Nick R Thomas - A Public Speaker's Blog

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Wednesday, March 26

So where do public speakers find their public? (Part 1)

by Nick R Thomas A.L.A.M. (Public Speaking) on Wed 26 Mar 2008 01:48 PM GMT

Finding the right audience for your presentation

Not for the first time, a reader has contacted me with a query (and if anyone else wants to use me as a 'public speaking agony uncle' then please feel free to do so. I'll help if I can - but it may sometimes take a while, depending upon my commitments!).

Sarah Rourke, The Audio Pod Artist, is a former BBC journalist and producer and is therefore not nervous about public speaking but wants suggestions for finding the right organisations to speak to in order to promote her podcasting, audio resources production and training business.

First of all, here are the more obvious suggestions. Let's start with business networking clubs. Now Sarah could certainly join some and get to speak at their meetings, ranging from one minute per week to say what sort of business referrals she'd like from other members at some clubs, to a six-minute presentation about her business at others. Some will cost hundreds of pounds a year in membership fees, others just the cost of a meal.

But with her BBC background and type of business, I feel that she really should be the guest speaker at business clubs. Her local library or free business paper should have details of all the business groups in her area and, if it's anything like here in Bournemouth, a very large proportion of these will be solely for businesswomen. It will then be up to her to decide whether she wants to widen her net and obtain details of similar clubs further afield.

Meetings can be at any time from breakfast to evening and from weekly to bi-monthly. Some organisations pay (very well), others may just pay her travel and for the meal but, whatever the arrangement, her presentation will have to be informative and entertaining, not simply a sales pitch, and she will need to take some interesting recordings along with her to play - using her own equipment.

A good organisation for Sarah to contact might be Businesslink. In my area, they run a number of rural business clubs and I have delivered 40-minute presentations as a guest speaker at a couple of these and obtained some coaching and other work as a result but they also run much larger training events in urban districts.

So these are some of the business clubs.There are also the service organisations whose members are business people who raise funds for charity: Rotary and their wives and partners in the Inner Wheel, 41 Clubs (ex-Round Tablers) and their female offshoot Tangent, Lions clubs, etc. They certainly all book - and pay for - speakers but the age range is pretty wide, from 40s to 90s, with many of them obviously being retired and although there are certainly older people who are very enthusiastic users of the internet (sometimes rather patronisingly described by the media as 'silver surfers'), many others have no interest in it at all. The same, I think, applies to BPW (Business and Professional Women UK Ltd) as a market. But perhaps Rotary's 'youth arm' Rotaract (18 upwards) might be a better bet, although these clubs tend to be very small.

Here are some less obvious suggestions. Podcasting is, like blogging, a form of self-publishing - so how about writers' groups? The audio aspect could be of interest to film-making and AV (audio visual) clubs, too (despite so much of my work being in radio, I have spoken to both a film-making and an AV club - and they approached me!) The logical progression from these might be carefully selected arts festivals. And how about contacting libraries where events are often held?

Sarah offers training so she could also consider becoming a lecturer for other educators. This would probably not bring in any extra business for her company but it would give her additional income as a speaker and increase awareness. She could be a guest lecturer on a university media studies course (as I was on the MA in Radio Production at Bournemouth University) or teach adult education classes (although she would be required to study for a basic lifelong learning teacher's qualification if she doesn't already have one).

She could also find out if there are any agencies representing subject-specific speakers for training days who would take her on their books.

Public Speaking Tip #182: Sometimes the market for a particular presentation is wider than you think so don't just look for the obvious speaking opportunities; instead, consider all aspects of your topic and think who else it might possibly appeal to.

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Tuesday, March 25

Even politicians sometimes have their uses...

by Nick R Thomas A.L.A.M. (Public Speaking) on Tue 25 Mar 2008 08:38 PM GMT

Political Biographies

Last weekend, the top UK blogger Iain Dale published a list of his Top 75 Political Books.

Political biographies often include a great deal about the preparation, delivery and impact of their subjects' speeches. A favourite audio book which I am just listening to yet again is A Different Drummer: My Thirty Years with Ronald Reagan by Michael Deaver. Throughout the 4 cassettes, there are constant references to Reagan's public speaking.

Oratory obviously also features heavily in political fiction, as viewers of the superb drama The West Wing are aware; some of the most interesting and entertaining characters are the speechwriters.

Public Speaking Tip #181: We may never wish to go into politics but we can still pick up some excellent public speaking pointers from political biographies and fiction (although, admittedly, the two are sometimes difficult to distinguish!)

