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When You Stop Growing, You Start Shrinking…

As speakers, you’d hope that we’d always be looking for ways to boost our speaking skills. However, it turns out that all too often this is not the case. The can be many reasons, but the end result is the same: we reach a given level in our speaking and then we just “hold” there. Not getting any worse, but at the same time not getting any better. Let’s take a look at what causes this and see how we can keep moving forward.

Why Do We Stall In Our Speaking Careers?

When we are first starting out as speakers, we understand that we’re not very good. We realize this because we are very attuned to the feedback that we’re getting from our audience – they are bored and restless when we are speaking.

Because we know that we’re not very good, we are open to change. We don’t want to have our audiences dread it when we approach the front of the room to give a talk. This means that we’re open to listening to what other people say about our speaking style. We also keep our eyes open and watch other speakers so that we can learn from them.

All of these different inputs cause something magical to happen: we become better speakers. It doesn’t happen overnight, but rather it happens little by little. All of a sudden we find that we’re actually pretty good speakers: we don’t fear standing in front of an audience and talking and the audience almost seems to be looking forward to listening to us talk.

However, this is when something bad can also start to happen: we plateau. Once we’ve reached this level of speaking, we can decide that we’re “good enough” and we stop. We stop listening to what our audience is trying to tell us and we stop listening to how others evaluate our speaking.

That’s why the world is filled with speakers who are just adequate. They’ve reached a level where they are “good enough” and then they stalled. If you can’t detect that you are in a rut and if you are not motivated to get yourself out of it, then that’s where you’ll spend the rest of your speaking days.

How To Leave Your Comfort Zone And Become A Better Speaker

So no matter if you are in a rut currently or if you fear that you may be starting to enter a rut, spending the rest of your days there does not have to be your fate. It turns out that there are a number of different things that you can do in order to pull yourself out of this situation:

• Change!: the biggest reason that we get stuck in ruts is because our speaking opportunities become too predictable. Change things up – offer to talk about a topic that you’ve not talked about before or change how you present the material that you’ve given over and over again. Different is good!

• Ask For Opinions: what helped you to become a better speaker back in the early days was that you were open to the comments offered by others. Invite someone whose opinion you respect to attend your next speech and provide you with feedback. When they do, take action based on what they tell you.

• Picture The Future: better than anyone else, you know what a better you as a speaker would look like. The first step in getting to there is to mentally picture yourself as that better speaker. Once you’ve done that, you can start to map out the steps that you need to take to get there.

• Baby Steps: Becoming a better speaker is what we all want to do. In order to make this happen, we need to ease ourselves into the future taking things one step at a time. We didn’t get to be the speakers that we are today overnight and it’s going to take mastering a sequence of steps to get to where we want to be.

What All Of This Means For You

Getting stuck in a rut is an easy thing to do. As speakers, those ruts can hold us back from becoming better speakers. The first thing that we need to do is to realize when we’ve gotten stuck in a rut and why. The next is to find a way to get out of it.

Getting out of a speaker’s rut is a tricky thing to do. The key is to shake things up: get used to change, get outside advice, and picture the future that you want.

Getting stuck in a rut can happen to any speaker. Getting out of that rut is the key to becoming a successful speaker. If you want to keep developing your speaking skills, then you need to do a “rut check” and then take action to get out if you are in one.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: What do you think the first thing that you should do if you find yourself in a speaker’s rut?

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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You are a great speaker. It’s just that if you use humor incorrectly, that might screw everything up. We’ve all been told that humor is a powerful tool that can make a speech that much more enjoyable for our audiences. That makes us all want to use humor and to use it more. However, if you screw it up, you’ll have to stand around and watch your next speech go up in flames.

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Audiences Seek Speakers Who Are Experts To Teach Them

If you forget all of the advice that you’ve ever been given about speaking, then please at least remember this: audiences come to hear experts speak. No matter how badly you stutter, lose your place, don’t make eye contact, etc. an audience will always forgive a presenter whom they believe is an expert in what he/she is talking about.

What Is An Expert?

