Whether you’re a coach, consultant, author, service provider, business owner or have any other kind of career, the key to success is to have a set of reliable skills in your arsenal that will set you apart from your competition and help you advance your career. Every industry benefits from certain specific skill sets, but no skill is as universally powerful as public speaking.
When most people think of public speaking, the image that comes to mind is someone standing on a stage presenting to a large audience. While this is certainly the most literal interpretation of public speaking, the fact is that speaking skills come up in a huge variety of other situations as well.
Just to name a few, coaching your clients in a zoom-meeting is a form of public speaking, delivering a pitch to investors or potential partners is a form of public speaking, running a meeting is a form of public speaking, even having a conversation with your coworkers or employees could be considered a form of public speaking.
When you boil it down to its essence, great public speaking is really just powerful and effective communication, in public.
So how can public speaking help advance your career?
Below are what we believe to be the 5 most influential ways it will help you.
01
Get Better Results (regardless of what you do).
Perhaps the most influential form of communication is direct face-to-face conversation. It’s the easiest way to connect with someone, share your ideas and inspire them to help you on whatever your mission is in life. The beauty of great public speaking is that the skills are transferable to all of your communication, and better communication = better results.
Think about how much more smoothly life could flow if you were able to clearly and confidently articulate your message in any conversation you ever had? Your team would understand you better when you shared your vision with them, your clients would clearly see the value of working with you, your personal relationships would improve… the list goes on and on.
Public Speaking is about so much more than standing on a stage in front of an audience, it is about being able to clearly communicate your message to anyone you are talking to, and being able to do so in a way that they can connect with your message. The key to great results in life is great communication, and public speakers are some of the best communicators around.
02
You’ll become a more attractive leader.
Have you ever heard of The Stage Effect? Simply put, it’s the correlation between the size of someone’s audience, the quality of your presentation, and how badly people want to hear what that person has to say.
Think about it this way. If someone sent you links to two different videos, and one of them has 10 views while the other one has 10 million views, but you only have time to watch one, which video are you more likely to choose? The one with 10 million views, of course, because if 10 million other people thought it was worth their attention, it must be worth your attention as well.
Public speaking works the same way. If you are able to communicate in a way that makes people want to listen to your message and follow you, other people will naturally want to hear what you have to say and follow you as well. If you have a message that is worth hearing and you can deliver it in a way that makes people want to listen, you will naturally become more attractive as a leader and people will want to follow you.
03
People Will See You as More Reliable, Confident and Effective.
People are naturally drawn to great communicators. Most people call it charisma. Being able to speak comfortably in public sends a subconscious message to the people around you. It sends the message that you are totally confident in what you do and that you can make things happen. People tend to hold speakers in high regard simply for their willingness to stand up and share their thoughts. This has an advantage for you because it can set you apart from other people in your industry.
Say, for example, someone at a convention has an amazing opportunity that would be well suited for many different people at the convention. If one of those people is a speaker at the convention while the others are just participants, there is a very high likelihood that the first choice will go to the speaker.
Why? Simply because they are a speaker, people naturally hold them in a slightly elevated place in their minds, so they are more inclined to want to work with them over other people. It’s an odd dynamic of human behavior, but it’s one that is well worth taking advantage of to advance your career.
04
You Will Be Seen as an Expert in your Field
It makes sense that the people who get asked to speak on certain topics are experts on those topics, right? People naturally assume that speakers are experts on the topics they speak about. Why else would anyone ask them to speak? The thing is, you don’t actually have to be the leading expert on your topic to be a great speaker. If you have a message that is worth hearing and you can deliver it in a way that people will listen to, your audience will view you as an expert in your field, even if there are other people who know more than you.
Think about people like Dr. Oz. Millions of people look to him for medical advice, simply because of his willingness to speak publicly about his medical knowledge. They don’t look to him because he is the best doctor, but because by speaking in public about medicine he has made people perceive him as an expert. You can do the same for your career. Speaking publicly about your topic will set you apart from your competition and it will make people naturally start to see you as a go-to expert in your field.
05
Those Who Ask Shall Receive…
And those who confidently and effectively ask large audiences receive even more!
Every time you invite people to an event, make a sale, land a new client, pitch an investor, start a new venture… All you’re really doing is asking people to support you in whatever it is you are trying to achieve. Great public speakers have the ability to ask for that support in the most captivating and inspiring way possible, and they get to ask a whole lot of people all at the same time.
The person quietly working away on a world-changing goal without telling anyone about it is far less likely to get the help they need to make that goal a reality compared to the person working on a world-changing goal and speaking about it to rooms full of people. When you can communicate to the world what you want, you have a far better chance of connecting with someone who can give it to you.
The point is, public speaking is a powerful skill—perhaps the single most powerful skill you can master in life. Warren Buffett once said he thought a person could more than triple their lifetime earning potential simply by getting good at public speaking.
But now what, how do you develop great public speaking skills?
The thing is, if you’re like most people you already have them.
You have a rich history of life experiences that no one else has. You have a unique perspective only you can share. You have knowledge that could be life changing for the right person. What you need now is a framework to put it all together, a formula to take all those stories and the information you have collected through your lifetime and put it together into a talk that can inspire, captivate and move your audience.
Once you have a framework like that, you can deliver any type of talk, whenever and wherever the opportunity arises.
To give you that framework, we invite you to our free live masterclass with Speaker Nation’s founder, Eric Edmeades, where he will be breaking down the exact process he uses to turn his life’s experiences into talks that captivate, motivate and inspire millions. (As he has done with many of his talks.)
In this masterclass, he will be taking you through the exact method he used to create the talks that added rocket fuel to his own career.
Click on the button below to register and secure your spot.
You have nothing to lose, but a whole lot of influence and career advancements to gain!
