Archive for the ‘Speech’ Category

Speak up, be heard

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Posted 19 Apr 2011 — by Harry
Category Confidence, Speech

For any and all who are interested, I’m now offering workshops to develop your speech skills and general confidence.

The initial workshop is running at an introductory rate of £50, and will run from 10:00am until 4:30pm on Sunday the 8th May at the William IV in Kensal Green.

It’s be a fun, challenging and hilarious forum where participants can work on whatever they’d like – with a focus on making you heard, understood and admired.

Speak up poster

“We learn how people think from listening to them talk. If you want to be respected and treated as if your thoughts are valuable, you must speak them as if they’re worth listening to.

It’s all about learning to speak from your core, harnessing the power of your body to create the impression of a real, fully formed human with valuable, fully formed ideas.

It’s about commanding attention from people rather than demanding it; it’s about inspiring people, not lecturing them; it’s about having fun and trying things out until you find what works.”

If you’re interested, RSVP on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=164614260260040

Or LinkedIn: http://events.linkedin.com/Speech-confidence-workshop-Speak-up-be/pub/623380

But be quick, places are filling up fast!

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How to tell great stories

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Posted 14 Apr 2011 — by Harry
Category How to, Speech

Have you ever sat and listened to someone tell a wonderful story and felt transported?

"You know what they say about big noses"

I’ve told a lot of stories… Terrible stories, boring stories, stories that aren’t true. Learn from my mistakes.

There are so many fun words to use to describe people that speak well. Captivating, awe-inspiring, entrancing… I personally like the word ‘enthralling’ because it sounds funny to be in someones thrall.

Thrall sounds like a mythical beast. Actually, according to google it is. It’s the name of an Orc in World of Warcraft.

So Merlin, you want to turn your listener into an Orc?

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Stand up comic speaks about speech

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Posted 11 Jan 2011 — by Harry
Category Speech

He speaks so wonderfully well. What a dude.

Why is public speaking scarier than death?

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Posted 07 Jan 2011 — by Harry
Category Speech

Public speaking is such a common fear, but why? I suspect evolution holds the answer.

Wikipedia reckons that the “most common fears are of: ghosts, the existence of evil powers, cockroaches, spiders, snakes, heights, water, enclosed spaces, tunnels and bridges, needles, social rejection, failure, examinations and public speaking.”

Even thinking about it can cause some people's heart rate to rise

Now doesn’t public speaking make a strange addendum to that list? Apart from the first two – which are imaginary – the rest seem like perfectly rational fears of things that could result in physical harm.

[You might claim the the fear of rejection is not a physical harm, rejection could be: Romantic rejection, which reduces your chances of procreation; and social rejection, which to a pack animal would be a very dangerous situation. Both may lead to the gene's inability to continue to replicate itself, which is why we enjoy other people's company]

So how does public speaking arouse so much fear? Most things we fear, like spiders and rejection, are things that sneak up on us and shit on our happiness. But public speaking is, for most people, totally avoidable. But we don’t. We do it, we just get scared of it and do it anyway.

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Even a homeless man has a better voice than you

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Posted 05 Jan 2011 — by Harry
Category Raves, Speech

This guy is great, such a beautiful sound it almost seems faked:

Our schools are failing us: Teach kids public speaking!

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Posted 05 Jan 2011 — by Harry
Category Rants, Speech

Isn’t it strange that in school it’s compulsory to learn trigonometry, while public speaking is a voluntary after-school appendage?

Being funny helps

I spoke up in maths and asked the teacher how trigonometry was going to be important in later life. She gave me some strange nonsense story about working out how tall a building was, and then set us all an activity of finding out how we’d do that. I learned my lesson: Teachers don’t like students to question the pointlessness of their existence.

I never used trigonometry. Ever. I forgot everything I knew about it during some post-exam binge drinking. I don’t recall suffering from it, either. I don’t recall being at a job and having someone say ‘Use trigonometry to work out the height of that large pile of stuff’ or being attacked by a mythical beast that could only be conquered by the application of some elegant equations.

The truth is, aside from surveyors, mathematicians, engineers and fictional heroes from maths tuition computer games, nobody needs to use trigonometry, ever.

One thing I was not forced to do as a student was to learn public speaking and communication skills.

I voluntarily took drama and did an after-school Toastmasters course, and I joined the debating team – but these were all optional – unlike bloody trigonometry.

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BBC Radio 4: The Power to Persuade: The Story of NLP

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Posted 05 Dec 2010 — by Harry
Category NLP, Speech

I listened to the BBC 4 radio program on NLP, and I must say I was rather impressed. It seemed to strike a perfect balance between the proponents and critics, it had some of the manic ramblings of one of the co-creators, Richard Bandler, and finished with a point that had been ringing around my head: Where is the proof? Read More

How to talk so people listen

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Posted 04 Nov 2010 — by harry
Category Confidence, How to, Speech
Creepy cult dude

Come die with me

Now that you’ve mastered breathing slowly and deeply, into your stomach, teach yourself to speak from there, in a way that makes people believe you.

Many people speak from their throat, some from their chest, a few (annoying) people speak from their nose. The really compelling speakers talk from the gut. Read More

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Take a deep breath

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Posted 28 Oct 2010 — by harry
Category Confidence, NLP, Raves, Speech

I sometimes run a voice session and someone says ‘Nobody listens to me’ and I usually say ‘You’re right. Moving on…’

So  relax. Learn to breathe in a calming way that demands respect…

And as you relax...

Some people think that ideas should be weighed based on their merit, just as there are people who think that we should judge people on their personality rather than their looks.

Well that’s a wonderful thing to believe if you’re softly spoken, poorly dressed and shockingly obese, but sadly it’s just not true.

If you’ve got a good personality, then parade it in a way that says: ‘I’m worth talking to.’ If you’ve got good ideas, speak them in a way that says ‘I’m worth listening to’.

You don’t always need to be loud, that’s just annoying. It’s about having the range of behaviour to match the situation, acheive your results. When you’re with your beloved you don’t scream sweet nothings in their ear, and when you’re in a club don’t mumble like a muppet.

If you’re going to present your ideas to an audience – when you have a nervous war of gasses going on in your belly that makes you want to do a poo right before your presentation, that’s when you need to take control of your physiology and assert yourself. If you can’t control your own inner state, how are you going to affect theirs? Read More

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The Self Confidence Con

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Posted 24 Aug 2010 — by Harry
Category Confidence, How to, Speech

I wrote this for PickTheBrain.com

There is a funny concept among the softly-spoken, the meek, the apologetic excuse-makers that there is some ‘kind’ of person who is confident, capable and calm in the face of adversity. The have-nots usually disempower themselves further by making an assumption that confidence is like a genetic trait, written into the DNA of some, and left out of the chromosomes of another. It’s not, it’s a lie.

Confidence is a con – it’s a lie to yourself that you can be whatever you want to be. The trick is that confident people have mastered the ability of self-delusion, and once deluded, the lie becomes real – for being confident is simply imagining yourself as already confident. That will spread a perception among others, who will react to your new-found power as if it’s you, which will reinforce your behavior and presto-change-o, you are one of the confident people.

One cannot imagine oneself taller, and no matter what ‘The Secret’ tells you – you cannot imagine yourself a new sports car, but you can imagine yourself being confident and become it, immediately. Read More