simply hold your hands at a 90-degree
right angle like this, with your palms out. Then forget about them
as much as possible. Focus on what you're saying and let your subconscious mind naturally start to gesture with your hands as you are speaking. The only thing you
need to do is resist the urge to hide them
or put them away. Make sure you are
always using them. Now, another quick point
on hands is palms. This is very interesting. Psychologically, we interpret open palms
as a sign of trust, and we interpret
close or hidden palms as a sign of distrust. Now the idea behind this is that thousands and
thousands of years ago in our evolutionary past if you were to meet someone
for the first time, by seeing their palms, you would know that
they are not hiding any weapons or not concealing
anything of danger, and so therefore you
could trust them more. But today, this
still plays a part. It's still going on
very subconsciously. You see politicians a
lot of the time try to open their palms when they're trying to show you
that they're being honest, and also sometimes when
they forget about this, they start hiding their palms. Tony Blair, the British
Prime Minister was famous for doing a lot of gestures like this where he was subconsciously hiding the real truth
behind what he was saying. Anyway, in short,
what this means is open palms is a very positive
sign for your audience. Moving further up
now, shoulders, a lot of times what we do is we tense our shoulders up when
we're feeling nervous. This whole area here is prime
for being tense and tight. Want to relax the
shoulders down, loosen them up, and
also free the elbows. Because a lot of
people I see they'll start to gesture
with their hands, but their elbows will be stuck
to the sides of the body. It's like what we call
the T.rex arms like this. What you want to do is free up your entire arms and
allow yourself to really open up and use your whole body to gesture
and express yourself. Moving further up. Now,
let's get to the face. This is where our
expressions come into play. Facial expressions
are a huge part of your overall body
language because they are telling
the audience how to think and how to feel
about what you're saying. It's really important to smile when you're starting to
have your eyes wide and really be open and engaging when you're
beginning your speech and letting the audience
know that you are happy to be there and that you're
happy to be talking to them. Smiling is such a great trick because not only does it make you start to
feel better yourself, but it actually allows the audience to start
feeling more calm as well. This is all down to something
we call mirror neurons, which are part of
our brain makeup which allow us to mimic
what we see in others. When we see pain or
anxiety or nervousness, our mirror neurons allow
us to understand this in other people and it makes us feel a little bit of
that in ourselves. This is why we have
empathy with other people; this is the whole
basis for empathy. But it also works in a
positive way as well. When we see people enjoying
themselves, smiling, having fun, our mirror neurons also reflect that
in those as well. Now, most of the time, you're going to want
your audience to be feeling engaged, excited, happy, and so the more of that you can show in your face, the more of that they
too are going to feel. Now, final thing about
body language is the eyes. This takes a bit of specific looking up because it's
such an important thing. Nervous speakers often don't want to hold eye contact
with their audience. They'd rather look
down, look away. Even sometimes people are told to look above the audience, which is honestly
terrible advice. Never listen to that
if someone tells you. What you want to be
doing is always looking right into the eyes
of your audience. There's two reasons for this. Firstly, it makes you feel more confident
to hold eye contact. Always do the thing
you're afraid of. Always move forward towards
the fear rather than away. If holding eye contact is
something that makes you feel uncomfortable by consciously
purposefully doing it, it will give you a sense
of your power back, because you are voluntarily facing the thing that
you are afraid of. But the second benefit of eye contact is
that it allows you to understand where
your audiences are. Are they paying attention? Are they understanding? Are they enjoying it? This is all information
that you want to be getting from your
audience all the time. In order to do that, you need to be looking
at them in the eye. It really helps that
two-way connection from the speaker to the audience
to work together and to gel. Now, if you are worried
about eye contact and if it's something
that you are maybe a little bit uncomfortable with, here's another quick tip. We call this light housing. All you do is move slowly
from left to right, a little bit like a lighthouse moves its light
from left to right. If you have an audience
that's fairly wide, this will easily allow
you to remember to share your eye contact
equally around the room. Because what you
don't want to do is give all your attention
to these people because maybe you feel
more comfortable with them and ignore the
other side of the room. Use that light housing
technique to help you to do this in the moment
when you're trying to remember everything
else at the same time. [MUSIC]
3. 3. The Psychology of Body Language: That's some of the common areas of body
language that it's really important to
understand and be aware of. If you get most of
these things right, then you will be pretty
