Your life is a summation of well over a million experiences. You participate in common events like eating, sleeping, breathing, working, exercising, reading, learning, and driving several times in a day. Those are all basic actions of human survival.
You experience emotions with the same regularity as the actions listed above. At some point your emotions will be channeled by the elation of love, the ferocity of anger, the debilitating forces of fear, the spine tingling impact of pure optimism, the humbling vibes of empathy, stomach twisting disgust, and the out of body experience called euphoria.
If you’ve done any sort of public speaking then I’m sure you have touched on each of these experiences in some way. Some of them are Angels (Great Experiences) and some of them are Demons (Horrible Experiences). On your path to improving as a speaker you must know how to handle both.
In order to handle them you must know what the most common ones are:
Demons (Horrible Experiences)
- Perfectionism – no speech is perfect. Your best output is your best output.
- Rejection – everyone has said something that was not received well.
- Anxiety – anxiety is a normal human reaction. Allowing anxiety to wreak havoc on you is not a normal human reaction.
- Timidity – people can smell fear. Fear does not win over an audience.
- Talking in Circles (click the link)
- Lack of Research (click the link)
Angels (Great Experiences)
- Great Feedback – nothing makes a speaker feel better than knowing their information was well received.
- Audience Participation – Audience participation makes you feel slightly better than great feedback.
- Referrals – Referrals hold a slight edge over audience participation.
- Requests to return – Alright. A request to return makes you feel better than great feedback, audience participation, and referrals.
Conclusion
As I stated earlier, we have all experienced our fair share of angels and demons. If you’ve stepped to a podium, lectern, or stage then you are more than familiar with both categories.
The key on your path to becoming a better speaker is to learn from your demons without allowing them to control you. If the demons of anxiety and rejection follow you to the podium you will never give a quality presentation. Face them and turn them into strengths. Then and only then can you add more items to your list of angels.
Thanks for reading. Please pass this information to anyone who can make good use of it.
To view a list of services click here .
Bookmark this page or follow this link to RSS subscribe to make sure you don't miss out.