We have practice public speaking, we have prepared this talk. Thank you now very ready to deliver Well, there are some tips I can give you about delivering a talk well, which many people wouldn't know. Firstly, first of all, and in accordance with the last chapter where James talked about being fit to speak, on the day of the talk, it's very important to give yourself fuel. So this would be a great breakfast. For example, if you're doing a talk in the morning or towards lunchtime, you want some lasting energy. You don't want to have something that's going to burn out really, really quickly.

So loads of chocolate for breakfast store and lots of carbohydrate wouldn't necessarily be the best thing. Fruit. Oatmeal porridge, as we say in Scotland. That kind of stuff is really good. Don't overdo the coffee or tea the caffeine. Hydration is extremely important.

Your vocal cords work when They're nicely hydrated. So sipping water. Ideally room temperature water is something I do very much before every talk, you know, when I get into the room, I'll grab a bottle of water and I'll just be sipping it and gargling with it as well. And then if you can gargle it can do that very quietly. But it's a great way to keep your vocal cords hydrated. Some people prefer herbal teas of some kinds or tea with honey in which is very nice again for keeping your vocal cords nice and lubricated.

Again, I would say loads of coffee or tea just before you speak is not necessarily the best thing to lubricate your cords. Now having sipped water all the way through, do remember, very important to make sure that you pay a quick visit before you're due to go on. I always do that just when the doors open. I've checked in advance there's a there's a loop through that back door over there by the stage So I can go there, make sure that you're going to be comfortable. When you're on stage. There's nothing worse than getting that one.

And then you're the third speaker from the beginning. So you're sitting waiting for an hour before you go on stage. And by the time you get on, you're really uncomfortable, I can tell you, that's not a great experience. I've got two other tips on this slide. Vocal zone. I use those a lot.

They're very nice for again, giving your your vocal cords a little bit of a sheen, especially if you happen to have any kind of roughness in your voice. They are very, very good if you've got a sore throat or a cold or anything like that. But I tend to pop one in before I speak anyway because they've got lovely things like mental and tincture in them. And for me, they work very well. So I carry a pack of vocals on with me at all times. And the other thing not to be frightened off depending on the size of the gig.

The size of the talk is using makeup, whenever you're going to be talking on stage and spotlights to hundreds of people with video cameras with a huge picture of you on either side, it is worth it. Gentlemen, I'm talking to you as well. I mean, obviously, females are much more accomplished and proficient and practiced with makeup than we males are. But I have found the female in me, I've got in touch with my feminine side. And Jane who accompanies me on all the talks does make up for me in anything but small gigs, it's worth it. If you're going to be on camera, it's worth it if you're going to be on stage in front of a large number of people under big lights.

So don't be frightened of playing with makeup even if it's just to take the shine off a shiny dome. That's a pretty good thing to do as well, particularly if it's hot. It's nice if you feel nervous if you're going to look a little bit sweaty or shiny, it's very good to use a little bit of makeup. Now, having said those things, those tips We need to warm up. And Jane has given you the program to do on the day, the stretches that are going to help you enormously to feel physically at your peak when you walk onto that stage very important to do. I want to give you two other tips to add to Jane's program.

First, and the second highest viewed TED talk of all time, I believe Amy Cuddy's talk is about power poses. So here is the typical power pose and doing this power pose. It has been, I think, pretty well established. There's been some controversy but I think they've come back and said no, it has been now validated. Doing this causes a release of testosterone in your body and that is the hormone that makes you feel strong and confident and fearless. So go into a restroom, a bathroom, a closet, a passage anywhere away from people and stand there and give a big power.

Pose, and you start to feel much more confident it's worth doing. Then we have the vocal warmup exercises that I recommend. Now I keep these down to just the basics, because it's easy to remember a small number of things, there are infinite numbers of vocal warmup exercises out there. And if you want to pursue them and look up books on ways to affect particular styles of speaking and so forth, I can particularly recommend Cicely Berry's classic book, your voice and how to use it to where she has a huge range of different exercises to use, which will affect all sorts of different aspects of your speaking. For now, this is the routine I use before I speak every single time and it's one I really recommend to you. It's the basics, and it will do very well.

First of all for your lungs as you sit and listen to me. Lift your arms above your head and breathe in and then as you breathe out Want you to make a kind of moaning noise and lower your arms. So with me now that may be the first deep breath you've taken today unless you've just done James breathing exercises. Let's do it one more time. Hi, ah, you may have felt your ribs open out and move the lower ribs at least. That is a really good feeling to have.