much on the right track. But there's a bit of a
deeper understanding of body language that I'd
like to go into with you. In order to do that,
I'm going to bring up two different animals
a squirrel and a lion. I want you to think
about the difference in body language of
these two animals. Let's look at the
squirrel first. You might describe
it as flighty, very hesitant, quite small. On edge, the squirrel is giving across the body
language of an animal, which is, maybe you
would interpret that as nervous or
flighty or anxious. The lion, on the other
hand, is very different. The lion is calm. It's taking up space. It's looking around its
surroundings very confidently. It's taking in all of its
surroundings and its movements, unlike the squirrel, are
slow, purposeful, strong. Now, the main difference between these two
animals, of course, is that one of them
is a prey animal, and the other one is
an apex predator. The squirrel spends its
whole life on the run. Everything's trying
to kill it or eat it. It has to be constantly aware of what's going on around it
of any potential threats. Its body language reflects this. It's making itself small so
it's not too easily visible. It's constantly ready
to jump away at the moment that it feels
threatened and it's very quick, it's very hesitant,
and it's very on edge. The lion doesn't have the
same need to be so evasive. It's a primary predator. Not really anything
is worrying it apart from maybe
humans more recently, but historically the lion
is the apex predator. It's not looking for dangers, it's looking for opportunities. It's surveying its landscape, looking for potential things
that it can hunt itself. Its body language
reflects this as well. It's taking up space, it's not trying to be small, it's looking around confidently, and when it moves,
it moves slowly. It doesn't need to expend too much energy or to run
away or to be too fast. It's calm, it's collected. Now, as humans, we have evolutionary, again, being both prey and predator at various times and in various
different scenarios. We have both of these
pathways and those, both of these body
language pathways of the prey animal and
the predator animal. Now, when we get up to speak in public, a lot of the time, if we feel nervous
and threatened, it triggers that more squirrel-like body
language to happen. We want to make ourselves small. We're ready to dart out of the room and we are generally on edge and we are very much in a heightened state of awareness. Whereas what we really need
to do is bring in more of that lion type that
predator calm, control, and being in
charge of the situation. How do we do this? Well, really the best trick is you have to be aware of what your body
is doing at any one moment, and you have to be
able to consciously choose to do one thing
rather than the other. Every time you speak and
you start feeling nervous, there's a reaction
happening that's telling you to close in, to look down, to go small, and to defend yourself. What you need to do
is catch that moment happening and break the
pattern as it occurs. As soon as you feel
the urge to close in, what you need to do is
instead open up wide, make yourself bigger, step forwards towards
the perceived threats, and breathe deeply and embody more of that
lion's hype spirit. What's going to
happen when you do this is you are breaking that pattern of going
into the negative side of body language and building a new pathway to open up
and feel more confident. When you do this,
two things happen. Not only do you start to look more confident to your audience, but you're actually
sending a signal back to your brain,
which is saying, actually, wait a minute, I'm not in threat here. I don't have to
hide or run away. I am actually safe
and I am in control. Body language is a
two-way communication. How we feel mentally
and emotionally is influencing our
body language. But how we hold ourselves
is also sending the signal back to our brain to tell us
how we should be feeling. This is why I call the
mind-body connection and it's such an important
aspect of body language that so many people
miss from the equation. We think that body
language is all just about how others perceive us. When actually far
more important is how body language makes us
perceive ourselves. There's quite a lot to take in. Let's do a quick recap. Body language is how we portray
ourselves to an audience. It's our nonverbal
communication. It's everything
that we're saying without actually saying it. It starts from our
feet and it goes rightly up to the
tops of our head, but the most important
things being our gestures, our overall posture, and our eye content. In terms of our psychology, we have two modes
of body language. We have more of a prey
animal body language, which makes us want
to go too small, and a predator body language, which makes us want to open up. Whenever we're
speaking in public and we start to feel nervous, we need to catch that reaction
that wants us to hide away and instead flip
it around to go big. When we do this, we
will also start to feel more confident on
the inside as well. Put this into
practice right now. I want you to stand up, put your shoulders back, put your hands on your hips, and just own the room
for a moment and just feel your
presence in the room, and get used to
feeling this way. So many people, it feels awkward for
them, even to do this. They're so used to holding themselves
in a submissive way. That it takes a little
bit of practice just to get used to embodying this level of confidence.
