The Best Way To Practise A Speech

By Bilyana Georgieva, TEDx Coach, Digital Nerd and Multi-Award Winning Professional Speaker, founder of The ‘Red Dot Speaker Star’ (formerly ‘Soon-To-Be a TEDx Speaker’) Program.

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In his Mindvalley’s “How To Become A Master In The Art of Public Speaking” Eric Edmeades shared that when he delivers long public speech he prep very quickly but if its a short 15–20 min talk he puts many hours to craft his script and practise it.

Why an experienced speaker like Eric would say and do something like this? and Why all big speakers do the same as Eric?

Because the shorter time you’ve got on stage, the more time you will need to prepare yourself to make the impact you want.

This is particularly relevant for TED and TEDx talks as you’ve got 18 min only

The best way to practise your speech is to follow the way your brain works

Here is how:

1. Your brain will first remember the words and the sentences
2. Then will start remembering the paragraphs
3. It might confuse and mix the sequence between the paragraphs until you learn them
4. Once the sequence is memorised you can now learn how to use your voice intonation so it doesn’t sound ‘flat’, like you are reading or citing
5. Next is to teach your brain and body to perform together, meaning you can learn which body gesture goes to which sentence.

Are you saying

“We all live to the same planet” and using the ‘lover gesture’ by opening your both hands

or

may be you are saying

“You’ve got this!” and on the “you” you extend your hand with open palm up ..

On TEDx stage we often hear a sentence starting with

“Remember this today ..”

Which nicely goes with the ‘soft warrior’

or the ‘hard warrior’, depending on your personality and the impact you want to do.

6. Once you memorise the words and perform them together with the body gesture, the brain is ready to memorise how to move within the red dot carpet, if you are on TEDx stage, or around the stage, if you are on a non-TEDx stage.

Remember, that one of the TEDx rules is that you can’t leave the red dot carpet as you will be outside cameras’ vision.

Speakers always move with purpose!

Different stories are in different places on stage and the red dot.

The biggest mistakes people make, especially when they haven’t practise consciously at home, are:

❌ (for TEDx only) leaving the red carpet and constantly remembering to go back. On stage that looks like someone constantly hopping out and in the circle. Funny for the audience, meanwhile very stressful for the speaker

❌ Walking side wise

❌ Twisting legs when speaking or the opposite — spreading widely the legs, the so called ‘cowboy posture’

❌ Moving hips left and right, putting the weight on one leg all the time

❌ Putting one hand or both in the pocket as speakers don’t know what to do with their hands.

A good practise is to

✅ take a neutral position of your body, where legs are open on shoulders length

✅ and have neutral position for both hands or one hand around the waist when you don’t use them for a specific gestures.

Experienced speakers invest their time in steps 1, 2 and 3 as the rest of the steps come naturally to them, due to all training and practices they had in the past.

If you don’t have such experience make sure you plan time in your calendar daily so the whole speech comes together as one piece. Only saying words won’t make the impact even you use good voice intonation! Adding body gestures and movement will help you emphasise and make your speech powerful

Remember:

The 6 steps I gave you today are crucial for your practise and need to happen in that exact order, otherwise your brain will be confused. If you skip a step and then go back it will take you longer time to be stage-ready.

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Sending you love and energy!

Yours,

Bilyana