And again, these exercises you don't necessarily want to do these in front of people when the doors are open. We'll find a little restroom or somewhere where you can do this in relative peace and quiet for the lips. So now we move on from the lungs, which is where your your voice starts to the the musculature of your mouth which is incredibly important, especially early in the morning. If you mass not quite awake really don't quite you're not on the money. You need a mouse to be with you and completely responsive. So two exercises first of all for the lips.

The first is to make the sound bop, bop, bop. So let's do it together. Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. So that's very good for getting your lips stronger. And the other one for the lips is to make the sound you used to make as a child when you were cold, which is simply and with me. Now your lips have woken up heavenly.

Let's move on to the tongue. Two exercises again for the tongue. The first is the word LA. And that is very pronounced with your tongue flicking right from as far back as you can get towards your palate to the front of your mouth. So La, la, la, la, la, la la, la. Okay.

And finally for the tongue with me, we're going to roll and our tummy months to learn how to do this I couldn't used to do it. If you can't do it now you can learn for those of you who can let's roll an AR now that is like champagne for the tongue, your tongue is now completely awake and I'm sure you can feel that your mouth and your tongue and your lips it all feels much more alert and awake and with you the last exercise is the strongest and it's the one I will do if I can only do one for any reason. This is the one I will choose it's called the siren it's from the acting profession. And it is making the sounds we and or in a kind of sine wave where we is as high as you can possibly go with your voice which may be higher than you think.

And or is as low as you can possibly go so with me oh oh Now, your voice probably, if you test it out, just say your name or something. Do you hear your voices lower, my voice has been pitched down, I would say a good tone always happens. And remember, we like deeper voices, deeper voices are more authoritative. This is a very good way of pitching your voice down before you go on. also listen for any inconsistencies in your sine wave. There may be little breaks.

And you can smooth them out by keeping going until they've all gone and you know your voice is fully fully ready for you to go on. So those are your vocal warm ups, you're now fully warmed up, and we have to approach this the stage, whatever it may be in front of a class in front of a meeting room, or in front of a big auditorium. There is a place you're going to stand and deliver. Now as you approach That place, I want to give you four things to do. The four things I always do when I go on stage, and these four things will help you enormously to focus and deliver well. The first one is brief.

As you walk to your spot, whether that's a TED red.or a, you know stance in a in a meeting room in front of four people take a deep breath. Your voice is just breath as we found, a deep breath counters, any nerves you might feel, and it's a wonderful way of eliminating that shaky voice that you might have. If you're a little bit nervous and you're breathing very shallowly. A deep breath will handle all of those things. It's also the fuel, as we've said, for the voice, your voice is just breath. So you need a deep breath in order to be able to deliver.

So breathe. The second thing to do is expand your awareness as we discovered in chapter Seven. Expanding awareness is very powerful, it smooths your face. It makes you look less troubled or stern or frowny. And it allows you to take in the whole room, it puts you into a much more positive emotional state, I tend to find, and it's how I like to speak to a room. So expand your awareness go into seeing the whole room.

And again, you can practice that with that finger wiggling exercise that we've done, until you can just snap into this. The third thing is your stance. So you've breathed, you've expanded your awareness you turn around and face the room. Take your stance, feet with roots going into the ground, you can do that visualization to give yourself a solid powerful base string at the top of your head, everything dangling from it so your shoulders are back and down. You're standing with everything vertically stacked one above the other, not locked, unless you have a trembling knee or something like that, in which case you could lock it back. Otherwise, knees slightly flexed everything loose.

Able to move, however looking solid, and neutral and ready to go. Finally, smile. Smiling is great. It means I'm pleased to be here I'm pleased to see you, I'm confident it makes a connection with the audience. It's a very, very good way of starting a talk. So deliver, fueling yourself up with the right food with hydration, and then warming everything up.

So just as you would with a machine like a car, in the old days, you would make sure it had fuel you would warm everything up, man, you have to look after yourself. You know, we're not high tech electric cars which you can just jump into and draw often. You do have to warm things up. We're a bit like old fashioned machinery treated with loving care. And then a power poses can help enormously as well. As part of your warm up routine, the you've got the the physical warmup chains given you you've got the vocal warmup I've given you and as you Your spot, best breathe, expand stance, smile.

Now, I want to give you a couple of warnings. And these are the most common mistakes I see people make. So these are in the spirit of Try not to do these things. And then I want to end with the most important thing of all. The first mistake I see all the time is people turning around and speaking to their screen the screen behind them, if you're speaking to the screen, the audience is looking at your back, you're not connected with them, and you become effectively a member of the audience. It's a very unfortunate style of delivery.