Get used to it. Feel yourself as the lion, if that helps, or just as a very competent version of you. What I'd like you to do now is complete a short challenge. In a moment, there's
going to be a question come up on the screen. While you stood here in this
new confident position. I'd like you to spend
two minutes answering this question as if it was
a mini improvise speech. Now, you don't have to do this
in front of anybody else. You don't have to
do this on camera. That's just a private
exercise for you to do, to feel how it's different speaking when you're adopting this positive body language. You're going to have
up to two minutes to answer this question. Do it any which way you like. It's not really so much
about what you say, it's how you say it and
it's getting comfortable talking while standing
in a confident position. Once you've done that challenge, I'll see you in the next video. [MUSIC]
5. 5. Vocal Variety: Welcome back. How did
that first challenge go? You might have found it
surprisingly difficult, or maybe you found it
surprisingly easy. Regardless of how it went, well done for taking action. Again, let me just stress, the more you practice
these things, the more you stand up
and practice speaking, whether it's in your bedroom
or in front of people, doesn't really matter, it's all about getting
in those reps. If you want to get good at
piano, you have to play more. If you want to get good
at public speaking, you have to practice speaking. Well done on taking
that first step, there will be more
challenges to come. But now we're going to
turn our attention from the body to the voice. This is the next most
important thing, I believe when it comes
to public speaking. In those first seven seconds, people have been judging your body language
and hopefully, they've got a good first impression because
you've walked in holding yourself high,
smiling, feeling confident. The very next thing that happens
is that people hear you. This is our next chance as
speakers to either keep building that credibility
up or if we're not careful, to lose our credibility. What are some common things
that happen with our voice? Well, very simply,
usually people either speak a little bit too quietly and then
people can hear them, or potentially they speak
a bit too fast and they're trying to just get
through everything as quick as possible. Or perhaps they
speak too monotone and they don't have any
variation in their voice, and they start sounding a
little bit like a robot. All of these things are
very common traps that people fall into when
it comes to the voice. Now, the most important of
all of these to address first is the volume
or the projection. Because if you are doing
everything else right, if you've got fantastic content, fantastic body language, but people can't
actually hear you, then everything else
doesn't matter, right? People need to hear you. This is the first and most
important job of the voice. Now, depending on the situation
that you're speaking in, you might be speaking
to a room full of people or an entire audience. You might have a
microphone or you might be relying on your
own projection. But whatever it is,
you need to be able to use the full power
of your voice. There's a very simple
way of doing this, and it all comes down
to this thing here, which is your diaphragm. The diaphragm is a muscle that goes all around your
midsection here. The diaphragm
contracts in order to push air up through our vocal
cords and to make sound. This is how we make
sound to speak. If you're a singer or an actor, or anyone else that is in
the world of performance, you get trained how to
properly use the diaphragm. Very simply, the diaphragm
works best when it is relaxed. When we get tense, we start to tighten
up everything. We tie up the
shoulders, the face, all of our muscles
become tight and tense. What that does is it contracts the diaphragm
and it makes us start breathing here into the chest rather than down here
into our stomach. Then we're trying to make all of our sound from
here in the chest, and we only have
this smaller space to throw out our voice. Our voice becomes tight and
it's harder to project. It also puts a lot of strain
here on our vocal cords. The very simple idea is that the more we can
release this tension, the more relaxed we can
get all of our body, the more naturally we will
project using our diaphragm. That brings us to
a vocal warm-up. If you can once again, please stand up for me, find some space, plant your
feet like we did before. We're going to go through
a simple vocal warm-up, which is going to make
