I have a real gem of a tip for you today. It’s about reconnecting with your passion. I get so many people asking me how they can find their passion I thought I’d give you this little nugget.

• Passion is that driving force – that oomph that enables you to just keep doing what it is that you do
• It enables you to connect with your audience because if you speak from your passion your audience will feel an emotional connection with you
• If you don’t have passion – you won’t inspire passion in your audience

Reconnecting with your passion

• Every week – for the next 12 weeks
• Take 2 hours per week and do something you loved as a child
• Just you – no family, no friends, no spouse, no children
• Just you and your inner child
• Connecting with your passion is not something you will figure out in your head – it is something you will feel with your heart

There’s nothing more powerful than using a success story in your presentation to prove what you say is true.  And there’s nothing more influential than hearing how someone else has become successful to inspire people to action.

Why You Need To Use A Success Story In Your Presentation

This is a bit of a no-brainer but I thought I would spell it out anyway.  Why do you need to use success stories in your presentation?  The key benefits of using success stories are:

• They hammer home your credibility.
• They convince your audience that you do what you say you do – that you can deliver; the bigger the results the better.
• They prove you have market trust in you – this makes your audience more receptive to putting their trust in you.
• It uses social proof perfectly – other people have risked their time and money investing in you.  It worked for them so it could work for you.
• By using someone else’s words to promote you, and not just you saying how good you are, it’s a compelling call to action.

What Makes A Good Success Story?

A good success story in a presentation should be brief and to the point. It should be a balance of enough detail and enough emotional impact and yet still be nice and clear.

The lesson in the telling of success stories of other people is take them back to the place where they were emotionally.  Paint out that journey from struggle to success. Share these stories with your audience as faithfully as you know them.  This is a really key point – be honest in your success stories because if you aren’t, this lack of honesty will come back and bite you.

The 5 Keys of How To Make A Good Success Story In A Presentation

• The “hook” to grab your audiences’ attention
• Painting the Picture
• Prove Success
• Using Multi Sensory Language
• A Success Story for when you don’t have a Success Story

A success story in a presentation is not about proving how good you are at what you do, although it certainly does that. It’s about opening up the emotional place and allowing people access to it. And then of course, you give them the tool that allowed you to make the shift. It’s this change that makes all the difference in the world.

In my next article, we’ll break this down and examine the 5 key components in more detail.  So in the meantime, if you don’t have any success stories why don’t you ask your clients and ask them what they’ve been up to.  Get on the phone to them and see what successes they’ve had.  You could even run the world’s greatest testimonial competition!

Good luck!

How To Make An Impact

Public speaking is very much about improving our communication skills, for when we know how to communicate effectively (to one person or to an entire room full of people) we also know how to inform, inspire and persuade others.

Each and every time you open your mouth, you tell the world who you are.  People form opinions about us, based not only on our appearance but also on our communication skills. And while many people go to great lengths to look good, dress professionally and so on, very few people take any sort of action to improve their communication skills. And believe me, there is nothing more effective than standing on stage for improving your communication skills!

Many of the world’s most successful people are also highly developed communicators. They have taken the time and energy to develop and hone their communication skills. As a result, they know how to inform, persuade and inspire others.

Public speaking is a sure-fire way to improve your communication skills.

Do You Want To Be In High Demand?

Strong communicators are in high demand.  Next time you pick up the newspaper have a look at the careers section – regardless of whether you speak on stage or not. Virtually every job listing requests that applicants have good or excellent ‘communication skills’. Your success lies in your ability to communicate your message – regardless of which platform you speak from. If your message is unclear and you appear unconfident, this dramatically impacts on your end result.

But just like any other skill, public speaking is a skill which must be learned!

So, why don’t you make a point to practice your presentation and hone those communication skills even further?  You can never stop learning how to communicate more and more effectively – and this will serve you in almost every walk of life, be it professionally or personally.

Here’s a question : why would you want to speak in public at all?  What’s in it for you?  Public speaking is (apparently) the number one fear that most people have.   This is such a shame as there are so many benefits to becoming a speaker – for your business, your bottom-line AND for your own personal confidence. 

