I hate public speaking. Most of us do.
Maybe you are like me. You write a brilliant speech, but once you are at that podium, your heart races and you are not brilliant. One would think, at 62, I would be good at speaking by now. Not really, but speak I must.
If you are a leader, you must speak. It is your job to inform, persuade, and inspire. Speaking, face to face, is how you move people. You cannot be like a Little League coach of mine. He was so afraid of giving a talk in front a bunch of 10-year-old boys that he recorded his instructions for base stealing on a cassette tape and played it for us at practice!
Speaking is like anything else you want to improve. You need reps. So I signed up to give an Ignite Talk at the VACEOs Spring Retreat. Ignites are five minute talks backed by twenty slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. I’ve done a couple of these before with limited success.
At the Retreat last month, fourteen other brave souls and I took the stage in front of 175 of our peers. Topics ranged from health insurance, to finding joy, to branding. I talked about how I survived divorce.
It may have been my most successful speech ever. Here’s why.
- I knew the material. It was personal. Heck, I had lived it, examined it, and processed it.
- I didn’t write a speech. There was no manuscript. I decided how to start and how to finish. I put together 20 slides that propelled the story that I wanted to tell.
- I practiced. A day before, I wandered my living room and ran through it about a dozen times. It got better.
Was my heart racing when I took that stage? Yes! In fact, I realized on slide two that I was out of breath and had to pause and inhale. After that, it got easier.
Leaders speak.
Get your reps in.
Contributed by Scot McRoberts, Executive Director, VACEOs.
