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I call my book 'Get Your Public Speaking Mojo Back Forever' because I didn't want to use
the word fear, anxiety or nerves or any of those really negative words that I think become
a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you start thinking about nerves, anxiety and fear, you soon start
talking about nerves, anxiety and fear, and then you start feeling nerves, anxiety and
fear and that's not what this book is about. This book is about building your self-esteem
and getting back the pleasure of public speaking and starting to enjoy it. So quite early on
in the book I deal with that. I explain that I'm not interested in what happened to you
in the past, any bad experiences you had that made you feel bad about yourself as a speaker.
We're going to deal with that, we're going to park it, we're going to leave it in the
past because that's where it belongs. Instead we're on a journey towards building self-esteem,
feeling better about ourselves as communicators and getting back that 'mojo', that sense of
'yeah, I can do this, I'm really good at it and I enjoy it'.
I decided to write this book because I found there was a gap in the market. It's about
getting your mojo back. It's not a book for people who are terrified of public speaking.
It's a book for any professional person who has spoken in the past and it was alright
and maybe it went well a couple of times but other times it hasn't gone so well and they're
not sure why that is but they've decided 'Public speaking's not for me, I don't like it, I
don't want to think about it.' When you take that approach for it you're always going to
head towards a bad experience again because it's inevitable that if you hold a middle
or senior position you'll be asked to speak again, probably at short notice, and you won't
be ready. So this book is for people who are capable of speaking but don't like it, don't
enjoy it and because they don't like it and don't enjoy it they bring all that as baggage
onto the stage with them. So my book is aimed at helping them to turn that situation around
and to understand what's going on in their mind and to start putting on a much better
performance that they enjoy as well as giving a lot of value to the audience who are the
most important people in all of this after all.
Well I'm led by my clients, what my clients tell me that they need and that they want
and how they react to the things that I tell them and I show them. My clients sometimes
come to me with a very defined goal in mind, they've got a job interview coming up, they
need to speak at a wedding or a funeral, they've got an important presentation coming up. Other
times it's knowing that they want to be better at communicating. It's very clear that good
communication skills are linked to advancement in your career. You're more likely to get
a promotion and more likely to be noticed if you're happy about speaking in public,
even if that just means speaking up in meetings or speaking up in networking situations which
some people do find difficult as well. I recognise that not many people teach this stuff the
way that I do. My clients often tell me that I teach them the exact opposite of what other
speaking coaches teach them and that what I teach them works. Which is fantastic, absolutely
wonderful. So I thought it was about time I put that into a book that many more people
could start to benefit from what I'm teaching my clients one-to-one.
I'd really like to challenge this idea that anyone is born a natural public speaker because
I don't believe that it's true. I'm very often told that I'm a natural speaker, naturally
good at this. That's absolute nonsense. If you'd have known me twenty years ago I was
just the same as every other person who hates public speaking. I felt no one's interested
in what I've got to say, that I'm not being very clear, that I'm not very good at expressing
my ideas, all of those things that I think all of us feel. I'm very keen through my book
to help people to understand that public speaking is a skillset. It's not even just one skill.
It's not just about projecting, it's not just about the 'narrative arc' (the story). It's
about lots of things but most of all it's about what goes on in here (your head). It's
about your mindset. It's about the mindset you bring to the stage. And two very important
elements of what I explain in the book are about how you do your practising. It is about
practise, practise, practise and preparation, preparation, preparation to use those clichés,
but it's in a particular way, and it's this particular way that may be new to the readers
of my book. And the other important element is to have a pre-talk routine, that's how
you get yourself into the mindset to give the performance of your life every time.
I believe that anybody can be a brilliant public speaker but I can tell you the difference
between people who are and people who aren't. That's commitment. That's it in a word. It's
commitment. You can come to me and work with me and I will show you everything I do to
enable me to be a great, successful public speaker who achieves the aims I set out to
achieve. And you can do those things. Or not do them. Sometimes I'm working with clients
and we're part-way through the process and they say 'Julie, it's not working, I can't
do it'. And I ask them 'Are you practising as regularly as I've suggested and in the
way that I've suggested?' And do you know what? The answer is 'no'. Well there you are.
Start practising, even though you don't feel like it. Start doing these exercises that
we've been through together even though you think you don't need to because it's in the
doing of these practises, doing them in this certain way that I've taught you and that
are listed in the book that will make the difference. It is about commitment. It's the
same with anything. If you want to perfect any skill you've got to commit to it. It's
the same as when you learned to walk when you were a baby. You know when you learned
to walk, did you fall down, and you thought 'that's it, this isn't for me'? No! You kept
going, you got up, you committed to practising because you really wanted that goal of independence.
It's just the same with public speaking.
I wanted to write a book that people will actually use. But I'm not naïve about it.
I know a lot of people buy so-called self development books, put them on a shelf and
don't look at them again and just hope that somehow what's in the book will just transfer
to them without them actually doing anything. So I'm very realistic about my book. I don't
expect people to read it from cover-to-cover and to absorb everything in there. So I've
put into the book 50 exercises to help you to get your public speaking mojo back forever.
I don't expect you to do all 50, you don't have to do all 50. Even if you just do one
or two or whatever most appeals to you. The important thing is that rather than just reading
a book and absorbing my opinion on things you can apply these exercises, you can do
these exercises, and you can work out for yourself what they mean for you. And you can
observe for yourself the difference that they make in your life. They may affect not just
your ability to speak in public but other areas of your life where you communicate.
