Want to calm down before a presentation? Even if you don’t regularly experience the fear of public speaking, just before you start a speech, it is easy to feel anxious. This initial nervous energy can cause a speaker to have a shaky voice, dry mouth, or sweaty palms just before a presentation. The good news is that this experience is very common. Most of the time, if you start your presentation well, the level of nervousness will drop very quickly. However, sometimes when people feel that stage ...
Oct 24, 2022•25 min
Are you a nervous public speaker? A majority of the population has some type of fear of public speaking. Ironically, a great deal of this nervousness or anxiety comes from well-meaning friends or coworkers who are just trying to help. When we see a friend struggling, we naturally want to help. So, we might offer a little constructive criticism as a way to help a new presenter improve his/her public speaking. However, these “helpful” pieces of advice can actually have an extremely negative effect...
Oct 17, 2022•24 min
This week, I'm going to show you how you can make your audiences pay attention to your entire speech. If you use this strategy, you'll get the audience on your side right away and avoid situations where the audience tries to test you or put you on the spot. The strategy will also save you a TON of time and make delivering your presentation much easier as well. Make Your Presentation Audience Focused Face it, most people hate meetings. They don’t want to sit through boring presentations, either. ...
Oct 10, 2022•20 min
This week, I'm going to show you how you can begin to develop your public speaking skills in low-risk public speaking venues. These are the tips I give to people after they come through my presentation classes if they want more practice. As I give you these venues, though, I have organized them in a step-by-step process. For instance, last week, I gave you a list of online venues that I ordered from least risky to most challenging. If you go through the earlier virtual venues first, you'll be ab...
Oct 03, 2022•22 min
I often get a common question after people attend our 2-day presentation class . “Now that I feel more confident, where do I go to practice to continue to get better as a speaker?” “How can I continue to grow as a great speaker?” The best way to continue to grow is with continued and consistent use of your presentation skills. If you take a public speaking class and then don’t present again for a year, your new skills wither away. In fact, one of the reasons why people come to a public speaking ...
Sep 26, 2022•32 min
Congratulations! You’ve been invited to give a TED talk. This non-profit talk series is the gold standard of speeches, so you should be honored to be on the event’s roster. Not to mention how great it will look on your resume and website. You’ve undoubtedly been chosen because you’re an expert in your field, be it medicine, literature, pop culture, gerontology, or careers, but it’s not the topic that will have your audience hanging onto your every word. No, it’s more than that. Attendees will be...
Sep 19, 2022•13 min
It is a great honor for me to have Grant Baldwin of The Speaker Lab on the show today. Grant helps people break into the professional speaking industry and shows them how to find clients and get paid when they speak. Grant founded The Speaker Lab years ago and is also the host of The Speaker Lab podcast. His specialty is helping presenters create speeches that help their audiences solve problems. In the interview, he actually throws me for a loop a little. Since he has a hit podcast, I assumed t...
Sep 12, 2022•24 min
This special holiday episode is a continuation of our holiday series on great speeches in American history. What better way to honor and celebrate the holiday than by critiquing one of the greatest, well-known speeches? Before we begin analyzing The Gettsyburg Address, let’s dive into the history and math to put it into context. David Wills invited Abraham Lincoln to give this speech as a way to honor and memorialize those who had fallen during the Battle of Gettysburg. Why were Americans fighti...
Sep 05, 2022•9 min
In this episode, we will cover a few of the common situations that occur that lead to experiencing public speaking fear. As I cover each one, I will also give you a few simple things that you can do to counteract each of these causes. So if you ever feel nervous when you stand up and speak in front of a group, these tips can really help. The Causes of the Fear of Public Speaking and How to Overcome Them You’re an expert in your field, and you know what you’re talking about. After all, you’ve wor...
Aug 29, 2022•13 min
In this episode, I share with you my presentation skills checklist that you can use when you are being asked to deliver a speech. It is kind of like a checklist that pilots use in order to lower the risk of failure. You can use it the same way. Make sure you do each of these simple tasks before you speak, and your risk of flubbing a speech shrinks, and your opportunity to perform well in front of the group increases dramatically. This presentation skills checklist can make designing and deliveri...
