The wonderful dearly departed comic Chris Farley had a character that was a professional motivational speaker. That character was Matt Foley and he was an absolute mess. His speaking style was painful and destructive and he lived (say it with me) in a van down by the river. Well, as hilarious as that routine was, that characterization of professional speakers is obviously for comedy purposes only. If you have been given the gift of public speaking, there is every reason to believe that you can make a very good living doing it for a living.
One way to view making your living as a public speaker is to see it as a variation on the profession of professional author. When you think about it, a writer of informative books takes an area of expertise that they have excelled at and they used their skills in writing to lay that out for people who need that knowledge. And when people buy that knowledge, its a fair exchange to pay that person for that valuable knowledge and allow that author to continue writing.
You can also compare a professional public speaker to the noble calling of teacher. A teacher, after all, is someone who does public speaking every day for his or her students. And that public speaking has a vital function in our society. Without it, our children would not be educated and the way our culture functions would be in serious danger. So professional public speakers are important.
How to get your own career as a professional public speaker going is the challenge. You may be used to public speaking to help with your work or as part of your membership in a church or other organization. So it may not be a big leap to think of taking that skill to the next level and seek ways to get paid doing what you love to do, speaking to larger groups about your area of expertise.
As might happen if you took your area of skill that you have the most knowledge an put that in a book form, that focus is your meal ticket to be successful as a professional public speaker. So to get the ball rolling, the first step is to add to the level of notoriety you may have as a professional in your field of knowledge. The internet is a good starting place. By building a web site where you can showcase your knowledge and using the skills of internet marketers to get some traffic to that web site, it is there you can begin to build an audience for your knowledge area and to keep them informed on times and places where you will be speaking.
Once that web site is in place, it can be a foundation for your new public speaking career. You can send people to it after each talk you give where they can learn more about how to use your talents for their function and for their audience. But dont just rest on the internet and expect it to do all the work. There are lots of organizations that you can speak at either for free or for a small gratuity (sometimes just lunch). But the value of these meetings is not the pay, its getting momentum and some buzz as a speaker.
From then on its just a matter of networking. As members of those groups carry your business card with them, they refer you and you get more and more "gigs" presenting your talk to bigger groups. Before long the gratuities turn into real pay. And when you are on your way and things start to click, you will never look back on your decision to become a professional public speaker.
We all have our little vocal style that makes us unique. How often have you heard someone make a remark about how interesting it is the way you phrase things? We learn the way we speak from our parents and our mentors growing up. So if you ever listened to yourself speak, you would recognize the expressions you learned from your childhood.
Your vocal style is what marks you as a distinctive individual. But when you stand up in front of a crowd, that distinctive way you speak becomes the center of attention for the length of your talk. For the most part, that is what makes your presentation style enjoyable to your listeners. But sometimes how you speak can become a distraction. If you have some distinctive "quirks" that begin to dominate how you speak when you are in front of a group, that can be a big distraction to the people who are trying to enjoy your presentation.
There are some very noticeable verbal quirks that if they are affecting your ability to communicate as a speaker, they deserve attention so you can root them out of how you talk in front of people. The one that is most notable is the dreaded "um". You no doubt have cringed listening to a speaker have to fall back on "um" during a talk. It is one of the biggest clues that the speaker is nervous, insecure or inexperienced. If you evaluate why a speaker uses "um", it is usually one of a few things. It could be because he or she got lost in the notes of the presentation. "Um" is usually inserted to buy time because the speaker is nervous about a pause of silence.
But "Um" is not the only quirk of public speaking that can become an annoyance to a crowd. Another place holder phrase that sneaks in often is "you know". Occasionally you even hear professional public speakers use this one and it is almost as mindless as "um". Sometimes certain phrases become catchy for a while and if they begin to "infect" how you speak, they will become notable to your audiences but maybe not even to you. The one that seems to be making the rounds lately is "at the end of the day" which is a fine phrase, if you only use it once. But you notice when speakers use it in speaking publicly, they use it many times.
The real problem with vocal quirks is you may not know yourself that you are using them. You are so focused on your topic and your presentation that they sneak in and become a crutch for you as you speak and before you know it, they are a habit that is hard to break. But there are some things you can do to send the habit of falling back on vocal crutches packing out so your presentation is clean of them and easier to take by your audiences.
One way to pinpoint focus quirks is to record your presentation and listen to it later. Now a lot of us dont like the sound of our own voices so that is sometimes unappealing. But be brave because if you can identify any vocal quirks you might have, you have a good potential for rooting them out of your speaking patterns. Another outstanding method of just identifying which vocal habits you may use too much is to ask your friends, spouse or even your children to listen to you as you speak publicly to help locate any vocal crutches you might be using. The people who you are close with are willing to be brutally honest with you so you can become a better public speaker.
Once you know what vocal quirks plague your presentation style, make a conscious effort to get them out of how you talk. Many times we fall back on vocal quirks when we are not confident in our material. The answer for that is obvious. Practice. Know your presentation well and you will be more confident in front of people and that will help you smooth out the way you speak publicly. And by making an effort to take out irritating vocal quirks from how you speak, you are assuring those quirks are not distracting your listeners from your message. And then you will be more successful anytime you get up in front of a group of people to speak.
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