Taming Your Public Speaking Monkeys (eBook)

Dee Clayton (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2012
198 Seiten
M-Y Books Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-908372-30-7 (ISBN)

Infos

A Godsend for anyone who's ever suffered that dread of speaking in public!'

If, like almost everyone, you're petrified of public speaking, the last thing you want is a lecture! And there lies the brilliance of this unique book's genuinely innovative approach to the issue: Dee Clayton makes the process of overcoming those negative voices in your head (Your 'Public Speaking Monkeys!') and becoming an effective speaker lighthearted and fun!

A Godsend for anyone who's ever suffered that dread, Dee's refreshingly simple yet amazingly effective multiawardwinning approach has already helped thousands to overcome their fears and become effective and confident public speakers. Significantly, the author's keenly aware that for most of us, effective public speaking isn't necessarily an end in itself but a means to other ends for example Dee has already helped company directors to persuade more successfully, doctors to win more funding, mediators to influence international decisions and all kinds of business people to fulfil their potential.

What's more, this is a genuinely practical guide! Unlike most 'self help' books on the topic (or any other), this one doesn't just tell you what to do; in her chatty, good-humored style, Dee explains exactly how, sharing her own experiences and coaxing the reader through a programme that doesn't just work it even makes public speaking enjoyable!

Taming Your Public Speaking Monkeys® works so well because its easy, enjoyable style is underpinned by Dee's solid, real-life experience of speaking publicly to tens of thousands of people first in her highly successful twenty-year marketing career (communicating for UK household brands such as Jacob's Creek, Pizza Hut and Jammie Dodgers to name but a few) and now as a public speaking training specialist. Equally vitally, the book draws heavily upon the NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) techniques and insights in which Dee is a highly experienced Trainer and Master Practitioner.

Taming your Public Speaking Monkeys® is a rare find: a self-help book that really helps and best of all the results come to you quickly and stick with you for life!

Textauszug

Monkey spirals

You can’t opt out of the monkey spirals or the @(O_O)@ – they’ll either work with you or against you. Either the voices will be saying negative, discouraging remarks, or positive, helpful remarks – you can’t be monkey neutral. If you don’t train the little fellas they’ll work against you and make your performance worse. But when you start to get the Public Speaking Monkeys® under control and working on your side, the good news is you can’t help but improve on your results. Let me explain.

Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to be on the monkey downward spiral. They hear the monkey voices and begin to dread speaking so they start to feel fearful; they talk about it with their friends who fuel or feed their monkey fears or they totally ignore the monkeys and hope they’ll go away. The physical conditions start to kick in and as you start to sweat you feel more nervous. As you get up to speak, your hands are shaking so you drop your notes, making you even more flustered. Your mouth’s dry so you take a sip of water but your shaking hands spill a little on your notes and create an embarrassing spot on the new suit you’d bought especially for today. Because of your panic, you forget to turn off your phone which rings as you mutter your first words. Oh well, at least it gets the attention of the room! You become short of breath, speak more quietly, back away from the audience and start to gabble quickly to get it all over and done with. This is just the beginning of the downward spiral because next time you’ll recall every last minute in painful detail!

Part of the reason that fear is such a debilitating emotion when it’s out of proportion is that it can feel so bad that it prevents you from trying things. Once you get the @(O_O)@ under control and working for you, even if only a little bit at first, you’ll find it so much easier to keep going, to work through any less positive emotions, knowing that there’s something brighter on the other side.

On top of the internal stuff, the monkeys affect your audience too. If you’re feeling nervous and full of @(O_O)@ when you present, then I know you’ll be performing below par because you’ll be too worried about what’s going on inside your head to give much thought to the audience. You aren’t thinking about how they’re reacting and what you might need to do to connect more or build more rapport with them. You aren’t looking to see if you need to

explain things a little more clearly, motivate them into action or any other such objectives for your talk or presentation.

I want to show you how you can be your best and share your message in a manner that will help you to achieve what you want, and that begins with learning to travel on the upward spiral. This begins when you take the first step to taming your monkeys and work with them, not against them. You’ll recognise them and know how to manage them and become calmer and more relaxed about speaking.

The reason taming the monkeys is such a critical first step to speaking success is because it’s the key to moving your thoughts from a negative downward spiral to

a positive upward spiral. As you move through this programme you’ll start to see and experience mini successes, which in turn make you feel better and more confident. Will everything be totally perfect? Probably not – but as your negative @(O_O)@ diminish they take less of your focus and time. You begin to see that the focus needs to be outside yourself – with the audience; not with you inside your head. So naturally you start to please the audience more. They don’t really care if you get all your words perfectly right but they do care whether you’re interesting to them and INTERESTED IN THEM. So decide now that you want the @(O_O)@ to work with you and not against you.