Perhaps with friends or family or your boss if you're after that pay rise, all sorts of
situations. And I'm really excited to hear the feedback from people who try these exercises
to see how you get on and what difference they make to you. But it's totally up to you.
All I've tried to do for you is put together in a book loads of ideas that will make a
difference in your life. The difference that they make really is up to you.
I decided that video was going to be really important because a book on its own can actually
be quite intimidating. The book is about speaking so it all being written down in words doesn't
really make sense to me. It needs to have somebody actually speaking. i.e. me, to bring
it all to life. Also I hope that people reading the book will want to work with me and start
that journey with me and to become great public speakers. And so it's important that you see
me and can make some decisions about whether I'm somebody you would like to work with.
I can work face-to-face with you or I can work via Skype over the internet as well and
that works just as well. I put these exercises together in the form of videos so you can
see what they really mean, they really come off the page at you. And it also helps with
that feedback loop so you can write comments on my YouTube channel to let me know what
you thought. Did it work for you? Did it not? How did it work? What was the consequence?
And I can respond to that and we can have a conversation that I know a lot of other
people will also get value from.
It's important to understand the difference between confidence and self-esteem. I think
some people think those terms are inter-changeable. They're not. Your confidence is how good you
are at doing something. So somebody might, for example, be really good at tennis. However,
they might think 'Well, I'll never be as good as my hero and I'll probably lose and I'll
probably not come in the top ten so it's not worth trying. I'm just going to play at home
by myself and not get involved.' And that is low self-esteem. So you may know an awful
lot about your subject. You might be brilliant. Other people in your industry might say 'Gosh,
you're so good, you know so much. You know? Let's hear it. Please share it with us.' But
the voice inside your head, your negative self-talk is your low self-esteem saying 'Oh
but I'll probably get something wrong, oh but I'm not as up-to-date as I should be,
oh somebody will be in the audience who I really respect and they're going to think
I'm an idiot'. That's a very common one. Or just 'nobody will be interested in what I
have to say'. I focus in the book on all of this because it's so important to challenge
that and ask yourself 'is that actually true or is the truth that I'm just a bit scared
and in fact the reality is that people are really interested in what I have to say and
for a wide range of reasons'. For example, if we tackle this one around 'everyone else
in the room is cleverer than me'. They may well be, but so what because being cleverer
than you doesn't mean they are fully up-to-date with all the developments in your subject
area that you know about. Also, you have the filter of your own unique experience. A lot
of academics they're always in the lab or with other academics. They operate within
a vacuum. When you come an speak to them about how this stuff applies 'in my life' you're
enabling them to have these amazing 'eureka'/'lightbulb' moments and I see it all the time. You see
the 'penny drop' for them when they realise 'Ah! This and this mean this!' And they may
not have had that moment had you not come out and spoken. If you're not sure, what I
do to show you that I practise what I preach, is I will regularly go and speak to groups
of really clever, scientific boffins where I know for sure I have nowhere near the IQ
level that these people have. And as audiences they're lovely, they're absolutely wonderful.
Because they don't often meet somebody like me. And I can bring them a perspective and
the latest thinking from 'the real world' and they find that fascinating. So that's
wonderful. And that's for a group where you might think 'I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy'.
And being able to get over that feeling enables you to actually help more people. There's
plenty of exercises in the book to help you with that.
My hope for the book is that people will read it. Not just buy it, read it! And apply a
couple of the exercises and let me know how they get on with them. That's what's of interest
to me. The book, yes it's got pages and it's got words on those pages but what really interests
me is what it becomes and what it achieves and how people use it in their own lives to
make things happen. That's what's exciting to me. I do a lot of public speaking and people
often, very kindly, say to me 'Your talk was very inspiring.' I hear that word a lot: inspiring.
I ask them 'Oh really, what did I inspire you to do?' And if they can't answer then
I'm unhappy because inspiring means action. So what I want from this book is action. I
want to hear that people have tried something and, good or bad, hear what they did as a
result of it. I'm also very keen for people to understand that this is a long game. I'm
never looking for overnight changes. Life is not like that. We're very impatient these
days I think. I like when I speak somewhere and then maybe 18 months later someone will
come up to me and say, 'I was at a talk you gave the year before last and as a consequence
of that we now do things differently in our company'. That's wonderful, that's what I'm
after and that's a prize worth waiting for. So with my book I don't expect anything to
change overnight. You may buy it, put it on a shelf, read it 18 months later and suddenly
it does something wonderful for you. Fantastic! Please make sure that you tell me about it.
I'm inspired by all sorts of people but they may not be people who you'd think. I'm not
inspired particularly by athletes or people who've climbed mountains or anything like
that. I'm inspired by people who put on great performances, who are always 100% 'on' when
they're in front of their audiences. I talk in the book about Adam Ant who I really admired
as I was growing up. Right now there's a band called Vintage Trouble who I always go and
see live whenever they're in the UK. They're American and they always, all four of them,
it's a four-piece band, they really give it everything, they give it 100% all the time.
And you really feel they're connected with you as an audience. And they care, they're
bothered about you having a good time and that's wonderful. And I try to bring that
to the stage when I'm speaking to my audience so my audience can feel that I see them, I
really see them and I really care about the experience that they're having and that I'm
very 'present' with them. Presence is an idea that I keep coming back to in the book. It
doesn't just mean 'turning up'. Being present means being fully aware to the experience
your audience is having while you're speaking to them. It's hugely important. If you can
nail presence a wonderful speaker you will be.