us nice and relaxed, and ready to speak. Okay, so let's begin
by please putting your hands on your
midsection here. So you've got this area around
your hips and just spread your fingers out over your belly and just start taking a
few deep breaths for me, and just relax and calm down. Take a few moments. You don't have to breathe
in any particular way, just however feels
natural to you. What you should start to feel is your stomach expanding
as you breathe. You can feel your fingertips
being pushed out every time you breathe in. This
is what we want. We want to feel the breath expanding the stomach
and the diaphragm. If you can't feel this, it generally means
you're breathing into your chest [NOISE] up here, which is a nervous,
anxious breath. It's the breath of the
fight-flight-freeze response rather than the
breath of calmness. Keep breathing for me. Hopefully, the more you do
this, the more you calm down, the more you will feel
that stomach expand. This is allowing us
to really anchor the breath deep down here
where we want it to be. Let's move up again
now, let's come back to the shoulders where
we hold a lot of that tension and just start to move these shoulders
backwards for me like this, in a circular motion. You can go forwards as well. Really feel into what
feels good for you, okay? Try to really get rid of
any tension you can feel. Then you might want
to move your head from side to side like this and maybe go
in some circles. All of this is just releasing
that tension bit by bit. Good. Now you can take two fingers here for me or
just your fingertips and place them between your cheek and
jaw bone where the tendons attach your face and just start giving yourself
a nice little massage. Here is where we store a
lot of tension in the face. The more we can
really work this out, the more relaxed the
face is going to be. There's over 100 muscles in the face and neck which
control human speech, and all of them,
like any muscle, need to be warmed up
before they are used. Once you've given yourself a
nice little facial massage, repeat after me,
we're going to go small, and then we're
going to go big. Go with me, go small, tight like you're
sucking a lemon. Then go back like
a big surprise. Then small and then big again. Great. Now we're going to do some lip trills so
repeat after me [NOISE] and you and one more [NOISE]. Good. Okay. Now
using your tongue, I want you to just feel
around your teeth like this, [NOISE] exploring your teeth. Finally, I want
you to take a big, [NOISE] yawn [NOISE] usually when you fake it, it
actually happens. Yawns are great because
they really stretch out all of your vocal cords
and loosen everything up. Then just shake everything
out for me a little bit more. Hopefully now you're feeling
a little bit more relaxed. This is the real key to utilizing your voice
as best as it can be. When you relax the diaphragm, you start speaking and
breathing from down here and having all of that area
to project your voice. When you relax the face, you start to articulate
your words more clearly. You start to be able
to use more tonality, more inflections so you don't
sound monotone or robotic, you sound human and
conversational, and generally, everything is improved by being more relaxed
and more loose. Of course, what usually
happens with most people is before they have to deliver a presentation
or a speech, they're sat down, bottling up all of that nervous tension. Then when they get up to speak, then they're the opposite of loose, they're incredibly tense. Always try to find even
just a few minutes to go through some of this
before you have to speak. It makes such a big difference. [MUSIC]
7. 7. Mindset Shifts: Welcome back. I hope that second challenge
went really well. You might have
realized that you are done 20 different
ohms in two minutes, which is often the case, or maybe you are able
to really get a hang of it and start using more pauses. However it went, again the important thing is that you tried and you're
practicing this. The more you do so, the more awareness
you will build up how you're speaking and what
words you're using, and the better you will get
using those powerful pulses. [MUSIC] In this lesson, I want to move on to the
third important thing that we're going
to look at today, from the body to their
voice, to the mindset. Mindset is so important to
public speakers because it's such a scary thing
for so many people. Of course, it's not
hard to see why. Standing up in front of
a room of people and having all of these
eyes look back at you is a very
unnatural situation for most of us to be in.