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An underrated technique for controlling public speaking nerves!

by Nick R Thomas A.L.A.M. (Public Speaking) on Tue 25 Mar 2008 07:41 PM GMT

Controlling panic attacks

In a recent interview, Madonna revealed that she still gets panic attacks on stage.

Now, you might be thinking that if a performer with her experience still panics after a quarter of a century of superstardom, then what hope is there for anyone else?

But then we are not performing as part of a multi-million pound tour where we are expected to remember and deliver outstanding songs and dance routines while knowing that every second we are up there, the world's critics are scrutinising us for any sign of weakness as we grow older.

Madonna has her own techniques for dealing with her panic. I am now going to enlarge on one of the suggestions on my Thomas's Twelve Tips for Terrified Speakers web page which can help you if you get really nervous at a speaking engagement. I was delighted when Liz Fuller recently referred to this list - and this tip in particular - in her highly-acclaimed blog for women entrepreneurs, More Than WE Know.

Between the ages of 15 and 23, my life was blighted by severe panic attacks. As this is a blog and not a therapy session, I have no intention of going into the childhood reasons for these, but I developed a full-blown social phobia which severely restricted my educational, social and working lives. Numerous medications were prescribed, conventional and homeopathic, which had little long-term effect (apart from very unpleasant side effects in some cases). And I was less than impressed by the doctor who felt that he would be able to cure my problem over two years of talking it out - despite the fact that he appeared to speak very little English!

Then, at last, I met a therapist who described all these tablets as 'cr*p' and introduced me to an incredibly fast-working and effective technique. Whenever I felt panicky, I was to give my fear a rating on a scale of 0 - 8.

Of course, if you are feeling terribly nervous, you're naturally going to give your fear a 'score' of 8. Well, if it was 8, you would probably be dead while 6 or 7 would mean you would be unconscious! But psychologists say that actually 8 = avoidance: you simply refuse to undertake the activity you are so nervous about. In public speaking terms, it would be the equivalent of running out of the venue during your introduction.

Realistically, a severe panic attack rates a 4. And the wonderful thing is that once you start giving your fear a score, you start to take control over it. You are treating it as something separate from you; you are acting as its critic. And when you start to do this, the score begins to descend: 4 becomes 3, becomes 2.5, becomes 2...I'm not saying that it will necessarily go right down to 0 straight away but the event will certainly become a lot more manageable.

When you get used to doing this, you will find that your starting point for these scores gets lower anyway: 'How nervous am I on a scale of 0 - 8? Well, I'd say 3. Is it really a 3? Well, no, actually it's more like a 2...'

As Liz Fuller points out, 'it helps you move from right brain emotion to left brain logic very quickly'.

It certainly helped me; within weeks, I was starting to do many things which I had totally avoided for years. It changed my life and I will always be grateful to Peter Henderson and his assistant Arthur Poropat.

As far as public speaking is concerned, this technique alone will probably not be enough to help a nervous speaker; you will need to know and rehearse exactly what you are going to say and you may also need some regular practice in the supportive environment of a class, workshop or club or at least in the presence of a coach at a one-on-one session (I certainly had to join a class to overcome my own fears about public speaking, despite my many years of scriptwriting experience). But when used in conjunction with thorough speech preparation and public speaking practice, rating your fear can be invaluable in helping a speaker to overcome any nerves just as they are about to be introduced.

The tricky part is remembering to do it when you have so many other things on your mind!

On 2 January 2003, after 7 years of relatively fearless public speaking, I began to get very nervous on my way to deliver a speech. There was an understandable reason why I felt a certain pressure that day: the speech was a eulogy at my mother's funeral. But then I remembered the technique - and a fear of 3.5 quickly went down to 0 over the course the last couple of miles of the journey and I was able to deliver this most important address in the way that my mother deserved.

In terms of what I consider to be effective tools for speakers, this technique is right up there with Mind Mapping and commonplacing.

It works; remember to try it for yourself if you need to.

Public Speaking Tip #180: If you feel really nervous at a speaking engagement, remembering to give your fear a rating on a scale of 0 - 8 starts to put you in control of it, instead of it controlling you. Your panic will begin to subside.

The more often you do this, the lower your starting score will be.

And after a while, once you are used to feeling more relaxed before speaking engagements, try to make yourself feel more nervous - you will find that you can't! This is when you know that you are really starting to control your nerves.

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