http://articlesurvey.com/ Articles at ArticleSurvey en-us http://articlesurvey.com/self-help/leadership/public-speaking---lets-get-physical.html http://articlesurvey.com/self-help/leadership/public-speaking---lets-get-physical.html Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400
Although developing proper eye-contact technique and learning how and when to pause are absolutely essential to acquiring "The Skills" - you're not finished yet. The last element involves adding the emotional to the mechanical. What we're referring to here is the element that works to lock in your audience once you've successfully engaged them with your eye-contact and person-to-person approach. What we're talking about is passion.

The truth is, you can break almost all the 'rules' about proper delivery if, in the end, you deliver your message with true passion. There are even some great speakers out there whom you'll notice will occasionally break some of the rules, but they get away it because they wrap you up so tightly in their passion that you don't notice.

With the easy availability of information today, there are many people who know a great deal. But knowledge matters very little if you can't convey what you know with a level of passion that drives people to sit up and listen.

After all, it's not likely that anybody in the audience is going to care more about your topic than you do, so to ensure that audiences come away interested and motivated to learn more, it's incumbent upon you, the speaker, to stretch to the point of almost going over the top with passion and enthusiasm for their topic.

So how exactly do you convey passion?

Gestures

One way to let your audience know how you feel is to demonstrate it physically. In our on-site classes we have a lot of fun with the gestures module. What you need to know about gestures is that in keeping with Rule #2, when you incorporate meaningful body movement into your presentation, it provides a win-win for all.

The presenter wins, because every time you move the muscles in your upper body it burns some of the excess energy running through your body. In a modern world one-against-many environment, it's not healthy for your career or your freedom if you choose to either fight your audience or flee the scene. So what do you do with that excess energy? You move your arms and hands in concert with the words coming out your mouth. You paint pictures of the words or the action you're describing. We say in concert because, unfortunately, most of the body motions we see presenters use tend to distract from the message rather than add to it:

If you're not guilty of any of the above, you probably err on the other side - in fact, most people don't gesture at all. Or their gestures are so reserved that they fail to either burn off energy or signal enthusiasm. What you want to do is put enough energy into your gestures that you both burn calories and let the audiences know that you care enough about your topic to actually get physical about it.

So far, we've talked a lot about what not to do. Now its time to examine (and practice) the type of physical skills that will project your professionalism. As easy as it is to define distracting gestures and nuances, it is also fairly easy to adopt the practices that can define you as a professional presenter. In this lesson, we'll work on the basics of maximizing your impact on the audience.

The first thing is to adopt a stance that both appears balanced and also allows you to keep from needing or wanting to rock or pace back and forth.

The Neutral Position

Then, figure out exactly what you are going to do with your hands and learn to gesture from the shoulders, not the elbows. Use your hands to describe and emphasize. Drop your hands down gently to your side (known as the neutral position) when you're starting your speech or when you're finished gesturing.

When you gesture from the neutral position, your gestures become more emphatic. If everything comes from the middle magnet position it looks like you are stuck in a phone booth. Dropping your hands down to your side is of course extremely difficult to do. With most people the hands immediately come back together like magnets or start grabbing things like clothing, various body parts like your face, or they jump back into your pockets.

So when you're talking about an increase in sales, show us your hand up in the air. To demonstrate lowering costs, extend your other hand down below it. And here you might mention that the space in between represents profit, which is a good thing, because that's where profit sharing comes from!

Studies have shown that gesturing lightens the cognitive load while speaking and actually helps you think. This may be why its not unusal to watch someone become very physically animated while talking on the phone, even though the person on the other end can't see them.

For maximum impact, then, balance your stance, feet shoulder width apart. You want to use your hands, but you want to use them appropriately. You want to use them in a way that helps to further your message. And then you want to increase your volume, increase your inflection as much as possible to show how strongly you believe in the words you have to say.

Passion is the driver. ]]> http://articlesurvey.com/self-help/leadership/public-speaking---lock-talk--pause.html http://articlesurvey.com/self-help/leadership/public-speaking---lock-talk--pause.html Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400
Here's a tip to begin the whole process correctly: Whenever you get up to speak, before you ever get out of your chair to come to the front of the room, know which person with whom you're going to begin speaking. Have that person picked out before you get up there. Otherwise, you're going to start off on the wrong foot: you're going to start scanning around for those "friendly faces". Choose the person you're going to deliver your opening line to ahead of time, and begin your talk by looking at that one person and letting it flow.

Let's be clear - one thing you definitely don't want to do is to look for and speak to only a few "friendly faces". That might be advice that works well for the few faces, but what about all the other less than friendly mugs? How do you suppose they feel when they notice that you are engaging other people but not them? Do you suppose it might get them thinking about something other than your message? Do you want a few people buying into what you're saying, or the whole group? Your job, remember, is to look at everyone in the audience. Everyone in the room needs to leave feeling that you took the time to personally engage them as individuals.

If you've been to a speech or a presentation by someone with The Skills, you have no doubt noticed that they did this. In fact, have you ever been to a large event with perhaps hundreds of people and come away feeling that throughout the program the speaker kept coming back to you? That for some reason the speaker picked you out personally for special notice, and repeatedly?

This is perhaps the most powerful advantage you will have with The Skills, but it's also the easiest to acquire, because it happens all by itself! One great thing about The Skills is that they are infinitely scalable. That is, the larger the crowd, the better they work for you, but you don't work any harder. You engage in exactly the same behaviors with twelve people as you do with twelve hundred!

