Refine Your Talk, Not Your Text

• 00:03 The first draft of most things, what do they call it?
• 00:06 A rough draft.
• 00:08 So if you are speaking in front of your intended audience,
• 00:11 and it's the first time you're actually giving this presentation,
• 00:15 you're throwing your rough draft out to that audience.
• 00:19 No wonder it's awful.
• 00:22 No wonder it's rough.
• 00:24 We don't expect anything else to be great in the first draft.
• 00:27 Why would we expect the speech to be great?
• 00:29 Now, here's what's really happening.
• 00:32 For most people, especially those in bigger corporations is,
• 00:36 we think of the speech as entirely the PowerPoint presentation or the text.
• 00:42 So we may spend dozens of hours.
• 00:44 We may spend 100 hours writing and rewriting and rewriting the text on
• 00:49 the speech or the text and the bullet points on the PowerPoint.
• 00:52 Guess what, a complete utter waste of time.
• 00:57 This was actually helping you get prepared to give a great presentation.
• 01:02 Now, certainly if you want the whole speech written out,
• 01:06 you do have to review it and spellcheck it, if you're giving it to people.
• 01:10 If you are using PowerPoint with text, and
• 01:13 I don't recommend using text on PowerPoint, but
• 01:16 if you are, well, certainly you need to get rid of typos and errors.
• 01:20 But for too many people, in too many corporations, it becomes a crutch.
• 01:26 I'll get around to rehearsing TJ on video, but
• 01:29 we just gotta make these final tweaks on this PowerPoint.
• 01:33 And before you know it, a week has gone by, it's 1 AM,
• 01:37 the speech is at 8 AM, and you're still redoing the PowerPoint slide.
• 01:42 So what's happening is you've crowded out on lesser important activities.
• 01:48 You've crowded out what's really important, the time to rehearse.
• 01:52 At some point, you've got to say, enough is enough with futzing
• 01:57 with the PowerPoint or with the script, we now have to rehearse.
• 02:03 Great speakers realize this.
• 02:06 Ronald Reagan, known as the great communicator,
• 02:08 had a discipline with his speech writing staff.
• 02:10 Now he would work with his staff for months for
• 02:13 a major speech like the State of the Union address.
• 02:16 But he would then force them to give him the final draft a week before
• 02:21 the speech was to be delivered.
• 02:24 He would then spend three hours a night practicing out loud,
• 02:28 reading the speech in the residency in the White House.
• 02:32 Now that wasn't to memorize it because he was still going to use a teleprompter.
• 02:36 He was doing that to build a comfort level in relationship with the words.
• 02:43 But then he would spend an entire day doing videotaped rehearsal
• 02:47 with the speech, the day of the speech, again, and again and again,
• 02:52 looking at it, figuring out what works, what doesn't work.
• 02:57 How about this pause here?
• 02:59 How about this thoughtful look down there?
• 03:02 So it's not an accident.
• 03:03 It's not something you're simply born with.
• 03:06 It comes through practice and hard work, but
• 03:09 it comes through a particular type of practice.
• 03:14 If you didn't do any of the homework earlier and
• 03:16 you didn't narrow your messages down to five and you didn't have stories, and
• 03:20 you have just a really boring data dump.
• 03:22 When you're going to practice giving your speech again and again and
• 03:26 again, it's still going to be an awful boring data dump.
• 03:29 And if you practice without video,
• 03:32 you might still be making the same mistakes again and again.
• 03:36 For example, if I had been giving this entire course to you, but
• 03:41 the entire time I'd been doing this,
• 03:44 I don't think you would really paid attention to anything else.
• 03:49 You would've said, wow, that guy's a complete fraud.
• 03:54 He's talking about how to be comfortable as a speaker,
• 03:57 he seems really nervous in his own skin.
• 04:00 Now, if I didn't look at myself on video, how would I know that I'm doing that?
• 04:07 You cannot know how you're coming across unless you watch yourself.
• 04:12 The camera doesn't lie.
• 04:14 Your friends and family can say, hey, great speech.
• 04:16 Good job, you're going to knock them dead.
• 04:20 Camera won't do that,
• 04:21 but camera's going to tell you exactly what you're doing.
• 04:24 So I'm begging you, I'm pleading with you.
• 04:28 Again, you've just completely wasted a lot of time if you're not willing to do.
• 04:32 You should have been off watching an episode of Gilligan's Island, or
• 04:35 some other time waster, rather than spend time in this public speaking course,
• 04:39 if you're not willing to practice on video.
• 04:41 It's absolutely the most important part of this process,
• 04:47 because you have a lifetime of experience watching speakers.
• 04:52 You already know what's boring.
• 04:55 You already know what you don't like.
• 04:57 You already know what's distracting.
• 05:02 So when you watch a video of yourself and
• 05:04 you find yourself doing a boring data dump or going from one foot to the other,
• 05:09 or grabbing a lectern like you're scared to death, it's going to be obvious to you.
• 05:17 And it's going to motivate you to change, to improve yourself.

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