Public Speaking – Get help from LIVE STREAMING
This is an AI generated transcript so please forgive any errors and spelling mistakes.
Hi, I have a question for you which is do you use live streaming as a tool to help you with your public speaking? Because if you’re not using it to help you with your speaking you might be missing a trick.
We’ll delve into that just in just a moment but first of all I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Shola Kaye and I’m a professional speaker and a speaker coach based in London. I work with individuals who want to improve their communication and I also work with companies to help their staff do the same.
Live streaming. A lot of my clients are small business owners who want to get out there and make more of an impact and grow their businesses. Of course, live streaming is a big deal these days because we can livestream on pretty much all the social media platforms. It’s touted and it is an excellent way to make more of an impact and to get new clients. We keep hearing that the various algorithms, the more we do live streaming, the algorithms favour people who are out there doing live video. Then your work gets seen by more people. It’s very useful.
Public Speaking – using live streaming to train your brain to keep going
A few weeks ago a client of mine, who’s a small business owner, he’s a coach working with a lot of people in the pharmaceutical industry, he came to me and said that he is planning to start up a YouTube channel. He wants it to have really high production values and look really slick and smooth. He was finding it hard work because trying to get all these videos looking really great, have all the language being word perfect and everything perfectly scripted. He realised it was a lot of work. In our conversation I said “well, why don’t you – as well as having these heavily scripted and really perfect videos – why don’t you throw in a few which are a bit more rough-and-ready where you’re speaking to the camera, it’s a bit more impromptu, you’re not doing loads of cuts, you’re speaking right through and just doing the whole thing in one take”.
I said the reason for that is this trains your brain to be able to speak continuously. Now, if each time you create a video, every time you slip up or you make a blooper you stop and start again, you’re training your brain to think “oh well, it’s ok to make a mistake, I’ll just stop (because you can), start again and it doesn’t make a difference”. However, if you have this attitude of “right, I’m gonna get through this, I’m gonna complete it, I’ll get from start to finish and keep the camera rolling” then you soon become much more fluent and fluid when you’re speaking because you’re training your brain to keep going.
If you make a slip-up you just keep going. If you’re lost for words here and there you keep going. In the same way if you don’t stop the camera from rolling when you’re making say, YouTube video, It’s exactly the same thing as when you’re live streaming. Once you’ve started and you’ve got a few eyeballs looking at you and you know there’s people out there who are watching your live stream if you mess up and say the wrong thing you’re not gonna stop it and then say “oh, hey guys, just come back I’ll be there and again in a minute or two and we’ll start from scratch”. You just keep going and it becomes a much more conversational experience because you’re speaking conversationally it doesn’t have to be perfect. You just relax and feel as comfortable as you would feel if you were chatting with friends or family members or colleagues at work.
Public Speaking – do it as often as you can to improve your speaking technique
I would argue that live streaming as much as you possibly can is a really great way to improve your public speaking. A few years ago, I had quite a big meetup group of women who were interested in speaking to grow their businesses. I’ve since stop that meetup group but I polled them at the time and I said “what’s your biggest fear and concern around speaking? The vast majority said that it was drying up or blanking out in the middle of a talk. Having practiced doing live streaming forces you to keep speaking and then you get over that hump of “gosh, what’s gonna happen if I blank out? what if I stumble? what if I trip and say the wrong thing?” And you realize that you can get through it, you can keep talking and you’re not talking gobbledygook, you’re talking sense that people are interested in.
Listening to so live streams are super useful and I’ve even used them with clients as a tool. One of my clients who used to come to me who had a lot of experience in corporate, very senior marketing executive, who decided to change role. She said that she always found speaking and doing teleconferences and videoconference very awkward. So what we did is we set up a task for her where every day she had to send me a video that was live streamed or at least one that she had recorded in its entirety where she couldn’t stop and start.
Sometimes I asked her to do that on Facebook and others I asked her to just create a whatsapp video and send that to me. It wasn’t so much about the quality of the video, it was about forcing herself to keep going and to recognize that everything’s going to be okay. If we can bring that feeling, that sense of security in that sensation to our public speaking and realize that we can get through this everything’s gonna be alright. We’re having a conversation. That will make life a whole lot easier for you when you’re on stage in front of an audience.
Public Speaking – do this to work through resistance and reap the benefits
I personally have experienced it too. I’ve been making these videos for the last… I guess it’s coming up to a year now, before that I had a written blog where I’d put an image and then just write. I forced myself to start doing video and at the beginning, of course, it’s awkward. You know, I have high production values and I’m not in a fancy studio, I don’t have a script necessarily, I’ll might write a few words down on a post-it or something, so I can just stay on track. The quicker you get used to speaking like that the better it is for your public speaking.
I encourage you this week or as soon as you possibly can, if you’ve been resisting live streaming then go ahead and do it. If you think it could be beneficial for your business if you don’t need a live stream but you feel that making video that’s unedited will be useful for you then, why not once a day just create a five-minute what’s that video or create something on your iPhone or your Android phone? No one has to see it but it’s the exercise of creating it and just moving through any hiccups and slip-ups and trip ups that it’s gonna really really benefit your public speaking.
To wrap up let me say this: please remember live stream if you need to or just create a daily video for a week or a couple of weeks, no one has to see it. You will see that when you take those skills that you’ve forced yourself to develop and you stand in front of an audience for public speaking, you will find that it’s so much easier for you to keep the train of your conversation to just follow your thoughts through. You will speak in a way that – okay, maybe it’s not gonna be super slick but – it’s conversational. That, these days, is what most people want.
That’s it for me today and if you are interested in finding out more about working with me possibly on my Get Clients with Speaking program if you’re a small business owner or bringing me in to your organization to run a keynote talk or to provide a masterclass please do get in touch. Go to sholakaye.com and drop me a line. I’ll be happy to correspond with you.
Take care and get on the video now!
***
P.S. Whenever you’re ready… here are 4 ways I can help you improve your speaking or grow your business:
1 – Get my free guide – 27 places to find speaking opportunities.
Find out where your next speaking opportunity might come from – whether you’re a beginner, intermediate or experienced speaker.
2 – Join my Facebook Group – Public Speaking for Female Coaches and Entrepreneurs.
Join us for tips, discussions and community!
3 – Are you an ambitious coach, consultant or small business owner? If you’d like to wow your audiences and find more speaking opportunities, then watch the FREE on-demand training video here: https://sholakaye.com/masterclass
4 – Find out about my VIP Days and private coaching. Book me for a VIP half or full-day session if you want to make some serious progress!