Public Speaking for People Who Don't Like Public Speaking

1. Trailer: How We're Thinking About Speaking: Hey, everyone. My name is Esteban Gast. I'm so happy you're here. Welcome to public speaking for people who don't like public speaking. A little bit about me is I used to teach public speaking at the University of Illinois in Orbana Champagne and actually taught in the College of Engineering. So maybe if you're someone who's like, I don't know about public speaking, that was the people I taught public speaking to for a few years. They're like, We're engineers. And I'm like, Actually, you're brilliant public speakers. Goal for this class is not to share the way that I speak publicly, but rather to share a paradigm and a framework for thinking about public speaking and also to encourage you to speak publicly, to communicate your ideas in the best way that you can, in the highest expression of yourself. So I firmly believe there's no right way to speak publicly, and I think you probably intuitively know that if you look at some of the speakers that you've seen. And this is a totally different approach. This is an approach saying, Hey, where are you at your best? And can we build around? A good class for anyone for public speaking is such a critical skill. If you're on a lot of Zooms and you want to make those zooms a little bit more exciting. I don't know why I'm saying Zooms like that. Want to make those Zooms. A little more exciting. If you are a creative and you want to pitch, if you are an entrepreneur and you want to pitch, public speaking is just for anyone who wants to communicate their ideas a little bit more effectively. I think that's it. I think I don't need to pitch you on public speaking. It'll be a short class. I'll try to keep it punchy. Let's do it. Let's get started. Thanks for being here. Happy you're here. 2. Lesson 1: Find Your Style: Hey, and welcome to the first lesson on public speaking. Here we go. Okay, here's the thing. Everything you know about public speaking, let's put that aside. Here's the first questions we are going to answer. I would love for you to write these down if that is helpful, or if not, just reflect. In your head, in your mind, and think about them. Number one is when are you most comfortable communicating verbally something? When are you most comfortable talking? This might be with friends, with family, with a partner? I'm married, like talking to my wife, I feel very comfortable. And think about who you are and how you communicate in that way, right? So when I'm talking to my wife, I feel very safe. I feel like she's not judging me. I feel like it's she likes when I'm really excited about a story, and sometimes I have so much energy that I like, don't even finish sentences because I'm so excited to tell her something. She likes when it's, like, I'm funny or, like, any type of humor, even if it's dark humor, right? So take a moment and reflect, Where are you most comfortable communicating? And what are the adjectives that describe? Okay, so we're making a bank of adjectives that describe you when you are communicating effectively. One of my favorite ways to sort of think about this that I talked to my students when I was teaching at the college level about, and it's a little bit funny. Here we go. It's Who are you when you are flirting? When you are flirting, you're communicating in a specific way. You're trying to be charming. You're trying to be confident. It's all things that are really good for public speaking, right? So we can take some of those ideas of who you are and again, remove all the inappropriate we can take some of the characteristics of who you are when you're communicating with people you're most comfortable with, who you are when you are flirting. Maybe when I'm flirting, even if it's with my wife, I'm a bit more confident. Nothing really throws me. I'm sort of grounded in a way. Something goes wrong, I go, Yeah, it went wrong, didn't it? There's maybe a little mischief. Those are really good places to start building an idea of who you are, your onstage or public speaking persona. Most likely, it is a version of you. What we want to start doing is crafting this persona. Not mean persona, like, not you. I mean crafting this specific version of you that is the best communicator, right? So when I'm on stage, even now, when I'm talking to you, the camera, I'm an exaggerated version of myself, right? My name is Esteban. If you hung out with me all day, I am not like this. This is an exaggerated version of myself. It's a little bit more energy. It's a little bit sillier. I'm okay to make mistakes. It's a little bit more articulate, slower. The goal here is to create a persona and not a persona of someone who is not you. In fact, the opposite, a persona of who you are, who you authentically are when you're communicating the clearest and the best and the strongest, and the most confident. Who is that person? And how can we have a list of characteristics that then we can take that and apply it to public speaking? And I want to be so clear that this can be you can be a little bit awkward, right? Maybe with your best friends, you're like, kind of the awkward, quiet one who throws in a quip here and there. That's amazing. Knowing that and knowing that onstage, you're maybe a little bit lower energy. You're may ivius. You throw in a quip, you look around and you find your crowd. That's 3. Lesson 2: Extemporaneous : Okay, here's lesson two. I want to talk to you about extemporaneous speaking. Okay? I'm going to give you a quick