Great I hear you saying, but just what is an expert? It turns out that this is a pretty simple question to answer: an expert is someone who knows more about a topic than the audience does. It really is that simple.

It’s not easy to become an expert; however, it is possible. The key to success is to transform yourself into a non-stop learning machine that is never satisfied with what you already know.

How Can You Become An Expert?

Shawn Doyle is a speaker who has looked into the whole “become an expert” thing and he’s found the secret. He says that the key is to get motivated and stay motivated.

Perhaps you thought that learning stopped when you got out of school? Sadly some people do; however, with any luck they are out there sitting in your audience. It’s really not that hard to acquire additional knowledge if you know the secret of how to do it. At the heart of knowledge is books and it turns out that, just like your mom told you all those years ago, the more you read, the smarter you’ll be.

Are you groaning yet? Complaining that you read magazines (while you are standing in line waiting to check out at the supermarket) but you haven’t read a book in years? It turns out that the time that you spent in school was just a brief part of your overall life (hopefully) and continuing to learn is something that you need to keep doing for your entire life if you want people to show up and listen to you.

Steps To Becoming An Expert

Another name for an expert is “learner“. If you want to find a way to work learning into your already busy schedule, then you are going to have find out how to find the knowledge that you need in order to wow your audiences. The good news is that I’m going to tell you how to do this.

Learners read books. They might also watch TV, they might surf the web, they might do a lot of things, but most importantly they read books. Not only do they read books, they have a plan for what books they are going to read. They create a monthly list of the books that they are going to read. They add books to their list by asking other people that they know and respect what books they are reading.

If you are going to become a learner in order to become an expert, then you are going to have to start doing more reading than you are doing today. Here are some suggestions for how you can make this happen:

• Create A Reading Budget - you create a budget for everything else in your life, why not reading? By doing this you’ll know how much you have to spend (and when you have it to spend) when you are surfing the Amazon.com and BN.com book web sites.

• Get A Library Card - remember the library from your childhood? Good news – it’s still there. No matter where you live, no matter how big or how small your local library is, almost all libraries have some sort of inter-library loan program that can provide you with access to just about any book that you might want. Check it out!

• Become A Sale Shopper – you don’t have to buy the newest books immediately when they come out. Look for the slow seasons and stock up then. Right after Christmas most books stores have great sales so that they can get rid of the extra stock that they bought for the holiday season.

• Befriend Local Used Books Stores – when I lived in Dallas there was a bookstore called Books-A-Million that was huge and always seemed to have a book in the area that I was looking for. If you don’t have a local used books store then you can always make use of half.com which is Ebay’s used book store.

Other Ways To Become An Expert

With all that being said, reading books isn’t the ONLY way to become an expert in your selected area (although it is the best way). You can always supplement your reading by doing additional things like:

• Searching The Internet – however, you need to remember that you can’t always trust what you find on the Internet. Verify, verify, verify.

• Ask Questions Of Smart People – seek out people who know more about something than you do and take them out to lunch. Ask them questions and then pay attention to what they have to say.

• Read The Newspaper – yeah, just like your parents used to do. You just might be amazed at what you find out is going on around you.

• Watch DVDs – no, not Hollywood films, but rather instructional ones that will teach you something.

• Attend Seminars – since you are trying to become an expert, take the time to go see other experts and learn from them – how did they get their knowledge and how do they use it.

Final Thoughts

One characteristic of an expert that many speakers never realize is that they are always growing, always changing. One self-help book that I read awhile back had a great way of putting it. The author suggested that we should plan on reinventing ourselves every year – sorta a you 1.0, followed by a you 2.0.

By doing this you will always have fresh and interesting things to tell your audiences about and they will always be interested in hearing what you have to say.

Make the effort to become an expert and you’ll be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The purpose of giving any speech is to be able to reach out and connect with your audience. No matter whether you are trying to inform them, entertain them, or convince them to take some action, none of this can be done unless you are able to make a connection with them. What you say is an important part of doing this, but did you know that what you wear also plays a role?

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