We're not used to it. What happens is it triggers
in us this fear response. Somewhere in our subconscious, something perceives a
threat and it triggers the fight-flight-freeze
response for us to either fight
off the threats, flight from the situation
by running away, or simply to freeze and play dead so that
we don't get eaten. None of which is particularly
helpful while you're delivering a work
presentation, unfortunately. How can we get over
that fight-flight or freeze response and how can we change our mindset to start
feeling more confident? Most people, I think
when public speaking, are really worried about
how it's going to go, whether the people are
going to like them, whether they're going
to think that they are confident or assertive, or whether they think they sound like they know what
they're talking about. All of these things are
running around in our heads, and ultimately the
problem is that we're focused on ourselves. Me, me, me, am I
going to be okay? Am I going to sound confident? Are they going to like me? When you're public speaking, you need to take the
attention off of yourself and put it
onto your audience. You need to stop feeling so
self-conscious about how you're coming across because
the more you focus on you, the more self-conscious
you'll become, and start becoming more conscious of who
you're speaking to. There's a few little
mindset switches that can really
help us with this. I'm going to take you
through three of these. The first one that I use is
practice over perfection. Nervous speakers feel often they need to be perfect and that if they make any
little mistakes, then everyone's going
to think that they are terrible or they're
going to laugh at them, or they're going
to talk about them afterwards and so they have this subconscious
needs to be perfect. Then if they drop a pen
or they forget a slide, or they lose where they
are, suddenly catastrophe. What we need to do is really get rid of all of that pressure that we're putting on ourselves. You are never going
to be perfect and no one ever is so
stop trying to be perfect and instead
see every opportunity to speak as an
opportunity to practice. Think about the most
confident speakers you know, they're not worried about
making small mistakes or losing their train of
thought for a moment. They couldn't care less, why? Because they're not
trying to be perfect. They're comfortable
in themselves, they're confident
in their own skin, and they know that they do
not need to be perfect. This is the first thing
that you need to work on; stop trying to be
perfect and instead, focus on the practice. Focus on getting that little bit better every single time. Second mindset shift,
enthusiasm beats confidence. Most people put confidence
on a bit of a pedestal, we want to look confident, we want to sound confident, we want to feel confident, and going back to that
perfection thing, we feel like we need to
have this perfect aura of confidence in order to be respected by other people
when we are speaking. The trouble with confidence
is that it's very flighty. It doesn't matter
how much you push yourself up or talk
yourself up for it, the moment when you
stand in front of that audience and
you start to speak, your confidence can
vanish like that. It's happened to me, it's happened to many other people, and it can happen to any of us. Now if we've put all of our efforts and all of
our focus on trying to be confident and then our
confidence abandons us what then do we
have left to stand on? We're left helpless. Confidence isn't a good thing
to put your foundation on. Yes, you want to work on
your confidence externally, you want to try to
feel more confident, you want to do all
of these things. This course is about
trying to make you feel more competent but in the moment when it comes to
the actual act of speaking, you need to take
the whole idea of confidence and just
forget about it. Don't try to be confident, don't even worry about it. Instead, focus on
being enthusiastic. Enthusiasm is a far better
thing to focus on because a, we can always choose to be enthusiastic even when we're
nervous, even when branches, we can choose to find
that enthusiasm and focus on expressing
that to our audience. Secondly, enthusiasm, as
they say, is infectious. The more we have, the more the audience
is going to feel. If you're trying to
influence, educate, inform, whatever it is
that you're trying to do to your audience
and give them, the more enthusiasm you
have for that subject, the more enthusiasm
they're going to feel and start to get
from you as well. This is a great
little switch around, whatever you have to speak
forget about being confident. Don't worry if you have
a bit of nervousness, that's very natural we all do. If you can speak
with enthusiasm, people will totally forgive
you for having some nerves, and it stops you from having this whole idea of needing
to be a certain way. Practice over perfection,
enthusiasm beats confidence, and the third little
snippet that I like to use is it's about your
audience, not you. Again, before I was saying about the internal monologue that
most people have is me, me, me, me, me rather