definition, and this is the most textbook thing we're going to talk about in this class. This is literally from the public speaking textbooks that I was teaching at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champagne. Go a Line. Great school. Okay, so extemporaneous is let's think of this spectrum. And over here is completely memorized speeches. For some weird reason, we have been taught public speaking, speaking publicly in front of others, is totally memorized. I know exactly what I'm saying and I practice it, and you have your speech, and you're like, and when you're on stage or when you're sharing, you go like. And another thing about that. You know. When I was a freshman in college, I met my best friend, Dan, and that's the thing that people are doing. Totally memorized. Good thing is, you always say what you need to. Bad thing is, there's no, like, personality that shines through. If you make any mistakes, you're kind of really in trouble, right? You've surely seen someone maybe even had nightmares where you have a memorized speech and you can't remember where you were in the memorized speech. That is memorized on this spectrum. The opposite is totally improvised. Also wouldn't recommend because you might not know what you're sharing. You might end up sharing things that you don't want. You might go over time. You might think, I need to pitch this person, and you go, I didn't even mention the thing, right? So one is memorized. One is improvised. And what I'm talking about is sort of right in the middle, and it is called extemporaneous. You can look this up. There's a whole school of thought about this. You might have heard about this, but it's extemporaneous speaking in the best way to define. Ready? Is this? It is the words can change, but the meaning stays the same. Extemporaneous has talking points. To me, I think of them as bullet points. Bullet points that are pretty drawn out, maybe phrases and sentences. And then I know, Hey, that's my script. I'm going to go in and out of that. But I've practiced it enough. It enough to know that I can sort of go in and out. Something can throw me off and I can jump back in. As an example, these videos are extemporaneous, right? I have bullet points. I know what I want to do. But if I were to record this video again, and maybe I have, you don't know the edits. Maybe this is the third time I've recorded this. I know that every time the meaning, right, I'm hitting just about the same points. The meaning stays the same, but the words can change. This is so key because public speaking is also getting people to be present with you. You need people to be present with you, and they need to see that you are authentically you. And one of the best ways to do that is to leave room for your personality. To say, Okay, you know what? Just as valuable as me sharing a tip on public speaking is earning a little bit of your trust, and that looks like me being a normal human who is here and says I'm and can make mistakes and is thinking about what's Cool. So the second thing is extemporaneous. So we're thinking, number one, how are you authentically What persona do you have on stage? What version of you? Probably an exaggerated, bigger version of you are you bringing on stage. Number two, in that person in that persona, can you set it up? So you are speaking extemporaneously. So you are not memorizing anything and you are not improvising anything. In fact, you are almost certainly building bullet points or note cards. You are giving yourself a framework for you to be present and be yourself, but still know what talking points to hit. That is the second part, extemporaneous speaking. We are off to the third part. Let's do it. 4. Lesson 3: A Cheat Code: The third part is preparing to fail. Yes. That's right. I your number one fear about public speaking is that it goes horribly wrong. That is my number one fear about public speaking. The good news is that we can prepare, prepare, prepare for that. You can, while you're giving a speech or practicing, actually have an interruption or intentionally look away for 5 seconds and then try to see if you can come back to your speech. The biggest things that I tell people when they're nervous that they everything up in their speech is great. Let's practice with the screw ups. It's a literal cheat code to public speaking to write down the things that might happen. You might forget your speech. Great. Well, if you're doing it extemporaneously, you can have a note card in your back pocket. And not only that, you're going to have a joke, ready to go. If you're on stage and you forget your speech and you have to go to your note card, you look at it, and then you can go, Oh, the notecard actually just says, keep going. You're doing great or whatever, right? You can write a. People go, ha ha ha. And then you're totally fine. Okay? This is something I'm a stand up comedian. This is something comedians. I don't want to ruin the magic, but this is something they do for everything. Every comedian, when they're doing crowdwork and talking to someone or something like that, has a backup plan and probably a backup plan to make sure that basically anything that happens, they are ready. I know if someone interrupts my set, when I'm doing stand up, I've got five things I can say to them, and I know exactly what to do. And there's no scenario where I'm caught off guard. This is the biggest cheat code, okay? So number one is persona. Who are you on stage? My thought is, like, who are you when you are talking to your