Practicing Public Speaking: Record Youself on a Video

00:01 Okay, folks, now it's time for a really big test.

00:04 It's a test for me.

00:05 I could flunk.

00:06 And it's also a test for you.

00:08 You could flunk. Here's the part that you've not been waiting for that you really don't want to hear.

00:14 But I'm going to just tell it to you straight.

00:16 Now you've got to practice your speech, and you've got to record it.

00:21 You've got to record it on video.

00:24 A.j., I don't like looking at myself.

00:26 I don't like my voice.

00:28 Too bad. And I'm very serious about this.

00:32 You can watch all my videos.

00:35 You can give me five stars and top rating.

00:38 All of that is completely meaningless if I don't motivate you to record your speeches and practice on video again and again and again.

00:49 Everything I do with people, sometimes I work 8 hours a day for five days with a client.

00:59 The most important part of what I do is getting them to practice on video and watch it. It's the absolute only way to really get dramatic improvement and to get consistent improvement.

01:12 You can't do it by looking at a mirror.

01:14 If you practice in a mirror, then, if you're a normal human being, Oh, it's my nose crooked? I did more of my hair fall out by getting Jeff.

01:25 You're not focused on giving the speech.

01:28 You're looking at your face.

01:30 That's not the speech.

01:32 The speech is you actually talking to people, conveying your ideas, moving.

01:39 It is absolutely imperative, critical that you practice on video. If you don't do that, there's an excellent chance you're never going to improve. And I'm sorry right now, but you're frankly wasting your time in this course or any other public speaking course if you do not videotape yourself. Now, when I was starting in this business 30 years ago, you maybe had an excuse.

02:05 Video cameras were relatively rare, relatively expensive.

02:09 Nowadays, you want a video camera, reach in your pocket, pull out your cell phone. It captures video, most likely, if not a tablet, an iPad, a webcam, a laptop.

02:23 I mean, we are all completely surrounded by videos, video cameras these days.

02:30 So you have no excuse.

02:32 Here's the thing. By my estimation, far fewer than 1% of people ever do this. If you want to automatically leap to the top 1% of public speakers, all you have to do is this one thing.

02:45 Practice on video now, but you have to do it in a very, very specific way.

02:52 Because if you practice your speech on video , and you never look at it, it didn't do any good. Complete waste of time.

03:00 If you practice your speech on video, and then you look at it once , and then you're like, I hate my voice.

03:08 This is awful. Well, at least I looked at it again.

03:12 Complete, utter waste of time.

03:15 In fact, that's often worse than wasting time.

03:19 Big, is it? Likely so reduces your self-confidence, makes you feel so awful.

03:24 You hate your voice.

03:25 You hated the fact that your eyes are beady like mine, or that you were twitching with a ring on your finger.

03:34 Just watching once doesn't help.

03:36 And in fact, it hurts.

03:38 You have to go about this in an extraordinarily systematic way.

03:42 Give your presentation.

03:44 Ideally, you have a family member, friend and colleague holding the camera.

03:47 But even if it's just you in a hotel room or in your bedroom recording yourself speaking, that's fine too.

03:56 You've got to record yourself, then you have to watch it.

03:59 Then what you need is a clean sheet of paper.

04:03 Put a line down the middle and write down everything you like.

04:07 Write down everything you don't like about any aspect of style or substance.

04:13 If you notice, for example, you're doing this every 3 seconds, it's going to strike you as weird, odd, nervous gesture.

04:21 Make a note of that.

04:22 However, if you think, Well, my speaking voice is pretty good, or at least I'm not rushing, or I like the fact that my head is moving.

04:31 Give yourself praise.

04:34 Everybody does something well, in the sense that they're not making blunders other people make. Maybe you're not saying are give yourself credit for that, but systematically go through the whole presentation, write things you like, write things you don't like, and then look at it.

04:53 Then you got to give the speech again.

04:57 This time it's a clean sheet of paper.

05:00 Look at it again.

05:02 Did you play with your nose four times this time? If you made any progress whatsoever, write it down.

05:10 So if you start it off and the negatives were this high and the strengths were this high, you want to do it again.

05:15 So the negatives come down, the strengths go up.

05:18 Do it again. Negatives come down.

05:21 Strengths come up.

05:22 Keep doing it as many times as it takes until you like what you see.

05:31 That's the ultimate way of getting better.

05:35 Again, people say, well, I don't want to do that T.J.

05:38 Tough. Let me ask you this.

05:40 How often would you dictate a memo to an assistant or just to a voice recorder and tell someone, send it out to all of our important clients, send it to my teachers who are going to grade me, send it to the media, send it to all of our customers, to all employees.

05:56 Don't spell, check it, don't edit it, don't review it, don't have legal look at it, investor. Just send it out as is.

06:03 How often would you do that? My guess is never.

