Click here to find out more about the Paid to Speak Accelerator Community (aka Mastermind Community) and to put your name on our Waiting List.

Any time you get the opportunity to speak, especially early in your career as a speaker, record it.

Preferably a video recording. But at minimum, get an audio recording.

Why?

Because nothing will help you improve as a speaker than seeing and hearing yourself speak. PERIOD.

Here are two quick thoughts...

First, be prepared because watching yourself present can be brutal, especially early on. So give yourself some grace and realize your speaking is a work in progress. And most importantly, don't give up. Everything worth doing is worth doing poorly at first.

Second, don't make recording complicated or distracting. Just set up your smartphone on a table or tripod and hit record. Or have someone else take care of the recording for you. Bottom line, if you make things too complicated, you won't do it. And if it's too distracting, you won't be focused on your presentation.

I hope these 7 simple tips for becoming a better speaker have been helpful. For review, here they are one last time:

• #1 - Know Your Topic
• #2 - Capture New Ideas
• #3 - Get Your Reps In
• #4 - Focus on Serving
• #5 - Create an Experience for Your Audience
• #6 - Look People in the Eye When Speaking
• #7 - Record Everything

• 9 Ways to Get Paid as a Speaker (FREE Resource)
• 5 Keys to Create a Speech That Pays (FREE Resource)
• Got questions? Submit them here

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review on iTunes. Also, share it by using the social media buttons at the top or bottom of this post.

Until next time, continue to move from #DREAMtoDO as a speaker.

Click here to find out more about the Paid to Speak Accelerator Community (aka Mastermind Community) and to put your name on our Waiting List.

Why Is This Important?

It helps you make personal connections with audience members. In fact, it's probably the simplest thing you can do to enhance the impact of your presentation and persuade audience members to your point of view.

Why Is This Challenging?

Looking into another person's eyes, especially when you're on stage talking to a group of people, just feels awkward. And if you're nervous, it feels even more awkward.

How to Improve Your Eye Contact?

• Remember that you are speaking to individuals and not just a group.
• Find audience members who are engaged and are already looking at you.
• Sustain eye contact with each individual long enough to make a connection, then move on. Three to five seconds is usually a good guideline.
• Avoid looking at people who you can tell feel awkward with eye contact. That will feel more like a stare-down than eye contact.
• Be prepared. It's practically impossible to make eye contact when you're in your head trying to remember your presentation.

Finally, here are the tips we've covered so far:

• #1 - Know Your Topic
• #2 - Capture New Ideas
• #3 - Get Your Reps In
• #4 - Focus on Serving
• #5 - Create an Experience for Your Audience

• 9 Ways to Get Paid as a Speaker (FREE Resource)
• 5 Keys to Create a Speech That Pays (FREE Resource)
• Got questions? Submit them here

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review on iTunes. Also, share it by using the social media buttons at the top or bottom of this post.

Until next time, continue to move from #DREAMtoDO as a speaker.

Click here to find out more about the Paid to Speak Accelerator Community (aka Mastermind Community) and to put your name on our Waiting List.

In the previous episodes of this series, I mentioned that if you want to serve your audience well, it's best to create a speech that is both enjoyable and educational.

Yet the truth is that the vast majority of speakers today focus almost exclusively on delivering content. They might throw in a joke or two and maybe even share a short illustration, but most of the time, it's content, content, content.

Have you ever sat through a 60 or 90-minute presentation that is all content? By the end, you probably feel like you've been sprayed with a firehose. What's worse is that you don't walk away remembering anything specific because anything worth remembering was crowded out by the rest of the content. It's just too much!

So how can you avoid overwhelming your audience with straight content?

Create an experience!

If you want to become a better speaker, you need to realize that less in more when it comes to presenting. So instead of cramming more content into their presentations, they look for ways to make their content sticky (aka so memorable that it sticks with audiences after the presentation).

In fact, instead of outlining their speech in the same way they would outline a research paper, they develop their speech like a scriptwriter storyboarding a movie. They ask themselves questions like:

• What is the one big idea that I want my audience to understand?
• How can I make that idea relevant? How can I make it come alive?
• Can I take the audience on a journey where they discover this idea for themselves?
• How can I create an experience that allows my audience to laugh or feel emotions along the way?

Here's the bottom line...

Don't just deliver content.

Create an experience that is enjoyable, educational, and best of all, sticky.

• 9 Ways to Get Paid as a Speaker (FREE Resource)
• 5 Keys to Create a Speech That Pays (FREE Resource)
• Got questions? Submit them here

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review on iTunes. Also, share it by using the social media buttons at the top or bottom of this post.

Until next time, continue to move from #DREAMtoDO as a speaker.