drjim

Public Speakers Need To Use More Sound Effects!

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Every public speaker stands before his / her audience naked. Well, not exactly naked as in “no clothes”, but rather naked as in you don’t have anything standing between you and your audience. This is both wonderful (you can connect with your audience) and terrible (it’s all you, baby). In order to boost the impact … Read more

Speakers Need To Know How Host A Roast Without Becoming Toast

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As though speaking in public isn’t tricky enough, then there is the roast. When we are asked to put on a roast for someone we find ourselves walking directly into a social minefield from which there appears to be no way out. If we do a poor job, then the audience will be bored and … Read more

What’s Your Tag Line?

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So don’t get me wrong, I love Toastmasters. It’s a great organization and I’ve been a member since forever. However, it’s not perfect. They’ll do a great job of teaching you HOW to give a speech, but they won’t help you to do a better job at WHAT you say. That is where tag lines … Read more

How To Write A (Good) Political Speech

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Political speeches, for the most part, are forgettable. Except when they aren’t. If you’ve spent any time listening to the types of speeches that politicians are giving these days, they are basically junk (the Phil Davison, GOP Candidate, Delivers Stark County Treasurer Speech on YouTube is a classic bad political speech). The question is whose … Read more

The 2 Most Important Things That A Public Speaker Needs To Do When The Curtain Goes Up

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One of the questions that public speakers have been debating since the beginning of time is “what is the most important part of a speech?” There are really only three possibilities: the beginning, the middle, or the end. I’m here to solve this question once and for all: it’s the beginning and I’m going to … Read more

Why Public Speakers Should Always Use Notes

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Do you use notes when you give a speech? As public speakers, we are always told by the “gurus” and self-help guides out there that we need to break ourselves of the habit of using notes. When we see highly polished public speakers deliver the speech that they’ve given a hundred times, we notice that … Read more

Difficult Speeches: Talking After The Layoff Has Happened

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A bad global economy means one thing for workers: loss of jobs. Just about every company has gone through this painful experience as firms have struggled to find ways to stay afloat during the most recent global recession. Into this environment, public speakers can find themselves asked to give a speech to a dispirited audience. … Read more

How Moses Can Help Speakers Wrap Things Up Successfully

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The voice of authority is one that any audience will respond to. However, all too often you and I just don’t represent enough of an authority figure to command that level of respect from an audience that didn’t know us before we started to speak to them. If we want to wrap up our speech … Read more

Public Speakers Need To Know How To Work A Room

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Getting up in front of a bunch of strangers can be a challenge for even the best public speaker. The really good ones realize that there is something that they can do about this: change strangers into friends. The challenge is that they don’t have a lot of time to pull this off. This is … Read more

It’s TV Time: What A Speaker Should NOT Do On The Air

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Giving a speech in front of an audience can be one of the toughest things that you’ll ever do.Unless of course you are invited to be on television. Having watched 1,000’s of hours of television you might naturally assume that you are the perfect TV guest. That’s where you’d be wrong… Why TV Is NOT … Read more