Speak Up And Stand Out: Are Public Speaking Courses The Secret To Success?

Jan 23, 2023

Question: if you wanted to learn the piano, play basketball, or become a singer, would you hire a teacher?

I guarantee you would, especially if you wanted to play piano, basketball, or sing at a professional level.

The funny thing about public speaking is that most people will tell they hate it, but they've never taken a speaker course???

Are Public Speaking Courses Worth It? If you read all the reviews across speaker trainers it's a resounding YES.

Some of the benefits of taking a public speaking course include:

Improving communication skills: Public speaking courses can teach individuals how to effectively convey their message and ideas, which can be beneficial in both personal and professional settings.
Building confidence: Public speaking can be nerve-wracking, but a public speaking course can help individuals develop the confidence they need to speak in front of an audience.
Overcoming fear of public speaking: Many people have a fear of public speaking, and a course can help them to overcome it by providing them with the necessary tools and techniques to speak confidently in front of an audience.
Learning how to use different presentation tools: Public speaking courses can teach individuals how to use different tools such as PowerPoint, Prezi, and other visual aids to enhance their presentations and make them more engaging.
Networking opportunities: Public speaking courses can also provide individuals with the opportunity to network with other like-minded individuals and learn from experienced speakers.

Long Story Short: Get a Sneak Peak At My Speaker Training Course.

Shameless plug: I deal with the uber-rich... I have young clients who have two speech teachers, and two piano teachers at the same time. The teacher who gets the best results and wins the most competitions gets to keep the client.

If I didn't produce results then I wouldn't get any referrals and my business would have ended in 2020.

What About Speaking Courses Offered By Toastmasters International and Dale Carnegie?

I graduated with the Distinguished Toastmaster Certification and got a certificate from Dale Carnegie; yes, they offer the above benefits but they also share three major flaws:

Limited flexibility: both speaker training courses follow a specific program and structure, which some people may find restrictive and inflexible. I know I do.
Outdated methods: I and many others find that methods and techniques are outdated and not relevant to many of today's business environments. It took me 9-years to graduate from the Toastmasters program! It's all self-paced, and Dale Carnegie is boring (no offence) but my class was mostly about taking notes.
Cost: Dale Carnegie is ridiculously expensive, and Toastmasters never teaches you how to make money. You could spend a lifetime at Toastmasters and never make a dime as a speaker. Toastmasters isn't expensive at the club level, but if you go to conferences, travel to other clubs, enter contests, or go to events... it can add up, especially when thinking about the time commitment. Some toastmasters commit 10 hours/per week to volunteer. I Emceed a conference for Toastmasters and organizers spent 30 hours per week volunteering and then paying to attend the conference! I had to pay to attend the conference as the Emcee. Nobody gets in for free!

Outside of the major organizations, there are plenty of us underdogs. The question becomes; how do you go about selecting the right course for your confidence-building speaker journey?

The solution could come down to a single word: coaching vs, training.

A coach's job is much different than a trainer's job.

The Public Speaking Trainer's Job:

I like to compare speaker training to basketball training. You show up to basketball camp and you are there to learn what?

Learn how to pass, shoot, dribble, and trade secrets outsiders would never understand.

Well, if you show up to work with me then you learn about speech structure, stage presence, body language, and trade secrets outsiders would never understand.

The foundation of basketball is passing, dribbling, and shooting.

The foundation of speaking is speech structure, stage presence, and speech delivery.

The speech structure is the easiest to master. You just need to remember three things:

opening remarks
body
closing remarks

As you go deeper you learn to structure jokes, persuasion, and hook phrases.

The speech delivery is your ability to deliver the above speech structure in an engaging way. Delivery includes your use of sentence structure, body language, facial gesturing, tonality, and the stage. The job of the trainer is to have you do exercises that master the delivery.

You can tell how good a trainer is by how much they talk. Imagine going to the gym with a fitness trainer and the trainer doing full sets of exercises with you. That would take forever, you may as well have a gym buddy.

Now think about how quickly you learn when you work one-on-one with a good trainer. They change your life in.

Listen up...

Your public speaking anxiety and frustration don't only happen in front of a crowd. Everybody tells me, " I can speak to one or two people just fine, but I can't do it in front of a crowd."

Honestly, I wouldn't want to watch you in front of a crowd! You would most likely bomb, just like I did. I stunk at speaking for years, and I wasn't scared of speaking. Do you know what happens when you learn public speaking in front of a crowd?

All your bad habits happen, your fidgeting, you're apologizing because you feel like your bombing but ramble on because your brain has left the building. You also develop bad body language habits like armchair hands. Not to mention that everybody sees your humiliation!

The trainer's job is to show you Leadership Development Exercises and make sure you do the exercise correctly, and repetitively until you get it right. The better the trainer, the easier it will be to get the exercise. The more you practice the simple exercises, the better habits you'll have when you do get in front of a crowd.

You might work with me and still think you are scared until you talk to a live audience and they praise you.

"I've had executives come to me because they went to a company event with "professional speakers," and they saw one of my clients speak using the exact techniques I taught him... and they said my client was the best speaker there. They all became my clients."

Fun Fact: the larger the organization, like The Speaker Lab, or the Millionaire Speaker, the less individualized attention from instructors. Unless you fork over $$,$$$$. You don't pay them for the training, you pay them for the resources. But realistically, they're not a good place to start especially if you aren't speaking full-time. There's too much going on and you will be overwhelmed.

You might be considering a private trainer like Suzannah Baum, or Patricia Flipp, and I would say go for it. I don't know Suzannah that well yet, but I've picked up tips from Patricia. I've researched most of the trainers in my industry, like Level Up Living here in Vancouver. He also has a lot of great reviews.

I like to know what's shaking in my industry. A while back I paid to work with a million-dollar speaker named Tom Antion. Tom has credentials 5 feet long but nobody I mention the name to has ever heard of him!

There are many speaker coaches out there, you could take two courses at once.

The Public Speaking Coaches Job:

The coach is the visionary, the wisdom, the dream builder. The coach gives pep talks, watches your videos back with you, and helps you with your presence.

Your presence starts the moment someone hears your name. When they think of you they think... {hopefully something good goes here}. It's how you walk and talk on and off stage. It's how you present yourself.

Not everyone is going to evaluate your presence with the same weight. Your sister thinks of you differently than your ex-lover thinks of you or your raving fans.

But, there are things about you that everybody who knows you would agree on. That's your presence.

Presence is the hardest to master. You have to become the person you want to be.

The Biggest Problem I Find...

Most of my competitors are coaches and not trainers. Even old Tom Antion, tells you how to pass, shoot, and dribble. He even shows you how to do it, but he just can't translate that into specific training exercises for you. You have to learn that on your own.

In Conclusion:

A lot of people shop around before they come to me, but if you read this entire article (that's less than 1% of the readers) then at least take a look at the program I'm offering.