How Public Speaking Will Change Your Life | Bridget Sampson | TEDxCSUN

bring to mind the entrance to your home picture your front door you're about to walk in and to your surprise you see that your home is filled with gifts wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling gifts everywhere you look they're all wrapped in beautiful wrapping paper with shiny ribbons and bows they're all different shapes and sizes so you start to examine all of these gifts and you notice that they each have a little gift tag and on the gift tag next to the word from you see your own name on every single gift these gifts are not for you they're from you and then you look to see what names might be next to the word - but they're all blank none of the gift tags say who these gifts are for so you have no idea who these gifts are meant for and you have no idea what on earth you're going to do with them that is the question that I'm here to answer for you today you see these gifts represent the gifts inside of you right now right here they are your brilliant ideas your unique experiences the wisdom that only you possess but those gifts could remain trapped inside of you forever undelivered and unopened unless you make the choice to embrace public speaking yes you heard me if you want to reach your full potential in this lifetime you must embrace public speaking and it doesn't matter how you feel about public speaking right now my goal is to get you to push yourself outside of your public speaking comfort zone whatever it is for you if you dread public speaking I want you to summon the courage to give it a try if you're mediocre at it I want you to bring more energy and enthusiasm to it and if you're already a great public speaker then why don't you apply to give your own TEDx talk it could be you here on this stage now I didn't start out as a confident speaker far from it I was a wreck the entire week before my very first speech in my college public speaking class I could barely eat or sleep or think about anything else I envisioned every possible horrific scenario that you could imagine projectile vomiting all over the front row fainting and falling to the floor with a fatal blow to my head or worst of all standing there and forgetting everything I plan to say as the entire class howled with laughter at me can you relate this kind of catastrophizing by the way is one of the reasons that psychologists label the fear of public speaking an irrational fear the things were so afraid of do not actually happen so I didn't vomit I didn't faint and I didn't forget all my points but to be honest that self-fulfilling prophecies go I certainly blew it I couldn't make eye contact with a single person the entire time I read straight from my outline with trembling hands and I only spoke for three of the required five minutes after that speech I knew that I had two choices I could continue to torture myself and let my anxiety run the show or I could embark on a mission to conquer my fear and become a confident public speaker I chose to accept that mission and it profoundly changed the course of my life if you had told me back then that just two and a half years after taking that class I would be teaching it I would never believed you but it's true or that I would happily continue to do so for 25 years and Counting and I certainly could not have imagined that that choice all those years ago would lead me to a career I loved as a consultant getting to travel the world teaching people to improve their communication skills my mission back then was to embrace public speaking in my own life so that I could unlock my true human potential my mission now is to encourage all of you to do the same so now that you know a little bit about my journey and my goal let's focus on two areas why it's so important for you to embrace public speaking and how you can begin to do it to answer the question why let's look at some examples the list of people who overcame a debilitating fear of public speaking to go on and become great leaders and entertainers is long it includes people such as Gandhi Barbra Streisand Julia Roberts Abraham Lincoln Warren Buffett Tom Hanks Nicole Kidman I could go on and on but you know their names right you know all those names because those people worked hard to overcome that fear so that they could give their gifts to the world to us so you've heard of all those famous people but I bet you've never heard of Mary Ellen Peterson she's not famous but her story is the most inspiring one to me as a mother especially Mary Ellen Peterson didn't set out to be an outspoken activist but everything changed for her in the 1970s when she gave birth to a special needs baby she joined with a small group of other mothers to advocate for their children other mothers of special-needs babies and together they decided to form the now nationally acclaimed nonprofit organization parents helping parents which Mary Ellen Peterson served as the CEO of for four decades secure in the knowledge that her gift to the world was to help families like her own with special needs children Mary Ellen Peterson knew that she could not afford to avoid public speaking neither can you so you may be thinking well I'm not fighting to save the world like Gandhi or advocate for special-needs children like Mary Ellen Peterson that's okay maybe for you it's music health business finance love parenting yoga anything no topic is too small if it's what you are passionate about and I get it I'm a university lecturer and trainer and coach who teaches communication skills I see people's reactions sometimes I know that a lot of people don't think that's as important as math or art or history but I do it's what I care most about and so I bring all my energy and passion to every talk I give on communication skills in fact that's why I'm here today I was asked to give three little one-hour workshops on communication skills for a student group here on campus that I had never heard of and of course I said yes I love to do that kind of thing but I didn't know if any of those students would have already taken a class with me so I spent hours coming up with all new examples and stories they even made up a new acronym and I showed up that first day at that first workshop so excited to be there to give it my all and to engage with those students even though I had no idea that in that audience sat the curator of this TEDx conference it was an audition even though I had no idea that it was and that's why I'm here I hope all these examples have proven to you that you every single one of you cannot afford to avoid or suffer through public speaking if you do you will absolutely