How TalkPower Came To Be

Although  the serious nature of fear of speaking in public is largely ignored and the subject of jokes and ridicule, a reliable solution for this condition has previously   remained a mystery. Nevertheless, the problem has ruined careers and caused untold grief as year after year  millions of people refuse promotions, drop out of Graduate school or fail their oral examinations, refuse keynote address opportunities, are unable to make a toast, read in church, participate at meetings, accept awards, ask questions in groups, fail at job interviews, avoid important presentations by turning them over to staff, suffer sleepless nights weeks before a speech, refuse to pursue careers where public speaking is involved and suffer the shame and humiliation of low self esteem as a result of this “problem.”

Due to my unrelenting drive to discover a solution for this mysterious and devastating problem of Public Speaking Phobia, Fear and Anxiety,  for the past 20 years I, Natalie H.Rogers, MSW have been  conducting Public Speaking Workshops. Taking a most  unusual approach, I turned my attention to exploring the relationship between performance, the mind, and the body to develop a practical system for eliminating public speaking dysfunction. Relying upon my experience as an actress, psychotherapist, yoga practitioner and trainer I was able to use my workshops as a laboratory. As a result after  careful research and observation I have produced a completely new training technology, comparable to the way star athletes are trained for  competitive events. This includes a  series of simple repetitive muscle –memory techniques for developing inner control and  permanent pubic speaking skills,  plus a variety of original concentration and focusing exercises. These exercises actually train the brain (neural patterning) for the skill of performance(Performance:any situation where an audience is looking at you).

Verbal Graphics

The TalkPower Action Formula (refer to TalkPower Kindle) provides a perfect vehicle for stylizing the look and sound of your talk. Verbal graphics is the TalkPower method of breaking a speech down into sections and then shaping the speech with strategically placed pauses. These pauses give your presentation the same design you would find in a poem of an essay. Just as the written page is designed with headlines, margins, bold print, bullets, and spaced, spoken word needs the contrast of silence and sound for style, beautiful design and dramatic effect.

Verbal graphics create the space (silence) for the audience to take in and reflect upon what you are saying. These pauses create a rhythm that brings your presentation to life. The rhythm causes the speaker and the audience to move back and forth, figuratively, in unison. This movement is the catalyst for the intensity that occurs between speaker and audience when so-called dynamic speakers perform. For example:

Speaker: When I was doing my research for this talk I got the strangest call. (Pause)

Audience: (leans in)

Contrast this with the following:

Speaker: when I was going my research for this talk I got the strangest call. It was a young man that claimed he had been abducted by aliens!

As you can see, a pause brings dramatic tension to a speech, providing the speaker with a mysterious quality called presence or charisma. I can think of many well-known speakers (I will not name them because I do not wish to embarrass them) who speak well, but are not thought of as dynamic presenters. They speak in endless even blocks of sentences with no pauses at all. In that case, the entire speech becomes one long ribbon unraveling with no values, colors, shades, or changes.

If speech without the logical pause is unintelligible, without the psychological pause it is lifeless

                                                            -Constantine Stanislavski

Even if the speaker has an interesting voice filled with a variety of intonations, he/she will not project a dynamic personality if he/she does not pause properly. What begins with and exciting liftoff for the audience when the speaker first appears, fades as the speech progresses and the attention of the audience suddenly begins to diminish. I have seen this happen on numerous occasions, and I thought, “if only there were 10-15 well places pauses in this speech, the speaker would surely receive a standing ovation instead of polite applause.”

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Where to Look

Should you make direct eye contact with the audience before you begin speaking? The answer, you might be surprised to learn, is no.

Making eye contact (which means having a nonverbal eye to eye conversation) distracts you at a time when you need your concentration to focus on your first words, your adjustment to this high visibility, the strangeness of the distance between yourself and the audience, your rapid heartbeat, and the general shock of the performance situation. You need time, about 30 seconds or even more, to get used to all of this.

ADJUSTING TO THE AUDIENCE:

The next phase involves your awareness of the audience, so that you can slip into an easy and comfortable relationship with them. This will happen automatically if you stand still when you first face your audience. You don’t have to do a thing except squeeze your toes three times slowly before you speak your first words. This phase is enormously important. If you do it correctly you will feel very much in control.

WHERE TO LOOK:

Look straight ahead at the faces in your audience, perhaps at their foreheads or even their hair. Look neither too high above their heads, nor so low that you appear to be looking at the floor. Making eye contact is not necessary because if the audience looks into your eyes and you are looking at their faces, you will feel as if you are making eye contact. The necessity for direct eye contact is a myth. For example, when you go to the movies and become involved with the story you laugh, you cry, you may become terrified, yet none of the actors in the screen make eye contact with you. In the same sense, when you are speaking, in is not necessary for you to look into the eyes of your audience for them to feel involved with you. Just don’t look above or below their faces. After two or three minutes have passed, and you feel you have established yourself in front of your audience and your presentation is flowing, you may choose to make direct eye contact with one or several of the members in your audience, as long as it does not disturb your concentration. Do what feels comfortable to you.

While keeping your gaze at the face level of your audience, do not fix anyone with a prolonged stare. Actively staring into the eyes of your audience implies that you are perusing them “Do you like me? Is this good?” Don’t look for approval. The audience looks to you for leadership. Lead!

SCANNING THE ROOM:

When you fist stand in front of your audience, please—do not mechanically scan the room, moving your head from right to left as if your eyes where great flood lights emanating from a controlled tower. This is extremely awkward and looks unnatural. Instead, as I have just said, when you first stand in front of an audience, before you begin to speak, be as still as possible and look straight ahead in the general direction of their faces. A smile is nice, but it isn’t essential. If you can smile a small smile, smile. If you want the complete attention of the audience, your physical stillness, rather than your physical activity, will make this happen.

As your speech progresses and you become more comfortable, from time to time, you can move your head slowly, looking at your audience to the left or right. Once again, naturalness and comfort should decide when and if you look at various people in the room. If at first this pose seems stiff and robotic, do not change back to your old nervous behavior. Eventually, you will relax into physical stillness so that you feel comfortable and empowered.

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A Stuttering Success with TalkPower

Dear Natalie
 I wanted to follow up from last Thursday, when I brought my nearly 14 year old nephew in for a speech coaching. He has suffered for nearly 10 years with a stutter, especially in front of his peers in class or with strangers and under stressful conditions in general. You taught him your technique in the space of an hour session. Today is 4 days since he saw you and I have noticed a marked improvement in his speech patterns. His parents have both also remarked on it, especially his mother who pays particular attention to his speech. When I asked him how he feels, he also said that he felt that the physical exercises you instructed him on have helped him speak more clearly. I have been amazed at how effective your technique has been in such a short time. My nephew has been seeing speech pathologists on a regular basis since the age of 7 and he has not seen much improvement. So I am that much more impressed that you have been able to improve my nephew's speech so much more with 1 visit than 7 years of speech pathologist sessions. He also had a speech improvement device, the SpeechEasy, fit which did very little for him. All that time and expense over the years, not to mention the emotional trauma experienced by my nephew, I wish I had known about you 10 years ago. I believe your technique can change the quality of life for so many who suffer from this condition, and I wish that it could be made more widely known and available, especially to children like my nephew. I am very grateful to you for having done this for my nephew, and I am looking forward to him learning and improving even more with your workshop.
Warmest regards,
Stan Altan
http://www.talkpowerinc.com/stuttering.html