06:08 You'd be scared out of your mind to do that because of fear that it would be filled with errors. You don't just dictate text and send it out. You look at it, you run it through spell check, you edit it, you refine it, you perhaps get feedback from other people.

06:25 So by the time you've gone through three or four or five drafts, you can look at it and say, Well, this is fine.

06:32 This conveys what I want.

06:33 You're not nervous.

06:36 You're not thinking it's going to win a Pulitzer Prize for literature, but you're comfortable that this particular memo, whether it's a press release, a document to a client, conveys what you want in a clear, easy, understandable way with good grammar and good spelling.

06:52 You hit send.

06:53 You're not nervous at that point because you have a due diligence process for taking this rough draft, which you dictated, into a final draft of what you're sending.

07:07 We understand that instinctively when it comes to text communication, but when it comes to spoken communication, so many of us say, well, here's the first draft and the last draft and just throw it out there to our audience.

07:22 Well, folks, I got to tell you, that's a horrible way of doing it, because the first draft of most things, what do they call it, a rough draft.

07:30 So if you are speaking in front of your intended audience, and it's the first time you're actually giving this presentation, you're throwing your rough draft out to that audience.

07:42 Well, no wonder. It's awful.

07:44 No wonder it's rough.

07:46 We don't expect anything else to be great in the first draft.

07:50 Why would we expect the speech to be great? Now, here's what's really happening.

07:54 For most people, especially those in bigger corporations, is we think of the speech as entirely the PowerPoint presentation or the text. So we may spend dozens of hours, we may spend 100 hours writing and rewriting and rewriting the text on the speech or the text and the bullet points on the PowerPoint.

08:15 Guess what? A complete, utter waste of time as far as actually helping you get prepared to give a great presentation.

08:25 Now, certainly, if you want the whole speech written out, you do have to review it and spell check it.

08:32 If you're giving it to people, if you are using PowerPoint with text and I don't recommend using text on PowerPoint, but if you are, well, certainly you need to get rid of typos and errors.

08:42 But for too many people in too many corporations, it becomes a crutch. I'll get around to rehearsing T.J.

08:51 on video, but we've just got to make these final tweaks on these PowerPoints.

08:56 And before you know it, a week has gone by.

08:58 It's 1:00 AM.

09:00 The speech is at 8:00 AM, and you're still redoing the PowerPoint slides.

09:05 So what's happening is you've crowded out on lesser important activities.

09:11 You've crowded out what's really important, the time to rehearse.

09:15 At some point, you've got to say enough is enough.

09:19 With Futzing, with the PowerPoint or with the script, we now have to rehearse. Great speakers, realize this Ronald Reagan Owen is the great communicator, had a discipline with his speech writing staff.

09:33 Now he would work with his staff for months for a major speech like the State of the Union address. But he would then force them to give him the final draft a week before the speech was to be delivered.

09:46 He would then spend 3 hours a night practicing out loud, reading the speech in the residency in the White House.

09:55 Now, that wasn't a memorized it because he was still going to use a teleprompter.

09:58 He was doing that. To build a comfort level, a relationship with the words.

10:05 But then he would spend an entire day doing videotaped rehearsal with the speech.

10:13 The day of the speech, again and again and again.

10:17 Looking at it, figuring out what works, what doesn't work.

10:20 How about this pause here about this thoughtful look down there? So it's not an accident.

10:26 It's not something you're simply born with.

10:29 It comes through practice and hard work, but it comes through a particular type of practice.

10:36 If you didn't do any of the homework earlier , and you didn't narrow your messages down to five, and you didn't have stories, and you have just a really boring data dump, well, you can practice giving your speech again and again and again.

10:48 It's still going to be an awful, boring data dump.

10:52 And if you practice without video, you might still be making the same mistakes again and again.

10:59 For example, if I had been giving this entire course to you, but the entire time I'd been doing this, I don't think you would really pay attention to anything else.

11:12 You would have said, Wow, that guy's a complete fraud.

11:16 He's talking about how to be comfortable as a speaker.

11:19 He seems really nervous in his own skin.

11:23 Now, if I didn't look at myself on video, how would I know that I'm doing that? You cannot know how you're coming across unless you watch yourself.

11:35 The camera doesn't lie.

11:36 Your friends and family can say, Hey, great speech, good job.

11:40 You're going to knock them dead.

11:41 Bad camera won't do that.

11:44 The camera is going to tell you exactly what you're doing now.

11:47 This is what scares people.

11:49 Sometimes they're afraid of the truth.

11:50 They can't handle the truth.

11:53 Guess what? Your audience is going to see the truth.

11:57 People often say, we'll teach you.

11:58 I don't want to look at myself.

11:59 I hate looking at myself.

12:02 You look at yourself all the time in the mirror, right? How many of you get up in the morning? You have a really important meeting to go to your bosses there.