The Top Five Benefits Of Public Speaking

1. Increased Self Confidence

Once you have mastered speaking in front on an audience, whether it be in front of a crowd of ten or a crowd of thousands, your confidence levels will go through the roof.  Do this, and you can do anything.

2. Reach More People

If you have a vision which is close to your heart, a vision which could shape the world, and you want to share this,   does it make more sense to talk to one person at a time, or a roomful of people?  Which method will spread your vision faster?  Remember, a vision flies when you stand on stage.  You give it wings.

3. Make More Sales

Regardless of what you are selling -  your ebook, your 3-day seminar, your coaching or your membership site, you will multiply your sales and in far LESS time when you speak to a hundred people as opposed to  selling one on one. This is a MASSIVE benefit of public speaking – the opportunity to make more sales in one sitting.

4. Build Credibility

When you are on stage you become an authority in your field.  People look up to you.  Their opinion on you changes simply because you are standing on stage.  This credibility will open up more opportunities and earn you more recognition which in turn builds credibility and gets you more opportunities.  It’s a winning cycle.

5. Make Big Money

I saved the best benefit for public speaking for last.  Public speaking is one of the easiest and best ways to make money.  Big money.   I’m not suggesting this will happen the first time round (although it can and it does all the time) but if you have researched your market, determined your niche, sent out a compelling message to this market and added tonnes of value to your product, then why not?

So, now you’ve seen the benefits of public speaking, why not go out there and stretch your comfort zone?  If you’ve never spoken at an event (but always secretly wanted to), is now the time to book your first one? If you’ve only ever spoken to smaller audiences, could now be the time to step up to the next level?  If you’ve spoken to large audiences, what could you do differently that will stretch you?
There’s always another step out there.  Perhaps now is the time to take it.

This is the second part in a series of 3 Behind the Scenes tips on influence. In this tip I talk about the second step to influence – inspiring your audience. This content is taken directly from my Presentation Profits Intensive seminar.

• To inspire – breathe life into the dreams of your audience
• You’re not asking them to believe in you, you’re asking them to believe in themselves
• Get them to take action that will make their lives better
• Paint out a bright picture of their future
• Get them to see their grand vision

Creating emotion has a few key elements that cannot be missed. These are:

1. Awareness
2. Intention
3. Vocal strength and flexibility

1. Awareness

The first key is to recognize the power that the voice has in impacting and creating change in another human and as such, how this can generate more sales.

It has been said that the words that we choose are only 7% of the message that we communicate.  38% of our message is due to our tonality, and 55% of it is due to our physiology, our physical action.

So over a third of your outcome depends on your voice.

Create awareness of your own voice and use it dramatically.

Listen to how you use your voice, listen to the vocal range that you have.

Start to listen to other people’s voices, how they use them, and then start to bring awareness to the extremes that you use in your own voice. Do you have extremes or is it all flat lining? 

You will make more money from stage AND make it easier to listen to you if you can work on your voice variation.

2. Set the intention

These are the intentions you will want to set if you want to make more money from stage:

• That you will start to expand your vocal range
• You will create moods with your voice
• You will carry your confidence in your voice
• And that your voice will take people on an emotional journey.

3. Vocal Strength and Flexibility

If you start to learn how to use your voice in a powerful manner, then you’ll find that it will be more powerful for longer, and you will be able to preserve and conserve your voice.   You want to use your voice in such a way that it touches the hearts and minds of the people in your audience and thus create more sales from speaking.

Don’t Be Just Comfortable, Be Memorable
If you’re committed to becoming, not just a profitable speaker, but also a memorable speaker, then the next step is to get masterful with your voice.

Be the sort of person that when people leave the room they continue to talk about you, not just because of your content, but because of your style, your charisma and your ability to take them on an emotional journey.   And be the sort of speaker that makes massive money from stage!

So, What’s Next?
Well, my suggestion would be to go and see a high drama movie!

Listen to the way these highly trained actors use their voice to create mood.
Notice the high, the loud, the soft, notice the pace changes, notice the volume changes.
So this week I want you to spend the whole time listening to people with a new intention and then see how you can utilize this in your next speaking gig.

And remember, have fun!

Making the time to develop your voice increases your ability to emotionally move roomfuls of people and in turn increases your conversion rate.  Public speaking is an area with the potential to make a lot of money so it makes sense to invest time on your voice.  Remember….

