2-Minute Tip: Earn your Confidence

If you project confidence on stage your audience is more likely to believe you. If you are confident, you’ll feel less nervous getting up to speak.

Confidence doesn’t come for free, though. You have to earn it. And you earn it by doing to work — by planning, editing, revising, practicing and rehearsing. If you don’t do the work, you don’t deserve the confidence and probably should be nervous.

So if you find you lack confidence in your public speaking, ask yourself, “Did I do the work to deserve it?” If the answer is, “No,” okay. Now you know what you have to do in the future.

Building blocks with Cory Truax

Cory’s story is one of building. He didn’t become a speaker by jumping on the biggest stage he could. He assembled this life in pieces beginning in school. Then began volunteering to speak and chaining together event after event as people would see him speak and then invite him to speak.

That’s the journey we talk about today — about taking small steps forward that lead to bigger and bigger things — and doing a lot of work today.

Bio

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Cory Truax’s day job is in Admissions at the University of South Carolina. He supplements that with secular and religious speaking gigs, and on air work at WLFJ radio in Greenville, SC.

Cory Truax fills a lot of roles – Host of the creatively-titled radio show & podcast, “The Cory Truax Show,” Teaching Pastor at Beechwood Church, uncle extraordinaire, and even has a day job.

Cory enjoys early-morning work-outs; all things football; basketball’s post-season; healthy political discussions; theology; learning new things; and discovering new voices. Cory is also an invited speaker at church, educational, and political events along with serving as the fill-in host for WLFJ Christian Talk 660’s morning show, “Christian Worldview Today.”

Leadership and Public Speaking

One of the key lessons in this conversation is the link between leadership roles and public speaking. If you become a leader in an organization, no matter how small, you have the opportunity to speak. The more people see you speaking, the more likely they are to think you are a leader. And the whole thing can loop from there.

For kids there are opportunities to lead and or speak in school projects, clubs, teams, and church. Pursuing those opportunities early open up future opportunities for success.

Adults aren’t shut out though. There’s a reason Toastmasters isn’t just about speaking, but also about leadership. There are opportunities in churches and PTAs. There are committees and cross-functional teams at work. There are condo and home owner associations.

To grow as a speaker, try being a leader. To grow as a leader, try being a speaker.

Question Your Assumptions

On a recent episode of the Real RX, a podcast hosted by doctors, they talked about aging in women. The official guidelines say that generally women do not need to get pap smears after age 65. The standard is in place because of two assumptions:

• Women over 65 do not have sex.
• If they do have sex, it’s with a long-term partner.

The problem is that often, both those assumptions are false. Relying on those false assumptions can lead to higher risk of cancer.

You can listen to the whole episode here:

If you’d like to hear more from Dr. Kim Brown, I interviewed her last year on my other show.

Another example that I’ve shared before is this. When I taught people to sell laptops, I talked about how I liked selling laptops instead of desktops because I didn’t have to lift a heavy monitor with the sale.

In the late nineties, that got a laugh. By 2005, new audiences no longer laughed. Why?

Because light weight flat panel monitors had replaced heavy CRTs in the market. The joke no longer made sense.

We have to question our assumptions.

Links

Call To Action

• To learn more aby or find his podcast, visit http://CoryTruax.com.
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2-Minute Talk Tips is the public speaking podcast that helps you become a more effective speaker in as little as 2 minutes a week.