best friends and you're sharing a story. Number two is extemporaneous. That actually relates to number one, because have you ever told a story often in your life over and over? Maybe it's the story of how you met your partner or why you have your name. Maybe you went on vacation and something funny happened, and you told your coworkers and then your friends, and then your family. That's extemporaneous. You know where the story is going, right? The meaning stays. The takeaways stay the same, but the words in that moment can change. That's extemporaneous. And then number three is planning to fail. Literally practice what it is like to lose your train of thought. Literally practice what it is like to get nervous. Have something on stage that helps me sometimes I think like this pumps it up. If you go thumb to pointer, pump up. Rest. You know, calm down. Pump up, rest. And sometimes when I'm on stage, and if I feel nervous, I will just go like this, like, calm down with my hands, next to my side, no one can even see. I went and I saw an incredible speaker this past weekend. It was actually a conference in Pittsburgh, shout out Pittsburgh, and the speaker was holding something almost like a fidget spinner. Weren't like a teenager, by the way, they were like 50s, and they're holding almost like a fidget spinner in their hand, and they made a joke about it. They said, Hey, I'm so sorry. After years of speaking, I finally realized having something in my hand helps me be a better speaker. So you're wondering what this is. It's a thing I need. They were like, fun, charming, disarming. And then they spoke for 45 minutes. And the whole time they were sort of messing with that fidget spinner. And honestly, I thought it was great. It was an incredible speech. No one cared, no one noticed to lean into those things, figure out your cheek code, figure out what could go wrong and plan for it. Okay? Let's go. We're almost. 5. Lesson 4: Mindset: Hey, welcome to the next video. This is going to be quick. It's going to be about mindset. Okay. Number one is I can think of very few scenarios where the audience wants the public speaker to fail. In fact, I can't think of any scenarios. So when you are on stage, there's a few things for you to remember. Number one is the audience wants you to be successful. They want you to have a good. If you're in sales, the person you're talking to wants you to do something interesting. They want to give you the benefit of the doubt, right? If you're in a pitch meeting, they've got 30 minutes with you or whatever it is, no matter what. There you're hoping the 30 minutes are slightly entertaining. Okay? So the audience is on your side. So I would go in with the confidence that if you don't panic, no one else will panic. It's the law of the lid. The audience will only panic if you are panicked. If you forget your speech and you drop your clicker and fails, the audience will look to you. And if you go like, Well, this is unfortunate. And then you continue sort of grounded in your confidence and continue your speech, the audience will follow along with you. I absolutely promise I'm a stand up comedian. This happens all the time. So many times, it goes horribly wrong. And so many times, I just go, You know what? There are no mistakes. We're fine, and the audience is with me. So we're thinking about this mindset of the audience wants you to succeed, okay? And almost, we talk about the first thing, right? Who is your persona on stage, extemporaneous, right? Sort of the cheat codes. And then number four is remember all of this. Remember, especially the first one, who you are on stage is who you are when you are talking to friends. What if the mindset, this is the paradigm shift is when I speak to crowds, I think, these are my friends, and I can't wait to tell them the things I'm going to tell them. I'm so excited to tell this audience, my friends, this next thing. And that is huge. I feel that now, I'm trying to as I'm here making these videos, I'm I can't wait to tell you the person watching, my friend, how you can feel a bit more comfortable while you're speaking? Uh, that is so exciting. I can't wait for that, right? That is the mindset that I want to be in, and I hope that that is the mindset that you can cultivate. Before you go on stage, as you're pumping yourself up, think, these are my friends. I can't wait to tell them. Wait to tell them this. One of my favorite quotes about public speaking is from Oprah Oprah Winfrey. Shut out Oprah. And she used to say before she came out and did her show, she would think, I love you. You love me. Let's play. Isn't that cool? I love you. You love me. Let's play. I think that mindset and really believing that reaffirming that and affirming that and affirming that will make you such a better speaker because it takes away the elements of fear, takes away the elements of judgment, because the audience loves you. You love them. It's just time to play. And there's no wrong way. You can be quiet. You can be loud. You can move around a lot. You can stay standing still. That does not matter if the speaker is excited to share information with the audience. That's all it takes. Okay? Let's do it. Let's do it. We're on to our final video. Let's go. 6. Lesson 5: Bringing It All Together: The last thing I want to talk about before we get out of here, before you go out into the world and communicate all your brilliant ideas is what does it look like to build frameworks for your speaking process? What does it look like to build systems for your