How to Speak with Confidence

• 00:04 Do you really wanna know how to speak with more confidence?
• 00:09 A lot more confidence?
• 00:11 I'll tell you the two biggest secrets.
• 00:14 For starters, just speak more often.
• 00:18 The more you speak, generally the better you get, the more confident you feel.
• 00:23 Martin Luther King Jr., according to many historians,
• 00:27 gave the best speech of the 20th century.
• 00:29 What they don't tell you is that in the very same year
• 00:34 he gave his famous I Have a Dream speech,
• 00:38 he gave more than 300 speeches that year.
• 00:42 And they didn't all go down history but
• 00:44 each one got him a little more comfortable, gave him more confidence.
• 00:50 Former United States President, Bill Clinton, known throughout the world as
• 00:54 a great speaker, also known for high speaking fees, but what people don't know
• 01:00 is the vast majority of the times that he speaks, he doesn't charge anything.
• 01:06 He does it out of his pure passion and he gives more than 300 speeches a year.
• 01:13 Virtually one per day, many days a lot more than that.
• 01:15 Ronald Reagan, the former president, very, very confident when he spoke.
• 01:21 When he started his campaign for president back in 1980 he
• 01:26 spoke with confidence in part because he had been speaking on those
• 01:32 very same issues since 1964 when he rose to
• 01:37 prominence as a keynote speaker at the 64 Republican convention.
• 01:43 He spoke virtually every day, he spoke all over the country and he spoke on radio.
• 01:49 Now you may be saying well TJ I'm not running for president,
• 01:53 I'm not going to be president.
• 01:55 Where am I going to find an opportunity to speak every day?
• 01:57 Well you've got one on the Internet, whether it's YouTube or
• 02:01 some other audio or video file sharing service.
• 02:06 Speak, upload your videos and let the world see it.
• 02:11 So you could be speaking out every single day.
• 02:15 People have told me well, TJ, you seem really confident.
• 02:19 I was born with no more confidence than anyone else.
• 02:21 I was a very shy kid, but
• 02:24 I'm confident when I speak to you now because I've done it so many times.
• 02:28 I've done thousands and thousands and thousands of videos and
• 02:32 speeches, so it's kinda hard for me to get nervous,
• 02:38 not because I have any innate skills but because I've done it so often.
• 02:42 Now, the second big, big way to have supreme confidence, as I've
• 02:48 mentioned in previous lectures, you've got to practice your speech on video.
• 02:54 Just whip out that trusty cell phone, webcam,
• 02:58 it doesn't matter the quality of video or audio as long as you can see yourself.
• 03:03 Keep practicing until you like what you see,
• 03:07 that's the number one way of really building confidence.
• 03:11 Even if you haven't given thousand of speeches like some president or
• 03:14 some major civil rights leader, just keep practicing your speech on video until
• 03:20 you love it, until you love every aspect of style and substance.
• 03:25 If you can, practice in the room where you'll be giving the speech, or a similar
• 03:30 room, so you can actually practice walking around, where you'll pause,
• 03:35 where you're going to keep your notes in a place where no one can see them.
• 03:39 All of these things will build tremendous confidence in you.
• 03:44 Confidence is contagious, when you look and sound and
• 03:48 move in a confident way it's just easier for the audience to pay attention to you
• 03:54 and define what you're saying as credible, which in turn makes you more confident.
• 03:59 So please do those two things.
• 04:02 Speak often, preferably every day,
• 04:06 record yourself and practice on video until you love your speech.
• 04:11 You do those two things, you will be supremely confident in your speaking.

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