than who am I talking to. What am I trying to give them
rather than get from them? You see if you go up to
speak in public and you're focused on what you want
to get from the audience. I want to get the praise, I want to get their acceptance, I want to get their approval, it puts you in a less powerful position
because you're trying to get something from them and that's going to make
you feel more nervous. What you want to do
instead is focused on what you're giving
to the audience. What are you there
to do for them? Do you want to inspire them? Do you want to educate them? Do you want to inform them? Do you want to give them some feeling that they
want to take away with? Whatever it is, focus on that. Remember, you are not the most important
part of the equation. When you're speaking in public, it feels like you're the special person because
everyone's looking at you and you're the one in the spotlight but
really it's not. I always think to myself that whenever I'm
delivering a speech, I could be picked up, popped aside, and replaced
with any other speaker, and really, it wouldn't matter in the grand
scheme of things. By thinking that it takes my ego out of the equation
and it puts me in this mindset of I'm there to serve not to get
anything from them. The great thing
about this mindset, if you can really
feel it and you can really embody it
is that it totally transforms the way
that you think and feel about public
speaking and it totally takes away a massive amount of that nervous
energy that otherwise can grab us and derailers when
we are speaking in public. These three things
really worked for me. These three little affirmations, practice over perfection,
enthusiasm over confidence, and it's about them, not you. But maybe you've got a
different way of wording this. Maybe you can come up with
your own affirmation, your own little quick one-liner, which gets right to the heart of the mindset that you want
to have as a speaker, a mindset of service
over getting, a mindset of enthusiasm
over confidence. Whatever works for you,
whether you want to steal mine or come
up with your own, choose something that really
strikes a chord with you that resonates with you and
repeat it and affirm it, and tell it to yourself
when you need it most. Honestly, this will help you
more than anything else. That was a quick
insight into mindset. The more you can go into
this and develop it, the more powerful you will
become as a public speaker. We're going to finish up with one final challenge for
you but before that, I want to throw in
an extra lesson on breathing because it's a part of public speaking
which is really, I think, underappreciated
and often confused. Let's jump into breathing. I want to show you an exercise. I want to show you why
it's so important, and then we're going
to wrap everything up with a final challenge for you. I'll see you in the next lesson. [MUSIC]
8. 8. Breathing Techniques: There's been many times when
I've been backstage before a big performance or waiting
to deliver a speech, and I've started to feel
those nerves creep up on me. I said before, I
used to suffer with really extreme social anxiety. Without going into
too much detail, it got so bad at one point that even answering a phone
call or having to buy a train ticket
would cause me to start having an overwhelming
anxiety attack. Even when I became more of an experienced
speaker and an actor, I would still feel
those nerves start to creep in and take over
before I had to perform. So many times, it's
been breathing, which has really been key to helping me handle those
nerves and deal with them. Now I think a lot of
people assume that breathing techniques are
supposed to immediately, miraculously just get
rid of all your nerves. They're feeling this tension and this anxiety and people think, I'm supposed to breathe
for a few minutes, and then hey presto,
it's all gone. When they do that, and then
they still feel nervous, they think the breathing
isn't working for me. It doesn't work. Then they entirely forget about breathing, and they don't even
bother with it. What I found is that breathing techniques
work in the background. It's a more subtle effect. You might still feel some of that nervous energy and some of those butterflies
in the belly, they don't completely go away. But at a deeper level, by doing a breathing technique, you have anchored
yourself further down into your own presence
and your own awareness. That enables you to move
forward despite the nerves, despite the anxiety, and still deliver your
best performance. Now the reason why
breathing is so powerful is that it taps into something called the
autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous
system is part of our physical makeup, which controls all
of the aspects of our body which are unconscious. Our heart rates,
our perspiration, our breathing, our digestion. All of these things
that happen without us consciously
making them happen. But the breath is the
one thing which sits on the crossroads between conscious control and
unconscious control. Because it's actually both. The breath can be