speaking process? And here's the thing I want us to think about, okay? Before you leave, and this is sort of a theme of the entire class is that there are no limitations. Okay, be fearless and bold in the way that you want to be because you can always pull from that. Let me give you an example. My dream speaking gig is like a question and answer. Sometimes I get hired to speak and I go like, Okay, great. There's something exciting about putting together an hour keynote. But also, I kind of want to be there and present and respond to the needs of the audience. And I'll tell you what a company will not book you for is hour long question and answer session. But I will then be like, Okay, great. Let me send a survey to the company that I'm speaking at and let me see if the people will answer some of the things that they want to see. Not only will I do that to guide my speech, I will in my presentation visually, say, Hey, I sent you some presentations. Here's a thing that someone at this company wants to talk about. They want to talk about creativity. They want to talk about public speaking. Let me respond to that. So I will design a Q&A, even if the constraints are you can't have a Q&A. Does that make sense? If you were like, Esteban, I never want to speak to a large crowd. I want intimate crowds, and you are in a position where have to speak to a big crowd. There's ways to think about that, right? You can build that framework out. We number one is you just go like, Hey, I'm going to treat you like a small crowd. I'm going to speak to you very intimately in this way. Or you can bring people up on stage for, like, to walk through certain activities. You can ask instead of do one big speech, you can do multiple. The main thing that I want us all to think about is that spending time reflecting on what is your ideal speaking condition and setting and then drawing lessons from that will make you a better public speaker. And now if you know this is the scenario that I perform best in, then you can also build you can communicate that to, you know, the people that you're working with. You can also build frameworks around that. I think the thing I wish for you in this class is for you to build systems and frameworks to support you as a speaker and as a communicator. Because I think this reflection and the activities are worth nothing if we're not actively implementing them. So my hope for you is that you're implementing I know every Skillshare class usually has a project. Here I promise. This is I think will be fun. I, if you want to record a video of you speaking under the project, I would love that. And I promise to leave comments and feedback and thoughts on, like, the first 50 projects. And I think outside of that, people like peer to peer just on Skillshare can also give thoughts and comments. We can make those be really positive, even if we think there's room for growth. We can have it be the most positive supporting section of the Internet. But I think it'd be really great. And if you go, Oh, my gosh, Esteban, there's no scenario. I'm going to record five minute speech or saying hi or anything like that for you, I would challenge you and say, Hey, isn't that interesting? Isn't it interesting that you are uncomfortable with that? Maybe that means we should do it. So, if you want to, if you choose to accept, I would love around a five minute video of you speaking. And I would love, like the story of your name like a simple prompt, a story of how you got your name or some other question if you want a different question. I would love for it to be extemporaneous. So you are not improvising. Maybe that means like you practice it three or four times off camera, and then you go to the camera, but I would love it to be extemporaneous. I would love it to be just so you authentically you the way that you show up best in the world when you are communicating, it doesn't have to be high energy. It doesn't have to be these things that maybe you think speaking has to be. I would love for you to make a plan if it doesn't go well, and the plan can't be just stop and re record. Plan is if you lose your train of thought, if you get tired, if you stutter and if you say too many ms, you just bounce back or you keep going, or you flash a smile, and you go, Yeah, okay, we're working on it. So I'd love that. I would love for you to know that everyone watching it, including me, is cheering for you, right? The audience is your friend. We love you. You love us. Let's play. And lastly, I would love just, you know, you doing that is really great. And I would love for you to think about how to continue building systems in your life that support you in the best possible speaking that you can do. That is it. Is the class. Thank you so so much for watching. I hope it was helpful. I hope it was useful. Genuinely, reach out to me and leave a comment if you're like, I want to see more about Blank, I want to see less about Blank. Okay? I hope this is a conversation because that's my favorite speaking style is conversation, but I hope this is a conversation. You'll see more of me. I hope to see more of you, and we'll just continue trying to, you know, share some skills pretty good. Honestly, pretty good. Thanks so much. My name is Esteban Gast. You can find me online at Real Esteban Gast on just about every social media. Or go to my website, samangas.com. That's it. I think that's literally it. Thank you so much. Have a good one. Thanks for watching the class. We'll see you next time. I've got other classes on skill.