miss out on opportunities to share your gifts with the world so now let's look at how you can begin to do it a couple of ideas regarding how you can begin to do it it all comes down to being confident building up your confidence if you google the definition of the word confidence you'll see something along these lines belief in someone or something firm Trust Trust is the key to become a confident speaker you must trust yourself and your audience to trust yourself you've got to believe that you have something of value to share I know you do I just wonder if you know that you do and you not only need to know that you have something of value to share you need to believe that you already have everything you need to do it you've done harder things in your life I guarantee you have one of the speech classes that I teach here on campus is for the educational opportunity program which serves historically low-income first-generation college students and I'll never forget when I first started teaching that particular course many years ago sitting in my office talking to a young woman in that class as she looked me straight in the eye and said with complete certainty I am never going to be able to get up in front of the class and give a speech there's just no way she was terrified she also shared some of her life experiences with me things that I could not fathom homelessness witnessing gang violence domestic abuse drug addiction incarcerated family members I used that information to convince her that giving a five-minute speech in front of 24 other students was going to be way easier than all the things she had already been through and survived in her life that the courage it took her to break out of that kind of environment and make it to college to a university was way more courage than she would ever need to become a confident public speaker thankfully she believed me and it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my entire career to watch her blossom over the course of the semester into a powerful articulate speaker and in fact her final speech was one of the best I've ever seen she moved us all to tears as she shared the ways that we could contribute to a world where children don't have to grow up the way that she did I have been privileged to see hundreds of other students in the educational opportunity program with similar backgrounds go through the same exact transformation over the years if they can do it so can you now you not only have to trust yourself you need to trust your audience you need to believe that the people in your audience are kind and compassionate the vast majority if not all of them are I guarantee you they are on your side aren't you on my side right now yes they want you to win your audience's they're cheering you on don't you do that when you're in the audience we don't sit there wishing that the speaker will be boring or will fall apart in front of us we want the speaker to win remember that when you're the speaker not long ago I was about to start a training program an all-day training program for executives of a fortune 500 company and just as I was about to begin the day somehow my foot caught on the computer wire and I tripped right in front of them and I stumbled and I Teeter and tottered back and forth and forward and back and I couldn't get my balance for what felt like forever and finally in my last attempt to steady myself I kicked my foot out tugged the wire and watched as my laptop computers slid across the desk and slammed onto the hard floor with a bang I hadn't yet said a word they're all staring at me this is not the impression you want to make on fortune 500 senior executives write that you're gonna spend the entire day with before you've said a word all I could do was trust that they were human beings just like me so I looked at them and all I could see on their faces was concern and empathy that empathy feeling of who that could have been me or more likely that has been me at some point right we're all in this together so all I could do was say the first thing that came to my mind which was to look at my laptop and say I hope it still works because I really like the PowerPoint slides I created for you today and they laughed and they were happy when it worked just fine rest of the day went great nobody expects perfection from you and your audience is perfectly fine with a mistake here or there as long as you move on don't make a big deal out of it the people in your audience are your allies not your enemies earlier in this talk I shared with you how terrified I was of public speaking when I was in college and I also told you about how I overcame that fear but please do not let that lead you to believe that it's always easy for me it is not I choose to challenge myself in new public speaking situations constantly this for example I'm not used to having lights on me and cameras filming me in a microphone this is new for me this is scary to be completely honest with you most of this version of this talk was composed in a complete fit of panic at 3 a.m. a few weeks ago and most of it was also inspired by a two-hour desperate FaceTime conversation with Carina the curator I had spent too many sleepless nights and stressed out days trying to figure out what to say in this talk so I reached out her for help and we sat there across staring each other across our computers through FaceTime in our pajamas on a Saturday morning for two hours sifting through a Google Doc with my ninth crappy first draft of this talk and I asked her to just tell me what I was trying to say and thankfully she had the answer so public speaking and getting comfortable with public speaking and being a confident public speaker is required if you want to reach your full human potential it is not optional it's not your home that's filled with gifts it's you and there are people out there that those gifts were meant for people who need them people who are waiting for your gifts so the next time that you're asked to speak the next time you get the opportunity to speak whether it's in a meeting at work in a class at a funeral or a wedding or at a TEDx conference first I want you to say yes with enthusiasm and then I want you to look deep inside yourself and find that perfect gift that's in there wrap it up in gorgeous wrapping paper put a big pretty bow on top of it and give it away thank you thank you you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 259,833

Rating: 4.8407626 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Humanities, Communication, Community, Learning, Speech, Teaching

Id: ioTo11P0P9g

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2017