Aug 22, 2022•21 min
We just finished a five-part series about How to Start a Public Speaking Career. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to that series, it will help you understand the concepts that we talk about here much more clearly. 5 Ways to Promote Yourself as a Professional Speaker In this session, we are going to cover how to promote yourself as a professional public speaker. In the earlier sessions, we talked about how to get experience speaking within your current industry. Some of the ideas were to sta...
Aug 15, 2022•11 min
We just finished a five-part series about How to Start a Public Speaking Career. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to that series, it will help you understand the concepts that we talk about here much more clearly. 5 Ways to Promote Yourself as a Professional Speaker In this session, we are going to cover how to promote yourself as a professional public speaker. In the earlier sessions, we talked about how to get experience speaking within your current industry. Some of the ideas were to sta...
Aug 08, 2022•22 min
This is part five of a five-part series about how to start a public speaking career. In the past episodes, we focused on how to use public speaking within your current career, both as an income stream and as marketing. We also covered a session on how to become a professional speaker for an established speaking company. In this episode, I cover a few step-by-step items that will help you create your own presentation company or speaking career from scratch. If you want to be a professional public...
Aug 01, 2022•25 min
We are continuing our series on How to Start a Public Speaking Career , and in this session, we will show a shortcut by working for an organization that is already established. While the first episode mentioned a wide variety of approaches, one of the advantages of working with an established company is that the company the speaker is representing has already done the hard work. They have already created the content, vetted the content, and created a customer base. The downside is that the speak...
Jul 25, 2022•27 min
One of the easiest ways to become a professional public speaker is by speaking to groups within your current industry. In this article, we will show you several ways to get paid as a professional speaker without having to change careers. This episode continues our previous episode, How to Start a Public Speaking Career . Although this is just one of the three routes we will cover in detail, this route is one of the most common (and perhaps the most lucrative). So, we will spend a little more tim...
Jul 18, 2022•19 min
For the last couple of episodes, I talked about how lucrative a professional speaker career is. Last week, I gave you a few things that have to be in place before you will have a lot of success speaking for a fee. This week, I'm going to pull back the curtain and show you a step-by-step process of how to start a professional speaking career. By the way, if you don't think of yourself as a professional speaker but you have a following or a way of doing something better, the ideas in this episode ...
Jul 11, 2022•25 min
This is part two of our two-part series on How to Become a Professional Speaker. Last week, I explained a few different types of professional speakers. This week, I give you five attributes that pretty much have to be in place to get people or organizations to pay you to speak. Hone Your Craft Before Dabbling in Professional Speaking -- Basically, get good at something else first. No one is going to pay you to speak if you haven't first been successful at something. Create a Magnetic Personality...
Jul 04, 2022•18 min
It’s easy to develop a career as a public speaker if you’re already a celebrity. If your last name is Trump or Schwarzenegger, you will have no problem getting people to pay you to speak. However, that is not the only way to become a professional speaker. In this post, I will share with you a few tips about how to become a professional speaker. By the way, if you have a famous last name, it may not matter what you speak about. (People just want to say that they saw you in person.) You will also ...
Jun 27, 2022•25 min
Sometimes when I'm teaching classes, participants really love how with a few simple modifications, even the most boring or technical presentation can become a fantastic persuasive message. In fact, last week, we covered some of these simple modifications. The big quest that comes up, though, is "What happens if you have to deliver a negative message?" In the past few months, inflation has skyrocketed, gas prices are so high that the cost of everything is going up, and since the pandemic months a...
Jun 20, 2022•11 min
The persuasion technique in this episode will help you create an amazing persuasive speech outline. In fact, these sales presentation examples can be used in a number of different ways. “ Wait… sales presentation? Oh, I’m not a professional salesperson. This may not work for me.” Whether you are a salesperson or just trying to persuade coworkers to accept your ideas , this process is important to success. By the way, this technique works both in written format and in a speech. The best way to pr...