consciously controlled. We can choose to breathe
in and breathe out. But if we forget all about it, the body will automatically
keep breathing for us. That's why we breathe
while we're asleep. The breath allows us to tap
in at a very deep level to our physical body and it allows us to bring
ourselves back down. We have the fight,
flight, freeze response, but we also have the rest
and digest response. These two systems are
always working in tandem, balancing each other out. They're also called
the sympathetic and parasympathetic
nervous system. But it's easier to
call them the fight, flight, freeze, and
the rest and digest. Now when we start
to feel nervous and anxious and uncomfortable, the fight, flight, freeze
response increases. It makes our heart
rate speed up. It makes our
breathing go shallow, and it makes us want
to run away from the situation like
we said before. When we breathe slowly, it brings the rest and digest
system back into control. This calms down our
entire nervous system. This is why the breath is so powerful because it
allows us to tap in to all of these things which otherwise are completely
outside of our control. Think about it, when
you're getting nervous, there's nothing you feel
that you can do about your heart rate or the
fact that you're sweating. But by using the breath, we can start to influence all of these other symptoms
that happen. Without going too detailed
into all of that, how do we start to
use our breath? Well, there are many, many
different techniques. The one that I
like is called the four times four technique. This is used by the US military. It's trained to soldiers
in order to help them stay calm in
battlefield scenarios. I don't care how many
people you're speaking to. No public speech is as
scary as it would be. I'm assuming to be in a battle. Sitting comfortably, make sure
you're relaxing your body. You can close your
eyes if you need to. Just follow along with
me as we breathe in for four and breathe out for four. Breathe in for 1, 2, 3, 4, and breathe
out for 1, 2, 3, 4. One more time
breathing in for 1, 2, 3, 4, and
breathing out for 1, 2, 3, 4. Now, with breathing techniques, there is no right or wrong. There are many different
variations of this. Really the only thing
that matters is that your awareness is on your breath and that you
are breathing consciously. Slowing everything down and breathing here into
the diaphragm. By doing this for even
just a few minutes, you trigger that rest and digest system to kick back into gear, which down-regulates
the fight, flight, freeze response and has this
overall effect on all of these other autonomic reactions from our heart rates
to our digestion, to our hormone release, whether that's
adrenaline being pumped out or not or cortisol. Generally bringing all of
our system back down to a feeling of calm,
controlled confidence. This is the power of breathing, but don't expect it to
be a miraculous switch. It's all happening
in the background, but know that it is happening, and then it will help
you to get through that speech and
deliver your best. Okay, so let's take
a big deep breath. We've covered a lot
today, haven't? We might have to go back and
watch this all over again. Hopefully, it wasn't
too much, too quickly, but for now, we've covered body, voice, mind, a little
bit of breathing. Let's now wrap up with one final challenge that
I want to set to you, which I'll do in the
next video [MUSIC]
9. 9. Speech Challenge 3: So well done on
getting this far. Hopefully now you've got
a great understanding of body language, why it's so
important, the voice, how to project yourself, how to get rid of that
tension in order to sound more confident and use
less filler words. The mindset that we need in
order to be bringing our best to public
speaking situations. Where we're thinking
about what we can give rather than
what we can get. Some little tips and tricks on breathing and how to calm down our physical systems in order to stay in control and
deliver our best. I want you now to bring
all this together into a final performance. This time, I'm going to set
you another question and give you another
improvised speech topic. What I'd really
like you to do is record yourself
delivering this back. You can do this very
simply by putting your phone on a shelf or
getting your webcam out, but the act of recording
gives you that little bit of extra challenge when it comes
to delivering this speech. It means that you can't
just stop and start again. You have to keep
going and you have to keep speaking until
the very end. Again, with all public speaking, we need to keep incrementally
building this challenge. If I took someone who
was incredibly nervous and threw them on
stage of 100 people, they'd probably
do a terrible job and it would set them
back even further. But if I take that same person and I make them speak in
front of one person, then three people,
then 10 people, and then 100 people, they're going to be
far more likely to succeed and do a great job, and to keep building that genuine self
confidence that comes from pushing
their comfort zone. This is what I'm trying to do in a very small way in this
