Powerful Presentations. Jacques Waisvisz
“Most people do not wish to become professional speakers!
They just want to be able to make a competent presentation once in a while!”
Who are these people? People who make their living selling, students who have to prepare presentations, women in all walks of life who want to assert themselves, older people who want to teach others about their life experience, entrepreneurs and business owners who would like to give workshops to promote their product or service, engineers or accountants who are called upon to solidify sales presentations, managers in government departments, and people who are involved with professional, community, condominium or other associations.
In fact, just about anyone who wants to communicate effectively to a group can learn how to do it better by applying the principles taught in this book.
If you are afraid to get up and be heard, you will find the solutions on how to overcome your fear in the section “The Power of Your Mind”. If you want to learn quickly how to write an effective speech, “Powerful Presentations” contains eight easy steps to prepare a speech. It also contains eight proven presentation secrets that will help to make you a competent speaker. When you follow the steps and learn those secrets, both you and your audience will benefit.
“Powerful Presentations” will help you understand that the basic objective of a speech is to provide sufficient information in a manner that will be clearly understood and can be acted upon by the audience. Presentation skills are the methods you may use to deliver the speech and make it memorable. You’ll learn how to project the appropriate personal and corporate image through improved presentation skills in Chapters Four, Five and Six, how to conduct meetings in Chapter Seven and how to prepare and deliver training sessions in the last chapter.
A wise man once said:
“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but, I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant!”
I hope that, by studying and working with “Powerful Presentations” you will become one of a new breed of speakers who say what they mean, and mean what they say - - and do it briefly and to the point.
It is my sincere wish that you and your audience will get as much enjoyment out of your presentations as I have had writing “Powerful Presentations”!
THE POWER OF YOUR MIND
“You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him find it within himself.”
Galileo
“No way, you won’t get me up in front of a group of people! I would not dare! I am too self-conscious! I don’t want to make a fool of myself! Why in earth should I want to make a speech?” Add to those remarks all the other excuses you have personally used and you will know why a study conducted by Reader’s Digest and Yale University has, for twelve years in a row, concluded that the number one fear amongst 75 per cent of North Americans is the fear of speaking in front of a group of people. Why do we have this fear of speaking in public? Why would most people rather die than make a speech?
Somehow we have developed a negative attitude about getting up and speaking in front of a group of people. When someone just mentions the words “making a speech” our subconscious immediately starts to regurgitate negative information to our conscious mind. Far too many of us tend to look at the “speech” as a problem rather than an opportunity for growth. And no wonder. Ever since our days at kindergarten and the “show and tell” sessions, we have had little opportunity to build on a positive base of public speaking experience. What little we may have had has often been a mind-numbing experience.
But let us take a few moments to examine how our minds function and how we can take control of our thoughts to overcome those negative attitudes towards public speaking and, for that matter, all other self-defeating behaviour patterns. Once we have prepared ourselves mentally to speak in front of a group, the negative emotions suffered years ago will soon disappear. The physical part of presentations will become manageable ... simply a set of skills that we can learn and use for our benefit and for the benefit of others.
Computers were built to emulate a model of the human mind. We have, on the one hand, the subconscious mind or the hard disk; and on the other hand, we have the operating system or the conscious mind. The conscious mind is constantly feeding information to the subconscious mind which stores all our experiences from the day we were born, into a file manager system. The sum of our thoughts, up to the present moment, is our belief system.
The belief system comprises all of the knowledge, the education and the experience we have acquired from our birth to the present moment. This includes information received from our parents, peers, teachers, religious, organizations and the media. This information could be good, bad or benign. The file manager does not care, it just stores that information. However, the belief system or the sum total of what is in each person’s file, is what most of us believe about ourselves to be the truth - or close to it.
The information we receive in our conscious mind, as feed back from our subconscious mind, becomes either a negative or positive attitude towards each activity in our life. The conscious mind constantly checks with our subconscious mind on how a certain activity we are doing was performed previously. If the sum of that particular file is negative, our belief system feeds negative instructions back to our conscious mind which reinforces the present negative belief in ourselves ... to do otherwise would be inconsistent with our belief system. But if the sum of the file is positive, we reinforce our present positive belief and we do well in that activity.
This proven negative attitude about public speaking goes back, in many cases, to our schooldays when we were called in front of the class and were humiliated because we did not know the answers or were speechless through sheer terror.
Even the student whom we secretly admired, snickered at our ineptness (or so we thought), as we fumbled in front of our peers. Many teachers, unwittingly, have helped to program and even reinforce the negative feelings in our minds about speaking in front of a group. The philosophy of teaching has changed somewhat over the past ten years, but I believe that many of us can still relate to these examples. And so these negative feelings and attitudes have stayed with us in our minds.
As a result, today, whenever we are offered the chance to get up and say something in front of a group, we try to get out of it at all cost. We don’t want to be ridiculed again! We simply avoid the pain.
If we actually do pick up the courage to stand up and speak, we panic, our hands start to sweat, our stomachs become upset, our knees buckle and our voice seems to belong to someone else or not exist at all! The words, if they come out, have no resemblance to the thoughts we wanted to get across to the audience. What are we doing?
We are reinforcing our negative belief in our ability to stand up and speak in front of a group. “I am no good at public speaking!” Once again we succeed in reinforcing the negative self-image we have on the file in our belief system. We complete the circle of our own self-fulfilling prophecy.
A negative self-image about public speaking might be an indication of a host of other negative attitudes and self-images filed in your belief system. If your negative attitudes and negative images overpower your positive attitudes and positive images (your true self), you likely will have a low self-esteem.
The measure or degree to which you like yourself is your self-esteem. A low self-esteem may prevent you from reaching the level of success you desire, because success is not consistent with your belief system.
Charles Simmons once said: “Our attitudes control our lives; attitudes are a secret power working twenty-four hours a day, for good or bad. It is of paramount importance that we know how to harness and control this great force.”
So you might well ask, if we have programmed our belief system ever since we were