Locked lesson.
About this lesson
How to increase your confidence when speaking in front of an audience.
- 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.
Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.