When clients approach us for presentation and public speaking skills training, they understandably seem excited about getting into the technical components of being a great public speaker ­— vocal exercises for a more authoritative voice, phonetics lessons for better pronunciation etc.
 
These certainly should be among the features of a quality public speaking programme. However, if you think that the keys to achieving these outcomes are exercises such as intense vocal training and phonetics drills, think again.
 
Jumping to these components before addressing more fundamental issues will make the road to becoming a great public speaker longer and possibly more arduous. I take the approach of working intensely, yet rapidly, on ‘self’ issues before plunging into technical training. By addressing these issues first, you’ll put yourself on the fast-track to becoming a confident, credible, authentic and memorable speaker.
 
Reframe Your Jitters as Excitement
 
One of the biggest problems people face is jitters. Some have such intense worries about stage fright that they begin having nightmares months before they’re due to address an audience.
 
A certain amount of nervousness can be good. It ensures that you put effort into preparing what you’re going to say and that you stay ‘on’ throughout your time in front of an audience.
 
However, to keep nerves from becoming destructive, instead of asking people to calm down which can be incredibly challenging, we take people through a reframing exercise that enables them to transform jitters into excitement.
 
Remind yourself why you care about this speaking opportunity. Why is this audience important to you? By telling yourself out loud how excited you are about this speaking opportunity and the impact it will have on your audience, you’ll begin the process of reframing it as an exciting event rather than a formidable task.
 
Another technique that’s proven to be effective is to visualise the entire event from start to finish and imagine it going really well. Imagine what your audience looks like throughout your delivery and imagine them feeling satisfied and walking away with something valuable at the end of your speech.
 
Learn How to Manage Your State
 
We also take our learners through powerful state management techniques to enable them to stay ‘in the zone’ throughout their speech. These usually involve recalling a past event where they felt positive emotions (e.g. confidence). Remembering what that looked like, sounded like and felt like is the first step to being able to use it as an anchor that you can call upon whenever you want to recreate the same magic for any speaking engagement.
 
Pause and Breathe
 
Many people take breathing for granted until they’re made to realise that they’re not doing it right. Many of us breathe while heaving our chest up and down. However, you’re not breathing right unless you’re breathing into your stomach. In other words, as you breathe, your abdominal area should expand.
 
This breath when exhaled gradually will support your words as you speak. Breath support ensures your voice sounds richer and more resonant. It also prevents your voice from trailing off at the ends of sentences and eliminates vocal fry (a low and scratchy voice, especially at the ends of sentences).
 
Pausing and breathing every now and then while speaking will also help regulate the pace of your speech while reducing stress and anxiety.
 
The best performers would tell you that committing to breathing exercises on a daily basis will strengthen your lungs and vocal muscles in the long run. As a result, delivering your message authoritatively in your best voice will become effortless.
 
In short, to accelerate your journey to becoming an amazing public speaker, slow down, take a step back, commit to the fundamentals and most of all, breathe!
 
This post was contributed by Communications Strategist, Consultant and Coach, Bharati Jagdish

Bad bosses, the biggest reason why employees leave their jobs. A gaping hole in parental – children relationships. These are some situations that arise from a lack of Emotional Quotient (EQ).
 
And what about Spiritual Quotient (SQ)? Do you see some people around you filled with it? They are on a Mission, driven by a deep Purpose. Others are listless, doing the same thing over and over again with no difference in results.
 
Many say that you either have it or you don’t. MYTH! Every human being has it. The question is;
 
“Have you tapped into your EQ and SQ?”
 
Some access these skills from young, encouraged by parents who live with heightened self-awareness. Others have to search for ways to access their EQ and SQ domains. Often these come with painful occurrences where learnings are developed and a deeper awareness drops internal filters.
 
Those who have been through this sort of experience may behave and operate differently to before, understanding a dimension they never saw before. Today, Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) makes this task easy.
 
Working with the unconscious mind that communicate through the five senses, anyone can do this. Simple processes taught at the Licensed NLP Practitioner which is an international certification, gives people tools to access their deepest side.
 
Imagine if you were bad at parenting or a leader lacking the ability to communicate with your stakeholders. Understanding the tenets of emotional intelligence would lead to astounding results. People begin to warm up to you and are willing to go the extra mile to make things happen.
 