course by getting lots of little bits of
practice which slowly build up the challenge level. So three minutes, stood
up, recording yourself. Try to utilize everything we've spoke about today
and really again, don't worry too much
about what you're saying. Just focus on how
you are saying it. Once you're done,
I will see you in the final lesson for a summary of everything we've covered and some key takeaways that I
would like you to remember. So give this a good
shot. Enjoy it. I'll see you in the next lesson. [MUSIC]
10. 10. Key Take-Aways & Summary: The things that we need to
learn before we can do them. We learn by doing them and my
ethos as a public speaking coach and in all the
work that I do with Project Charisma is
learned by doing. Public speaking is something you have to practice in
order to improve. Whether you are watching
an online course like this or you're
attending one of our in person workshops or
getting one to one coaching. It's all about getting that experience and putting
these things into practice. Well done on taking
even more practice. I hope that last challenge went even better for you
than the previous ones. But if it didn't,
it doesn't matter. It's not about how it went. It's about the fact
that you did it. The more you keep doing this, the more you keep practicing, the better you will get. I believe honestly, after coaching hundreds
of people and after being an incredibly anxious
speaker myself that absolutely anyone
can learn to be a competent public speaker. It just needs the right training and the right
amount of practice. Thank you for joining
me here today. I hope that you've got a lot of this short concise class
on communication skills. Let me just leave you
with some key takeaways. [MUSIC] We began with the body. Remember that the
first seven seconds of any speech is
the most crucial. This is when people make their first impression
of you and it sets the tone for the
rest of the speech. Also remember that body
language is a two way street. It's not just about what you're expressing to the audience, it's about the messages and the signals
that you're sending back to your own brain
about how you feel, about how you're
thinking and about how confident you are feeling
within that space. Always remember
to stand up tall, to open wide and body the lion, if you need to, and to smile and to give good eye
contact to your audience. When it comes to the voice, remember that the
most important thing is that they can hear you if you are mumbling or
you're speaking too quietly, or you're going too quickly, you will make your audience switch off and stop listening. Remember, always relax, try to get rid of any
tension that you have and that will allow you
to project your voice, to articulate your words, and to engage your audience
using the full power of this instrument that you have here called your vocal chords. Also remember that
pauses are one of the most powerful
tools that you have in your arsenal as a
public speaker. Another perfect thing to switch in in place of
those filler words, which can be a real
credibility killer. In terms of mindset, remember those three key mindset switches
that I gave you. Practice over perfection, it's not about being perfect, it's about practicing being
the best version of you. Enthusiasm beats confidence, don't try to be
confident in the moment, focus instead on finding
and giving your enthusiasm. Finally, it's about
them not you. Remember as a speaker, you are there to give
something to your audience, not to get anything from them. Finally, breathing is
such an important aspect of your preparation
as a speaker. If you do feel nervous, if you do feel anxious, which is so common and so to be expected
for anyone, even me, even experienced speakers, then breathing is one of the best
things that you can do. Whether you're sat
in the audience in a meeting room or backstage
waiting to go on. It only takes a
couple of minutes of conscious breath to bring
down all of that stress in your system and give you that anchored confidence
that we'll see you through even when you are
feeling a little bit nervous. [MUSIC] Thank you for watching. I really hope that you've
enjoyed this course, please let me know down in
the comments if you have, if you'd like to share
your final video with me, please by all means
you can go into the Projects and
Discussions tab, share your video there, and I'd be happy to give you
some individual feedback on how you have done well and where you can potentially
keep improving. If you'd like to find
out more about me and my work with
project charisma, you can find my website at
www.projectcharisma.com. You can find us on
LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook/ @project charisma. Follow me on Skillshare as
well as I will be releasing more videos on
different elements of communication or
public speaking, and on a new course that dives into the
other side of things, which is more about
the content and how to actually write and produce engaging pitches,
presentations, speeches, etc. Thank you again, keeps speaking, I'll speak to you soon. [MUSIC]
Ed Darling, Actor, Speaker & Creator
