Overcoming Your Fear of Public Speaking

Today’s question is all about how to overcome your fear of public speaking, and the answer might just surprise you!

Here are some links to the banners mentioned in the video:

http://www.bulletproofspeaking.com  The finest online speaker training in the world.

http://www.legacycertification.com The worlds most comprehensive speaker training.  We don’t just give you a certificate, we give you a career.

Hey everybody thanks so much for tuning in to my video blog on professional speaking. I just got finished filming some stuff for a client of mine and I thought, before I shut all the lights down and turn off the camera, I’d take a few minutes to answer one of the questions that showed up on our Facebook page for professional speaking. Before I tell you what the question is and answer it, let me just share with you this. If you’re watching this on any other website other than my video blog, we are glad to have you but you are missing out on a lot of great content. You might want to head over to www.tophermorrison.com, check out my blog, and subscribe so you can get updates and check out all the other tools. We’ve got a load of webinars on professional speaking as well; check it out, it will be well worth your time. But anyways, today’s question comes from Khalid, he said “Hi Topher. I would love to speak but I feel very uneasy about speaking in front of a group of people. Can your program –“ And I’m assuming that either he is talking about my Speaker Membership Training or my Legacy Professional Speaker Training, the online version or the live version, I am not exactly sure.
But he says “Can your program teach someone like me to being comfortable and good in speaking to an audience?” Now before you even tune out in thinking that this is a setup for me to commercialize my program so let me just answer quickly. Are you ready for this one Khalid? The answer to the question is no, it cannot. I actually don’t work with people that have professional speaking phobias, or are uneasy getting in front of a group of people. I actually only work with professional speakers or people who aspire to be a professional speaker and are already quite comfortable being up in front of an audience. So, that’s not my specialty, but I’m going to tell you exactly where you should go though. I think you should go to Toast Masters. Toast Masters is, in my opinion, the end-all / be-all for people who want to overcome their fears of professional speaking. It’s just a great group of people. It’s a non-profit agency or an NGO; I’m not exactly sure what it is but you can join a local chapter in your area. You can go there and they are designed to help you clean up your “Ums” or “Awes” and get comfortable speaking in front of a live audience so you can sit up and deliver a two/three minute event intro or speech at a networking seminar.
Alright, so I recommend you go check out Toast Masters. Now having said that, here’s where we get a little controversial. For many of you watching this, I actually recommend to stop going to Toast Masters. So before I piss off all the loyal Toast Masters people, here’s the reality: Toast Masters, and they will tell you themselves by the way, never professes to be a training program for professional speakers. Yet so many people who are what I consider to be an amateur or a public speaker, they go to Toast Masters and they join it. (By the way, I used to be a member; I am a big fan of Toast Masters.) But a lot of people stay in way too long. They go in, they join the group, they love it, they stick with it, they keep going on, they start entering their contests, and they win a couple of awards and then they stay in it far too long. And then they want to become a professional speaker. And I’ll tell you right now. I can spot a Toast Master “Professional” Speaker a mile away. The reason is they are way too perfect of a speaker. See, Toast Masters will break you of every bad habit that you’ve got but the reality is, as a professional speaker, you don’t want to be perfect.
You don’t want to be polished. You want to have a couple “Ums” and “Awes”. You want to fumble for your words occasionally because that’s what people do. Alright, so I really recommend that if you are a professional speaker and you’re currently being compensated to speak in front of a group of people then you get out of Toast Masters. They’ve served their service well, the purpose is complete, move on to bigger and better things and get some training on professional speaking not having to deliver a two/three minute toast in front of a group of people. Alright, so having said that, I think you should check out my training. So, if you would like, for those of you who are watching who are already good speakers, if you’d like to learn how to make that profession even better, well check out two things. Number one, you can go to www.BulletproofSpeaking.com and there I have a free eBook on professional speaking but more importantly there, I have got a membership site which I really recommend you join. It’s only $47 a month. That’s less than taking me out to dinner once a month and you can ask me all the questions you want, because I’m that one that checks that website every single day.
It’s a monthly membership site. It has videos, it has books, it has all sorts of stuff in it; you should check that out. The other thing is if you’re really committed in the next twelve months to maximizing your effectiveness and getting up on stage as many times as possible and really wanting this to become a full time profession, well then, I think you should go to my legacy speaker training. So check out www.LegacyCertification.com, it is well worth looking into. This is the last and final year that I am offering www.LegacyCertification.com or the Legacy Program to the public. In fact that is not some bullshit type of marketing technique where I am just going to re-name it the next year, I’m done. I’m getting out of it. I’ve realized that, quite frankly, there is more money just in speaking and doing keynotes, than there is chasing people down and doing sales. So, check it out. This is the last year you can take advantage of that. www.LegacyCertification.com. If you have questions on professional speaking, make sure you got to my Facebook page @ facebook.com/professionalspeaking.
You can ask a question like Khalid did and I will respond usually within 24-48 hours. Until I either meet you on Facebook or in my Bulletproof Speaker Training Membership Site or the Legacy Certification Training, whatever it might be, please take care. Dare to dream and make each day an epic adventure. Bye for now.