Parallax Universe

The reason is this: thanks to the ways our eyes are built, from distances as short as ten feet, a phenomenon known as parallax kicks in, and for the very same reason we see railroad tracks converge in the distance, our eyes see the other person's eyes converging on ours even when they might be pointed a few feet away. Speakers with The Skills are always only looking directly at one person at a time. But from a short distance, and increasingly with greater distance, people sitting around the person to whom the speaker is actually looking believe the speaker is looking directly at them.

So from, say, fifteen feet away, the four people around the one person you're looking at will feel the benefits of your engaging them as individuals. From thirty feet, twelve people around your target will swear you've singled them out for attention! Your circle of influence keeps getting larger and larger, but you're just doing the exact same thing you'd do in a small conference room. In our classes we enjoy asking the women if they've ever been to a concert where the singer sang directly to them, and we inevitably get at least one response of, "Yes, but how did you know?"

Rock stars know how to create and keep fans, and this skill is a big tool in their box.When you lock on one person, everything else kind of fades away. You focus all of your attention on that one person and nothing else. For the moment, your entire universe is composed of the one person to whom you are directing your one thought. And when you do that, for those three to nine seconds or so, your brain isn't making new threat calculations all the time, trying to get you cranked up, cranked up, cranked up. Everything kind of fades away.

Advantages

Just as when you work from a nice, clean desk, or as when you're given just one task to do, and that's all you have to do, by talking to only one person at a time, it creates a nice, strong point of focus. All of your attention can be given just to this one moment, so that nothing else that's going on affects your brain. Focusing on one person creates an environment that helps you focus on one thought - the thought that you're delivering to that one person.

You're also able to pace yourself. When you learn how to pause, when you learn how to say what you have to say and then stop talking for a moment, move on to the next person and only then begin speaking to them, it helps to create a smooth pace that the audience can follow, and also one that doesn't foul you up.

One of the problems people have when they get up to speak is that, with adrenaline in your veins, your metabolism is elevated. Consequently, your perception of time slows down. You thus tend to speak much more quickly when you're up in front of a group, when our juices are all flowing high. And unfortunately, with your somewhat diminished cognitive ability it's not impossible for your mouth to overrun your brain. You know, you can push the words out so fast that your brain is not be able to replenish the queue quickly enough. And so you do end up finding yourself with nothing to say.

When you find yourself with nothing to say, that can be quite an anxiety-producing situation. It starts cranking up the whole fear juice thing again. The more you get cranked up, the more time slows down. That's one of the reasons most people don't pause. In your slow-motion state, you feel your pauses to be much longer than the length of the pauses your audience hears. But when you've been speaking on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, and then all of a sudden, you just stop, the pause then becomes very, shall we say, pregnant.

By working pauses into your speech from the very beginning, you're able to establish a pace that seems natural to the audience, and will actually mask any moment when you might not be able to think of what to say. ]]> http://articlesurvey.com/self-help/leadership/who-is-robert-blackman.html http://articlesurvey.com/self-help/leadership/who-is-robert-blackman.html Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400
Robert Blackman's path to greatness in his field came to him honestly through the example of his father. His dad was already very successful as the president of a business forms company in Oklahoma. But at the late age of 58, Robert's dad retired from that lucrative position to become an entrepreneur in the area of quick printing franchise operations.

This was a powerful example to the young Robert Blackman because it really impressed his young mind that you can get out there and make your own path if you want to. Because his dad was not afraid to go out and do something bold and new at the age of 58, young Robert Blackman was given the gift of courage and the entrepreneurial mindset to go on to even more success in MLM marketing.

This is not to say that the road was always easy for the young entrepreneur. Robert Blackman actually went bankrupt in 1990. But Robert Blackman always saw every negative situation as one that was loaded with potential profits. And he turned his focus to network marketing and by 1995 he was back in a six figure income. Currently Robert Blackman is a Fruta Vida distributor.

This showed that the real wealth that Robert Blackman was tapping was not just financial, it was what was inside of him. It was the willingness to take chances, to see the world in terms of possibilities, not limitations and to always be discovering new income streams whenever they come along. Robert Blackman didn't just discover that it was more fun to be an entrepreneur, he discovered that it was by far more profitable to do so as well and has gone on to great success because of the aggressive and creative attitude he brings to everything he does.

Like many in that small group who are true innovators and who blaze the trail for the rest of us, Robert Blackman has put together materials to share how we can tap the power of network marketing as he has done. When you think about, Blackburn is already a wealthy man from his on work in the MLM marketing arena. So his books, tapes and courses really represent that teacher's spirit in him that has that instinct to share with others the things he knows.

Its easy enough to find resources online that will put a strong and diverse library of materials prepared by Robert Blackman that and help you and I start to learn how to follow him into wealth if we wish. Sure, there are some motivational materials in his books and tapes and truthfully, those are necessary because without that inner drive to succeed, its hard to get to your financial goals using MLM marketing. But the materials Robert Blackman has produced also have some concrete advice based on his real world experience in areas such as prospect development, use of direct mail for marketing, partner selection and development and how to dodge the mistakes that most often stop people from success.

His background set him on a course to success. His success inspired him to teach and write and his materials have the potential of helping others achieve the same kind of success. That is just the kind of thing you would expect a Master of MLM to do. ]]>