12:14 The board of directors is there, and you just get up, and you don't look in the mirror. Once you shave, get dressed, put on makeup, and never look at a mirror.

12:25 I seriously doubt any of you do that.

12:27 If you're like most people, you get up, you look in the mirror, and you get out of the shower, you look in the mirror, you shave or put on makeup.

12:34 You look in the mirror, you put on clothes, you look in the mirror.

12:37 So by the time you walk out of your house or apartment, when you're walking into your office or into that conference to give a speech you're no longer worried about, is there jelly stains all over my mouth? Is there a coffee stain on my shirt? You're not worried about that? You're not wondering about that because you already know how you look.

13:00 You've looked in the mirror.

13:01 You know how you're coming across.

13:04 Now, you might wish you look better or thinner or something else, but at least you know that you're visually coming across the way.

13:13 You want to come across the best you can come across based on time and resources that you have because you looked in the mirror numerous times.

13:22 It's the exact same thing with speaking.

13:24 Although the mirror doesn't help with speaking, the speech is you talking.

13:29 The only way to really see what you're getting is by watching video, and you have no excuse for doing this.

13:37 I'm begging you, I'm pleading with you again.

13:42 You've just completely wasted a lot of time.

13:44 If you're not willing, you should have been off watching an episode of Gilligan's Island or some other time waster rather than spend time in this public speaking course.

13:52 If you're not willing to practice on video, it's absolutely the most important part of this process because you have a lifetime of experience watching speakers.

14:05 You already know what's boring, you already know what you don't like, you already know what's distracting.

14:14 So when you watch a video of yourself, and you find yourself doing a boring data dump or going from one foot to the other or grabbing a lectern like you're scared to death, it's going to be obvious to you , and it's going to motivate you to change, to improve yourself. Here's the other thing it's going to do if you actually do what I've asked you to do, which is keep practicing on video until you can look at the video and say, Wow, that's a great speaker.

14:47 The person's interesting.

14:48 The person seems confident.

14:50 If I can speak like that person, I'll be a star in my industry.

14:55 If you actually practice until you get to that point, something magical happens.

15:01 At that point, it becomes impossible to be nervous about public speaking, to be fearful, to be full of anxiety.

15:11 The reason you're nervous if you are before a speech or a presentation is there's a part of you wondering, I might be awful, I might be boring, I might look stupid, they might not understand me.

15:25 Well, guess what? All of those things could in fact be true.

15:30 You won't know until you watch a video of yourself.

15:35 Now back to what I was talking about earlier with the analogy of the text, the print information.

15:43 You're probably not nervous or fearful before sending an email to your boss because you already know you got rid of the spelling errors.

15:51 You get rid of the grammar errors.

15:53 It makes sense.

15:54 One of your colleagues proved it.

15:56 You're not nervous about that? What if somebody asked you, or you're at a comfortable dinner party and somebody asked you how you met your spouse or your significant other? Probably be hard for you to be nervous about that because you've said it many times, you're comfortable with it.

16:15 It's almost impossible to get nervous if somebody ask you a question like that. If you already know how you're coming across, and you know how you want to say it. It is exactly the same thing with speeches and presentations, even if you've never given the speech before to a live audience, if you keep practicing it on video until you like it, it's going to just fill you with confidence.

16:42 You will have eliminated most of the problems that affect most speakers.

16:46 Now, I could give you a 24-hour course and go through every single little detail.

16:53 Don't play with your finger.

16:55 Look people in the eye for a full thought.

16:59 I can go through all those little things.

17:01 But you know what? You already know what you like and don't like, but you don't know how to apply it to your own speech until you watch it on video.

17:10 So rather than go on and on and on and on, I'd rather free up more time for you to practice your speech, watch it on video, and to do it again and again and again.

17:23 Now, some people have problems seeing anything they like with their own presentation. So you may want to bring in a friend or a colleague, have them critique it, but always start off with the positive.

17:34 Ask them what they liked.

17:35 What did you do? Well, because I've seen this countless times.

17:39 Someone does 25 things right, but they had some ahs and ums, and they just fixate on the ums and ahs like it's the worst thing in the world, and they completely ignore all their strengths.

17:51 You don't want to do that.

17:52 So sometimes it's helpful to bring in a partner family members if you can avoid it, don't because family members think they're helping the most by just telling you what's wrong.

18:04 That's not what helps when it comes to the video critique.

18:07 You've got to spend equal time strengths, what's working, what's good to do, more of weaknesses, what to do less of.

18:14 You constantly have to build the strengths.

18:18 So before you go to the next lesson, please give your speech.

18:22 Right now, you already have the outline because you have five messages, and you have a story for each one or a proper visual.

18:30 And now practice your speech on video.

18:33 Keep doing it until you like it.