As you become more relaxed you’ll be better able to breathe more easily, get more oxygen to the brain and think on your feet. Your body language will

improve and you’ll automatically stand taller. As you stand taller, your head will become more upright and you’ll be confident enough to try new techniques, engage with the audience and begin to make eye contact. The audience will respond more positively and the energy in the room will pick up. You’ll feel the energy and confidence pick up and become even more relaxed, so the audience relaxes and really starts connecting with you and the message you’re sharing.

The four keys to switching spirals

The four keys to switching spirals looks at what elements make up long-term successful change. I don’t want you to switch to the upward spiral just temporarily; I want you to know how to do it forever and to do that you need these four keys.

The process of successfully changing from a fearful speaker to a confident one requires four key elements, which we work through in this book.

1) Acknowledge why this is important to you – what are you missing out on or what do you want? Your fear of speaking might mean you’re lacking the confidence you want, missing additional sales or being overlooked for promotion. Perhaps you’re losing sleep before a presentation or want to advance your skills. The Public Speaking Monkeys, when left to run wild, are a problem, preventing you from having what you deserve. These early chapters are about laying solid foundations so the next step of monkey taming can take place. You don’t want to build a house on dodgy foundations – it won’t last long. To go through this process effectively you mustn’t miss out anything – but by reading this book you’re already well on the way to resolving the problem because you’ve overcome the first hurdle – knowing there’s a problem. The next exercise helps you to look at the problem in a little more depth – a bit like doing a house survey before you start work on improving it!

2) Focusing on what you do want. Because the monkeys have been chattering negatively in your head, it’s all too easy for us to think about what we don’t want. In order to change your public speaking mindset permanently you need to focus on what you do want, not what you don’t want. Next there are a few questions to identify what you do want from this programme, and at the end of the book there’s a section dedicated to focusing on what you want achieve in the future with your new skills and positive frame of mind (but that may seem a way off yet!). Once you’ve done this you’re ready to neutralise the negatives. Knowing what you want and what you’re aiming for will help you to have the energy to see you past any small challenges when neutralising those negatives or help you try new things.

3) Finding and neutralising negative feelings. Whether you realise it or not there are likely to be some negative feelings or thoughts lurking behind this fear of speaking that might not be immediately visible. They’re a bit like a bad smell. You know there is one but perhaps you don’t know quite where it’s coming from and you certainly might not know how smelly it really is until you go outside in the fresh air. Only then might you realise the impact the problem is having upon you and how genuinely keen you are to be rid of it. In order to eliminate the smell, you need to uncover what’s causing it and where it’s coming from so that you can neutralise it. The unique Taming the Monkeys process covered in these earlier chapters takes you step by step through examples and exercises that enable you to uncover where the bad feelings and thoughts around speaking are coming from. That way you can neutralise them and get the @(O_O)@ working on your side.

By doing this, you’ll get rid of the fear. You’ll learn to respond in different and better ways to the idea of public speaking and only then can you open your mind and adopt the practical techniques and speaking approaches covered in the Training your Monkeys section from Chapter 6 onwards. Too many people try to get rid of their fear by going directly to the skills section; by learning new things, but this is only effective once you’ve tamed the monkeys. Otherwise it’s like covering the bad smell with an air freshener: it’s a temporary fix but the smell will soon return once the 30 days of pine freshness are up!

4) Take action to improve your mindset, skills and habits. The final piece in the “monkey puzzle” comes after you’ve neutralised your fear of speaking in order to learn some good approaches to stand you in good stead. No longer being scared, in itself, will not make you a good speaker – it will just make you a “not scared” speaker. Speaking is a skill like many other things, and the best mindset, attitudes and skills for public speaking and presenting need to be learnt and practiced. This section is all about the first steps in training your monkeys to be on your side. Once the fear’s have been neutralised you’ll notice how much easier it is to take on board new approaches and skills. Of course in this book we can’t cover everything to do with becoming an excellent speaker but I’ve summarised and included some of the most common questions, challenges and useful tips from years of personal experience and client questions.

What do you want to achieve?

Let’s take a quick look at the first and second keys – identifying where you are now in your speaking journey and where you want to...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 8.8.2012
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft ► Briefe / Präsentation / Rhetorik
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Lebenshilfe / Lebensführung
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Sprachwissenschaft
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft
• Schlagworte: business meetings • Lectures • Presentations • Public speaking • work seminars
• ISBN-10: 1-908372-30-3 / 1908372303
• ISBN-13: 978-1-908372-30-7 / 9781908372307