The trick to awesome speaking is not looking good on the outside, but feeling good on the inside. You must build an inner foundation of comfort in your skin, presence, internal fullness and receptivity to the flow of other’s attention. What trips people up about speaking is often the internal tension that distracts…
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I teach people to think on their feet and speak from their hearts. My greatest challenge as a presentation teacher is to persuade people to accept their natural ability to speak and to let it flow without expecting themselves to be perfect in their speech. Verbal communication does not require the same sentence structure that…
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I would love to have been a fly on the wall to have heard what President Clinton said to the North Korean officials that persuaded them to release the two women reporters. My guess is that he used his ability to connect genuinely and speak from his heart. I am sure he had a…
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Recently, I was fascinated by an NBC Dateline documentary spotlighting the singing star, Taylor Swift. What compelled me to pay attention and watch the whole hour twice was the authenticity from which this dynamo of a performer and businesswoman lives her life and runs her productions. At 19 years of age, she…
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I heard this on the radio today, “Great Leadership begins with the ability to level with people.” That’s another way of saying we must be transparent to be effective as leaders. I just heard Obama criticized for going to Cairo to “apologize” for American behavior. It might just be that he was being transparent…
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Most people are used to hearing others say what is bad and wrong about them. That is one of the causes of fear of public speaking. It shocks people to hear all the good that you sense and see in them. We use “mirroring the good” as a part of our speaking training to…
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Public speaking clients ask me how they can “read” their audience. I tell them they must open to receive their audience members. Receiving is an experience of 1) seeing individuals in the audience, 2) making authentic connection one-to-one with them and 3) taking them in through soft-focus eye connection. Receiving is my way of expressing…
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Speaking to groups of people, sharing your ideas, insights and expertise can be a peak experience if you open to be yourself fully in front of others. I found myself humming the song “I Enjoy Being a Girl” yesterday. Who knows why that song was in my head? As I hummed, I began to think about…
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This blog post has nothing to do with public speaking and everything to do with opening the heart. Well, certainly opening the heart is needed to be great at speaking. Come to think of it, the heart pounding out of the chest that so many people experience in fear of public speaking is because those people…
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Our new President just spoke to the world. He began to reclaim our place in the world. He called on us all to fill ourselves with the spirit of service, to remember who we are as a nation that has withstood worse challenges than we face now and to begin anew the work of remaking…
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