Your voice becomes your money-making machinery.

Developing your voice also:
Builds your confidence on and off stage
Having a strong and powerful voice builds and carries your confidence to every member in your audience.

There are two sides to this coin:

1. It’s your voice that will give you away if you’re not confident.
2. A confident voice will cause you to feel more confident in your presentation and in yourself generally.

So with a good strong confident voice you’re going to really make that lasting impression we are after.  It is a positive feedback loop.

It enables you to perform and create whilst on stage

A powerful and flexible voice gives you the ability to create the most incredible moods. These are the moments where it is just you and the audience, hanging on your every word, feeling your every nuance.
Your voice enables you to create a full palette of moods:

• Conspiracy: “shhh- don’t tell anyone but…”
• Expectation:  “when all of a sudden, you would not believe it…”
• Pain: “It was the most heart-wrenching decision I had ever had to make…”
• Elation or hysteria:  “I was stunned, rapt, we were wildly celebrating…”
• Seduction: “As I looked at the options, I could tell there was really no choice but to…”

You name it…with your voice, you can create it.

When you become a master of creating mood in your audience, what happens is you become a master of the emotional journey of your audience.

A salesperson who is in control of the emotional journey of the person in front of them can control the action they take on that journey…and there you have it – “sales” in a nutshell.  This is why sales from public speaking is so powerful.  You’re not just converting one person, you’re converting hundreds!

When you can control the emotional journey of your audience you can control the action they take on that journey.

So, next time you stand on stage with the aim of making sales, why don’t you spend some time focusing on creating mood in your audience and then see what happens when you take them on an emotional journey.  You never know what magic might happen to your conversion rate!

Speaking is a key area in almost every business, be it negotiations, promotions and of course, speaking and selling from stage. 
This makes it ALL THE MORE important to know just how powerful your voice can be. 

Your Voice Is Your Money-Making Machinery.

Understanding this will make you a truly exceptional speaker with the power to move roomfuls of people AND make you huge sales from your public speaking.  If you’ve ever watched any great speaker, the people that stand out in your mind well after the story has ended are those who create a mood in the space. They convey emotions so powerfully that it takes you on the journey with them.
Interestingly, sales are about the emotional journey too. A big part of being a speaker and taking people on an emotional journey is the use of your voice.   An even bigger part of being a speaker is to make sales.

How Improving Your Voice Will Make You More Memorable, Captivating and Entertaining As A Speaker

There are many great and profitable speakers out there who have never considered how improving their voice could benefit their sales, so that’s where you already have a leg up on them!

Whilst your voice is not the most important thing that will directly impact your sales from your public speaking on the day, it WILL directly impact how memorable, captivating and entertaining you are as a speaker…so think of those referrals and the long-term goals of your business!

In other words, WHY should you consider becoming a vocal artist?

The benefits of becoming a vocal artist

• If you learn to protect your voice and rehearse effectively you will have a long and profitable career as a speaker
• Great vocal control builds your confidence on and off stage
• Powerful vocal technique gives you flexibility to perform and create whilst on stage

If speaking is a key element of creating your business, be it promotion, sales or communication, your voice becomes your money-making machinery. If your voice is not in shape then essentially you are losing your uniqueness in the marketplace and losing sales from your public speaking.

Remember, your voice is your money-making machinery, so what can you be doing right now to start caring more for your voice?

The venue and environment you select when doing your presentation is as much a vital part of what you do as everything else.

You want to choose somewhere that supports your message and adds to what you want to achieve. For Example: Don’t choose somewhere dark and gloomy if you have a bright and sunny message.

The place you choose to have your presentation will have it’s own story to tell. Make sure you find out what that story is (if it isn’t obvious) and make sure that it is in alignment with what you will be speaking about.

In order to become a speaker that moves hearts and minds and is memorable, you need to use an element to your language that is unforgettable.

Like Shakespeare did in his plays, if you can use verbs in a powerful way in your presentation, you will find it all comes to life.

This is the same trick that copywriters employ – using active verbs in their copy makes it come to life and its the same in your presentation. Using active verbs in your language engages the audience in a more powerful way.