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The best thing is that it doesn’t matter how experienced or inexperienced you are. The only thing that you need to emphasize is your speaking ability. The better you speak, the better you will be paid. The more you establish yourself as an expert speaker, the more opportunities are bound to come your way.

Listed below are some ways that will help you further your career goals by using professional speaking:

-The Simple Fact: It is obvious that whenever you speak, people lend their ears to what you have to say. That means that whenever you speak, you are the expert. The more experience you have in this respect, the better your chances for success in this field will be.

-Expose yourself: This simply means that you have to make your presence felt in the market. By doing this, you will ensure that you are available to do what you do best and cater to your clients. Print out some brochures, announce what you do in an online advertisement, include your name in programs, etc. When you are launching yourself in the field of professional speaking, marketing and professional exposure is everything.

-Meeting new people: Professional speaking is one of the best ways to meet new people from your field as well as to develop new contacts. Some of these new contacts will be only too happy to add you to their speaker list, in case they need anyone to speak at a particular event.

-Attract attention: This definitely doesn’t mean that you need to do something that would attract unwanted attention. It simply means that you have to attract attention by giving an outstanding speech. The best way to do this is to invite the media whenever you are delivering speeches. This will help you to make yourself popular in the field of professional speaking.

-Learn constantly: Speaking should be more of a learning process than anything else. To achieve this, you have to listen to other speakers in an effort to learn something new. Write down points that you find interesting in order to improve yourself as a professional speaker.

-Participate in seminars: There are many free seminars that you can attend to make yourself familiar with the professional speaking atmosphere. Such seminars are basically the hotspots for speakers; and companies that are in need of public speakers usually attend these events as well.

In order to sharpen your skills at professional speaking, join a professional association or sign up for a course that offers training in the field of professional speaking. This will help mold you into a better speaker, sharpen your skills and further your career goals.

Tony Jacowski is a quality analyst for The MBA Journal. Aveta Solution’s Six Sigma Online ( http://www.sixsigmaonline.org ) offers online six
sigma training and certification classes for lean six sigma, black belts, green belts, and yellow belts.

One of the questions I most ask people who come to me for personal coaching to increase their public speaking skills is this. “Did you warm up before speaking”. And most of them just stare at me as if I am completely mad and don’t have a clue what I am talking about. I then explain that even professional singers and professional actors and athletes all warm up before going on stage or performing in some way.

Why should it be any different for public speaking?

The one fundamental difference between people who are capable of decent public speaking and people who are not is the difference in the state of mind. Good speakers have mastered their nerves (well mostly) and appear polished on stage. I will repeat. The only difference is the state of their mind.

It is therefore of enormous importance to warm up in order to become calm and this be in the optimum state for speaking. One of the best ways to warm up and change your state is slow deep breathing.

The preferred way is known as 7/11 breathing because you breathe in slowly to the count of seven and then breathe out slowly to a longer count of eleven. The main reason you breathe out longer is because the parasympathetic nervous system receives a signal that all is becoming calmer when your breathing slows but this only occurs on the exhalation rather than the inhalation so you need to give this system every chance you can to pick up this signal correctly.

The next thing to do is to make sure that you breathe all the way out so that you hardly have any residual air left in your lungs because it is carbon dioxide build up in the body sends you into fight or flight and signals for adrenaline to start flowing and we all know how that feels, not very nice.

Remember that this technique is also breathing from the diaphragm or belly area rather than just expanding the chest. If you are not sure you are doing it right simply place a hand on your diaphragm and you should feel it rising and falling as you breathe in and out slowly.

Belly breathing fills the lower lobes of the lungs correctly which in turn fill all the little alveoli that transport oxygen around the body. Once your body is well oxygenated the stress response will correct itself because the amount of carbon dioxide to oxygen will be rebalanced.

The last thing to mention which is probably the most important is to do the breathing for a minimum of ten minutes with fifteen minutes being better. i know many people who say to me that they tried this and it didn’t work. so I asked then how long they had done it for and they replied that they had done it for a few minutes only.

If you feel quite stressed it will take at least fifteen minutes to correct the imbalance caused by too much carbon dioxide in the blood so the trick is to take a look at the place you will be speaking in beforehand and find a quiet place there on early arrival and start your breathing.

Please believe me, this will work if you do it for fifteen minutes or more. Athletes don’t take two minutes to warm up.they spend at least fifteen to twenty minutes and singers often take longer. Pavarotti, the famous opera singer, once stated that he would never sing without warming up his voice first of all.

So 7/11 breathing for at least fifteen minutes is the trick to changing your mental state before public speaking.

Lee James Heather is a therapist and personal coach who inspires people through his free personal development website - http://www.growthjunction.com. Its subjects range from change techniques to consciousness research and work/career makeovers

We all know that public speaking is one of the most feared endeavors for many, many people especially when we are not called on to do it very often. There are many ways to combat public speaking nerves but for some reason the very people who are the most scared do the least to get over this fear. There is one main thing we have to remember when we have this type of fear. It does not allow us to think straight because all or most of our brain activity moves to the rear of the brain where out ‘fight or flight’ reactions belong. There is minimal activity left in the frontal parts of the brain where our fine thinking skills are located. And what do you think will happen if we do not have access to fine cognitive processes, yes, our speaking will deteriorate even more.

The answer is first to realize that this happens physiologically for a reason and the next step is to discover how to put this activity back where it belongs, in the frontal or neocortex as it is known, so a clearer thinking mind is available to you when you need it.

Lets look at a few ways to do this then. Doing it in stages or smaller chunks will make this much easier. Firstly I really recommend that you do some slow deep breathing for a while, at least ten minutes, getting control of your breathing is a crucial first step to taking back an empowered mental state. Make a conscious effort to go somewhere quiet and breathe in to a count of seven using your diaphragm or belly (not chest breathing) and breathe out to a count of eleven seconds, After ten minutes you will find yourself calming down tremendously. It is the slow exhalation that lets your autonomic nervous system know it can calm down now and will begin to take your body away from a fight or flight response.

Well done, the next step is to start rubbing your hands together for a few minutes and then suck your cheeks in hard whilst continuing to breathe. this may sound strange but the reason for this is that it moves activity back to your frontal brain area. Then you can look straight ahead and let your eyes move gently outwards so you become aware of the peripherals of the room you are in. this feels a little different at first but try it again, just move each eye outwards to observe the periphery of the place you are in. When you are in peripheral vision there is no ‘internal voice’ in your head saying things like ‘i’m nervous’. You will be aware that there are no pictures in your mind either (of the large audience for example) that could further unnerve you.

The peripheral vision technique actually quietens your mind right down to a still point. Practice all the above before you actually do the speaking, at least a few weeks before and they will really help enormously.

Lee James Heather is a counselor and the webmaster of http://www.growthjunction.com - a large and ever expanding depository of personal development information ranging from public speaking skills to meditation and work/career information.

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