One Step At A Time.
Most people are fully aware of the widely spread public speaking techniques and tips. I meet clients daily who share lots of information they know about public speaking, yet they struggle to apply it.
There are many reasons behind this, but one thing that people overlook is how wanting to achieve it all at once greatly negatively influences their progress.
In his Ted talk "The Art of Stress", David Allen discussed how during hardships and stressful situations our thinking gets clearer and we become able to handle things even better than when we aren’t under stress.
He discussed that this is because, during extremely stressful situations, each tiny detail of our thinking focuses on only one objective which fosters and sharpens our brain to achieve that objective with excellence.
And that’s also something the "12-Week Year" book and strategy suggest, written by Brian Moran and Michael Lennington. It also promotes how focusing on fewer objectives can help you achieve more things in less time.
I recommend reading about it, as it stands for more a lot than this, that will give you a new perspective on how you set your plans and apply them.
That’s why when my clients come to me with a list of many things they want to enhance in their public speaking skills, we work step by step to get a better picture of what affects their performance more than the rest and then reorder their objectives, divide them and work on each one step at a time.
The top reason why you still struggle to enhance your public speaking skills is that you don’t know what is hindering you. That could sound weird to you. But the generalization that fear or stress or lack of storytelling techniques are the barriers isn’t necessarily true.
Focusing on enhancing one thing at a time not only helps you improve that element better but will help you understand whether it’s that element that is harming your speeches/presentations or not. It’s like minor research being done, where you change the independent variables one by one to measure the dependent variable.
How to Implement this?
1) Choose only one or two elements to change to enhance your content or delivery style.
2) Start noticing the internal challenges that come with that change. (For example: Is it affecting your focus? Is it making you uncomfortable? Triggering new coping techniques? etc.)
3) Observe the external impact of that change. (Did it make your audience more engaged? Did you get better feedback than you normally get? Did it help more people understand the concept? etc.)
4) Apply those changes in different setups and circumstances. Because sometimes it’s not your inability to make the change properly but rather your inability to choose the proper time for that change. (You can’t be focusing for example on using stories and you apply this in a 10-minute urgent decision-making meeting, then you decide it failed because storytelling isn't your thing!)
5) Compare recorded speeches/presentations before applying those changes Vs after. Then start analyzing the differences.
6) Do not set a new objective till you feel that the new delivery style in that element has become natural to a good level and you become convenient with it.
I totally understand how we all want to reach our goals super-fast. But trust me those minor changes you make and those small steps you take will make achieving the big goals easier.
One step at a time, that’s all it takes.