Please try not to do that. If you've got a comfort monitor in front of you, you should be able to see what's behind you anyway. Even on your Presenter View, you can see the screen that people are looking at, you know what they're looking at you made it so you don't need to turn around and look at it, especially if you're not using bullet points which I've suggested you don't. So please try not to speak to the screen unless there's a particular thing You want to turn around and indicate in which case you're looking at the audience, with your arm pointing at the screen behind you. The second, as I've said, I think is probably best avoided unless you're awfully good at it is reading, writing. Try to give yourself enough to remember everything you're going to say.

But enough wiggle room to be able to say it in an interesting way that relates to the audience in the room. At that moment, you're speaking into a listening, it's dynamic. It's there right now. And if you write everything down way before, it may not land, you may want to change it. So reading writing is a little bit static and formal, and not necessarily the best way to go. Lack of variation is a killer.

If you're on for I mean, I speak for anything up to 60 minutes. And if I spoke for the entire 60 minutes like this, and every phrase and sentence went like this, I can pretty much guarantee to you After 10 or 15 minutes, most of the audience would really be struggling to stay awake. You know, you can load people into really sleep it, it's almost hypnosis. In fact, it is a form of hypnosis to induce a trance in people with a repetitive cadence that can be your vocal style. It can be your pace, it can be your prosody. Do try to keep varying as you go.

That means Gapps changes in pace changes in emphasis where you are, I just woke you up, didn't I? So, doing that is enormously important. Otherwise, you know, it's a billiard ball, it's completely featureless. And what you want is much more like Planet Earth with all sorts of interesting things going on which are different and require different levels of attention or different engagement with people. Another issue which I see very often is a physical tic of some kind or another. I will give you a couple of these Examples of physical tics leaning on one leg and then going to the other leg, walking around in small circles over and over and over again, moving from a point over there to a point over there, and then back again, and then back again for no reason at all.

I have no objection to anybody walking. Tony Robbins, for example, tends to Prowl like a tiger when he's talking. That's the energy of the man and that's his style. However, if it's unconscious, and meaningless, and distracting, then it becomes an issue. And certainly some of the things I've seen people do repeated gestures, repeated physical manifestations of nervousness or simply unconscious movements, they continually make these things do become distractions. Try to avoid them.

Videoing yourself is a great way to get out of those. running over I've said is very rude to my Book, if you have been given a time for talk, rehearse it and make sure you're on that time, I have seen people pulled off stage at TED. I remember one occasion where there was a senior senior business person who declined to take part of the rehearsal when you could this was quite a few years ago, and turned up and gave his talk. And at the appointed time, he was less than halfway through it. They knew that because he told them what the script was. And they pulled him off and they said, I'm really sorry, you've got one minute, could you please wind up the second half of your talk and just give people the summary, and we need to move on because it's not polite to the next person.

And it isn't, you know, I have seen events. I've spoken at events where there's no discipline, very little discipline. I remember one event, I won't say which country it was in, where it was running an hour late, after the first hour by which it was supposed to have had three talks in the first round. The first speaker was still going on and then the other two talks are an hour long. Well, you need Make sure you don't do that to people. I think it's rude.

And it's unprofessional. So practice, make sure you are on time. Watch your timer. And please don't run over. Now this is almost the opposite of going over time. But it is something many, many people do get to the end of your talk, everything's gone really well the audience start to applaud you get that the person's gone.

What happened? They rushed off. Many of us are not that comfortable with affirmation with receiving applause like that. It's important to do that. The audience want to give you thanks. You've just given them a gift.

They want to say thank you. And it really behooves you to stand there. Look at the audience nod a little bit. I'm not talking about grandiloquent gestures with your arms spread waiting for bouquets to rain down on you know, I'm talking about graciously receiving affirmation. Not a few times. Thank you very much indeed, you can say thank you very much indeed.

And then walk off but don't rush off the moment. You Finished because people feel short changed. Now, to finish with the most important thing of all, be conscious. When you're on that stage when you're in front of people when you're in that important conversation even, it's so important to be on to be conscious, everything being intentional, everything being conscious. I don't mean mechanistic, I don't mean that you have to play act. I simply mean, turn on your consciousness and be aware of what you're doing, and how you're affecting the other people or person and also what listening you're speaking into at all times.

I love speaking on stage actually, because it's the time when perhaps I'm most powerfully conscious aware of everything around me. It's a real stimulus. It's a great opportunity to increase your level of consciousness. I do commend To you, and if you carry out what I've suggested in this chapter, practice, prepare, deliver, you take care, you make sure you're delivering the right material into the right listening. And now you have the capability to do it through this course. You will have a lot of fun with this.

And I believe you too, will enjoy moving to new levels of consciousness and take public speaking perhaps, as a means to an end. A means to become more conscious, more confident, more expressed as a human being. That's what I wish for you