Jun 13, 2022•15 min
In this episode, I'm going to explain the pros and cons of public speaking coaching. Sometimes, when I suggest to people that presentation coaching may not help them, they are a little taken back. "Wait Doug, aren't you a public speaking coach?" Yes, I am, but I very rarely work one-on-one with a single person in a coaching session. In this episode, I'm going to explain why. Also, if you have been listening to the podcast as a way to reduce nervousness, I'll also explain why that may not be the ...
Jun 06, 2022•16 min
This is part 2 of a two-part series on Glossophobia (an irrational fear of public speaking.) In this episode, we cover a few simple tips to help you overcome glossophobia. 1) Start Small. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. If your fear is intense, there is no need to schedule a high-level presentation in front of 1000 people right away. Instead, start by speaking up more in staff meetings, at church, or join a social organization. Set a goal for each interaction. For instance, if yo...
May 30, 2022•12 min
Want to know how to overcome glossophobia? Does stage fright sometimes make you pass up opportunities in your career? Do you feel like you have an irrational fear of public speaking? You are not alone! Glossophobia or the fear of public speaking is very common. I’ve been in the presentation skill industry for decades, now. In that time, I’ve come to realize that the statistics about this fear are confusing. Some studies say that as few as 7% of the population has glossophobia. Other surveys clai...
May 23, 2022•18 min
In today's digital world, there are so many ways to come by great public speaking types and presentation training. Here on Fearless Presentations, we have over 200 podcast episodes, and over 400 YouTube videos on our YouTube channel, and we have also published HUNDREDS of free presentation skill articles on our blog at Fearlesspresentations.com. These resources are all free to the public. However, some people prefer a more structured approach like an online public speaking training course. If yo...
May 16, 2022•14 min
This is part 4 of a four-part series covering the 101 best public speaking tips. We are going to the last 25 today. In this episode, I will continue with a list of some of the best places to practice your public speaking skills. (As we progress further down the list, the locations will become more lucrative for you when you speak to these audiences.) Then, I will cover a few best practices for group presentations (especially group sales presentations.) The last major section of presentation tips...
May 09, 2022•21 min
This is part 3 of a four-part series covering the 101 best public speaking tips. We are going to zoom through another 25 or so tips today. In this episode, I'm going to continue our series on 101 public speaking tips that you can use as a roadmap to improve your presentation skills. I have to go through them at lightning speed. though. So, if you want more information about any of these tips or you want to see all of them visually, just click the link in the show notes. Last week, I finished wit...
May 02, 2022•19 min
In honor of our 201st episode last week, I started a four-part series covering the 101 best public speaking tips. So if you missed last week, make sure to catch up before listening to this episode. We will zoom through another 25 or so tips today. These are public speaking tips 25-50. I cover a few ways to use stories to reduce public speaking fear. Then, I cover 20 or so of the best ways to add impact to a great presentation including audience participation tips and ways to add showmanship. For...
Apr 25, 2022•25 min
This is the 201st episode, so for fun a couple of years ago on my 101st episode, I started a series of 101 public speaking tips. So, in the 201st episode, I'm going to deliver those 101 tips a second time. (My humor knows no bounds.) So for those of you who listen to the podcast and say, just give me the tips without all the fluff, these are the episodes for you! This episode covers public speaking tips #1 - #24 and is part 1 of a 4 part series. To see all the tips along with additional details ...
Apr 18, 2022•20 min
You have identified a problem or opportunity for your company. Now you need to get approval. So, how do you present a proposal to management that will get approved? The process is actually pretty simple. The method of how to present a proposal to management that we use works about 100% of the time. Just follow the simple steps below, and your project will easily get funded. By the way, if you are presenting a proposal to a customer or potential client , see this post. The technique below is main...
Apr 11, 2022•22 min
Here are a few tips to keep in mind when you present a proposal to a client. Here is the scenario… You have done your homework. A team at your company painstakingly created the perfect sales proposal. In fact, the potential client was so impressed, that they moved you to their “shortlist.” Now, though, they want you to present a bid proposal to the purchasing committee. Your team is one of just six to eight other companies competing for this contract. How do you make sure that the committee pick...
Apr 04, 2022•26 min
