You Can Speak In Public With This guild

This Article is about a someone who use to think speaking in public could expose is grammatical ability hear his view as a guild for you: My parents had lived in Japan before I was born, and they brought back a Japanese kite that hung in my room. It was about ten feet long and segmented into about a dozen sections, I thought it would make a good prop for my speech.  I've always been confident speaking in public.

Mostly because, when I was about 12, I entered a county-wide public speaking contest. (People say public speaking is terrifying, but for me, there was no way it could be more humiliating than gym class.) And I learned that being a successful public speaker is not about what you're saying. The talk went pretty well. I didn't drop any of my index cards, and I think everyone could hear me. At the end of my eight minutes, I folded up the kite and gave my conclusion.

Everyone in the audience suddenly snapped to attention. Even my parents, who had watched me practice, had a surprised look on their faces.Right then, I knew that I had won. That boy in the blue blazer, who seemed like he was going to win? No way.Here's the thing: I didn't win for speaking. I won for folding.No one expected a 12-year-old to talk and do anything else -- much less fold a complicated kite -- at the same time. My eight minutes with those index cards meant nothing. It was all in the folding.

Now, when I'm asked to give a speech or moderate a panel, or even go on television, it's not the words I worry about. Don't get me wrong. I put a lot of work into the words, and I practice them relentlessly. But I don't worry about them.I worry about the folding -- the technical difficulties, the venue, even the clothes. Here's how I handle it.

Technical Difficulties

Whenever possible, I don't do Power point. It's hard enough to stand in front of a group of people and talk intelligently for half an hour or more. I don't need to remember when to click, too. Or to wonder if I'm supposed to point to my slides or look at the audience.

Sometimes, though, you need slides -- if your presentation is numbers-heavy, or you need to show a lot of charts and graphs. But for most people, slides are a crutch. So lose them if you can, and practice more. Plus, do you really want to start your talk by turning the lights out and encouraging everyone to fall asleep?

Notes

I practice so much that, in the end, I hardly need notes. But I have an irrational fear of blanking out. So I put my notes on index cards. I punch a hole in the upper left corner of each one and put them on a key ring. That way, if I drop them, they won't go flying in different directions.

Water

No one wants a Marco Rubio moment. Hopefully, there is somewhere onstage where I can place a bottle of water. If not, I ask the host to sit up front and hold one for me. And I've always got a pocket full of Ricola cough drops.

The Uniform

I do not wear anything new on stage or on camera. That would be the wrong time to determine that, oops, that button really doesn't hold so well. If you see me speaking in the summer, there's a good chance I'm wearing a black-and-white Calvin Klein dress that I bought at a sample sale years ago. In the winter, I'm in a bright pink and orange (really) blazer. Who cares if I wear the same thing over and over? It's not like I have groupies who follow me.

Last year I was at a conference with Sally Hogshead, author of Fascinate. Every time I saw her, she was wearing a dress with the exact same silhouette, but in a different jewel tone. She looked great in each of them. Ideally, that's what you want: your own personal uniform.

Confidence

What's the very best confidence-booster? Watching videos of people screwing up. Even Steve Jobs. I don't say that because I'm an evil person. I say it because after you see a few snafus, you quickly realize that the audience is on the speaker's side, every time.

The audience doesn't want you to implode. They want you to recover. Which means that when things go awry, ask for their help, either implicitly or explicitly.

I was in Belgium and The Netherlands recently, doing as many as five events a day talking about women, business, and entrepreneurship. It was exhausting, but I loved meeting so many entrepreneurs and impressive women. Loved it. But by the end of a six-day tour, I was fried. And at one event, I actually forgot a chunk of what I was going to say. By that time my notes were a mess (next time, I will laminate them). I said, "You know, I can't remember that second point, so if it's okay with you I'm going to move on." I was embarrassed, but I guarantee you I'm the only one who even remembers it.

Another time I was on live TV, in a satellite studio, and my earpiece broke. I could not hear a thing the host was saying. I guess a real warrior would have just carried on with her talking points, but I said, "I'm sorry, my earpiece just broke and I can't hear you." One of the sound guys relayed the questions to me as he was fixing my earpiece. All I could do was smile and pretend it was no big deal. It kind of made me wish I had a kite to fold.