If you are someone who lacks EQ and SQ skills your first port of call is to attend an NLP Program. It is the fastest way to acquiring models that will lead you to exponential results.
 
Change one thing about the way you operate and experience the profound results it brings!

Following on from our blog about how to solve problems with Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), a common corporate application is to model high performers. After all, the entire body of knowledge that is called NLP today, emerged from modelling high performers in the field of psychotherapy.
 
Today, we need to think different. We need to understand context of the environment we are in, the players we are up against and the resources needed to achieve our Vision.
 
Whether in an organisation or personally, the ability to extract “excellence strategies” from a high performer with a view to transference to the team, is fundamental to success.
 
Wouldn’t every senior leader want this? Isn’t this something a parent could teach their child?
 
Setting ourselves apart from the masses is the key. Eliciting internal strategies of high performers is knowledge that most do not have. An NLP Practitioner Certification course is the starting point to learn the ropes.
 
A lady in one of my programs found she had no internal dialogue when she was ready to close a deal. She was a high performer in sales. Others in the sales team elicited their closing strategies and realised that they could eliminate this aspect of what they did.
 
True to form, team performance elevated to greater heights as soon as some of them amended their internal strategies. It was only one step that needed a change.
 
Many said it was unbelievable. They wished they had learnt it before. Wouldn’t you want the same for your teams?

​“He is too stingy,” I heard Susan utter to her friend John, about their colleague Alan that afternoon. They were at work overhearing a conversation which was a rather common pushback from Alan. “I can’t afford it. I won’t be attending the event.” was Alan’s typical retort to invitations. 
 
Susan was accustomed to hearing this. Her judgment based on what she knew of Alan had John immediately raise his eyebrows. “Are you kidding? Do you know his circumstances?” asked John. Susan realised she didn’t.
 
Alan was an introvert. He kept things to himself. John was one of the few colleagues he confided in. Alan had been extremely careful about spending on any ancillary expenses as his main focus was to see his three children through university.
 
This type of situation often happens in daily life. We judge rather than reframe — an efficient technique in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) especially when a problem seems hopeless. 
 
The ability to change the meaning of any negative experience into something useful. It’s natural to panic or be fearful when you’re faced with big problems.  But this just magnifies the problem in your head.  It’s more efficient to solve problems with NLP by shifting your focus.  It helps to clear your head and enable sensible decisions.
 
In another daily application, let’s say you break up with your partner.  You feel like it’s the end of the world.  Let’s reframe it by looking at it from a different angle. What are the possible benefits of being single?
 

• freedom to do anything you please
• time to focus solely on self
• valuable lessons from this breakup help future relationships
• you are ready for the adventure of  new potential relationships

 
NLP training teaches you how to see a different meaning to a problem, one you probably never saw before. This ultimately leads to a more positive experience of the situation.
 
Learning the art of reframing is taught at the NLP Practitioner program. For me it is an invaluable tool to have, especially when a reframe leads to a lighter meaning such as humour.
 

​Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is an epistemology, a model of how we know what we know. Co-founded by a Professor of Linguistics, Dr. John Grinder and a computer scientist, Richard Bandler in the late 70’s, NLP was discovered through observing high performers in the field of psychotherapy.
 
Consisting of more than a hundred processes, each geared towards a specific type of problem, NLP began to gain traction from people in other industries. Today it is used in corporates to resolve conflict, deepen rapport, manage states of mind and more. 

At an organisation level, NLP is used to align cultures, heighten motivation and build high performing teams. As the CEO of an organisation, wouldn’t you like to spike the performance of your teams? 

This could only happen if you understood behaviour. As Aubrey Daniels (the man who coined the term Performance Management) so rightly said, “Business is behaviour and behaviour is business.” In order to get the most out of your people, you need to know what makes them tick. 

The gold nugget in all this is that you don’t need to become a psychotherapist to do this. NLP provides a series of models that are based on how human beings use the five senses to experience life. 

Designed with process in mind, engineers, IT programmers and other process-oriented industries would take to this like a duck to water. As Grinder & Bandler observed how three psychotherapists were ahead of their counterparts, they coded and structured their findings in a simple-to-use model called NLP.

Today, learning NLP is merely signing up for a course to attain these processes. Conducted in a fun but intense seven days, these international certification courses can be found globally. 

In following blogs I will detail some applications that are most useful to individuals and organisations.