Image Credit: Brian Ujiie
Every speaker eventually reaches a point where they are the best that they can be. They’ve reached a point where their skills and their knowledge can no longer take them to the next level in speaking. All too often speakers just stop here – they will never get any better. However, it does not have to be this way. It is possible to keep moving forward and to become a better speaker so that you can express the importance of public speaking. The key is that you can’t do it by yourself. What you are going to need is a mentor. Now all you have to do is to discover how you can get a mentor who is going to be willing to work with you.
Where Can You Find A Mentor?
You might think that it would be hard to find a mentor who will be able to help you to become a better speaker, but it turns out that it’s really not all that hard. The mentors that we need can be found everywhere. The trick is that you simply need to know how to look for them and, when you find them, how to ask them to be a mentor for you. The good news that many speakers are not aware of is that it is possible to have more than one mentor at a time. What we need to understand is that when someone agrees to be our mentor, it is not just a role that they are going to be playing, instead it is really a partnership.
Mentoring has two different requirements attached to it. The first is that there has to be a person who wants to learn – that’s you. Additionally, there has to be a person who is willing to help them – that’s the mentor. You are going to have to understand that mentors like to work with people who are willing to take whatever action is required in order to grow. What this means for you is that if you want to be successful in finding a mentor, you are going to have to become the type of person that a mentor is going to want to work with.
We need to understand that we’ll have different mentors for different stages of our speaking development. The first will be there to help us with the basics of doing a good job while we are on the stage. The next may be the one who will help you to write better speeches. What you need to do is to identify speakers who are good in areas where you need help and then approach them to see if they would be willing to mentor you. By approaching several people to help you become a better speaker in different areas you will have created a customized mentoring team for yourself.
How Do You Work With A Mentor?
An interesting question that many speakers don’t do a good job of answering is knowing when we need to improve our speaking abilities. It turns out that we may never know the answer to this question, but others will. What we need to do is to take the time to listen to what people are saying about the speeches that we give. What we need to be listening for is when people are making the same comments about our speeches or are making the same suggestions. At this point we need to realize that we probably need to get in touch with a mentor.
Another key question that speakers often have is to try to fully understand what the value of a mentor can be for them. If you can find the right mentor who is willing to work with you, your speaking life can be transformed. What a mentor will be able to do for you is to provide you with targeted, accelerated learning about how to become a better speaker. What a mentor can do is to help you to move forward when you really need it. They will also be there to hold you accountable for each speech that you give.
Speakers need to understand that having a relationship with a mentor is a two-way street. You have an obligation to help them out also. They are going to be making recommendations to you about how you can become a better speaker. You owe it to them to try out what they are suggesting to you and then provide them with feedback on how their suggestions turned out. You may not be the last person that they mentor and you have an obligation to help them to become better by letting them know what works and what doesn’t.
What All Of This Means For You
As speakers, we’d all like to find ways to become better so that we can share the benefits of public speaking. Each of us will eventually reach a point where we are not able to become any better than we currently are. When we reach this point, we need to start to look for some outside help. We need to find a mentor. A mentor is going to be the person who will be able to help us make it to the next level in our speaking career.
When we decide that we need a mentor we are going to have to go looking for one. The good news is that potential mentors are all around us. We can have more than one mentor at any given time. We need to be willing to be told how to be a better speaker and we need to find someone who is willing to tell us how to be better. We may need different mentors to help us at different stages of our speaking career. We need to listen to others in order to determine when we need to seek out a mentor. Mentors can help us to become better speakers quicker than we could do it by ourselves. We need to understand that having a mentor is a two-way relationship.
All speakers can always be becoming better. However, we can’t do it by ourselves. Instead, what we need to do is to seek out a mentor who can help us to make it to the next level in our speaking career. If we take the time to find a person who will be willing to work with us and if we give back to them, then they can help us to become better speakers. Go find a mentor and watch yourself become a better speaker.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: How many mentors do you think that you could handle at the same time?
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here!
Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!
What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
As speakers we need to understand the importance of public speaking and that that we are living in a constantly changing world. What this means is that how we used to give speeches is now changing and that means that we need to learn how to change with the times. A good example of what is going on now is that more speakers are using iPads and tablets to make presentations to audiences. Are you going to be ready to do this?