Early to rise, first to speak

Confidence, Discipline

I am an early riser.  Or rather, I pretend to be an early riser.   My alarm goes off at 5:05 a.m. I start drag myself out of bed with varying degrees of success. This morning I assiduously avoided hitting the snooze button, immediately hauled myself up, and staggered straight into the wall on the…

Pages from kid’s books

Performance, Tactics, Uncategorized

Reading out loud is one of the best ways to get in speaking practice. Whether you’re working on diction, expression, breath work, or something else, grabbing some reading material makes practice a lot easier than taxing your brain trying to come up with original content.   Just about anything can be fodder for your speaking…

Headspace / Workspace

Creating

For years, my primary workspace was a desk in an office.  For a few brief, shining months, I even had my own office with a door!   At all of these jobs, I had quite a bit of time to twiddle my thumbs and work on my own projects. It should have been perfect: I…

Small Risks

Confidence

Habit and confidence. These are the friends of anyone who wants to do something extraordinary. They are also the most high-maintenance friends you could ever imagine having. Neither of them simply appear out of thin air. If they did, we wouldn’t be so interested in exceptional people. Even those we know who seem to naturally…

Dipping your toes

Tactics

There are two ways of dealing with a fear: either by plunging in whole-body or dipping in your toes and gradually getting in deeper. One way isn’t better than the other, and neither method is going to apply to one person all of the time. That being said, I find that when it comes to…

Off the Introspective Cuff

Connecting

One of the keys to being able to ramble out a good, solid off-the-cuff or spontaneous speech is introspection – and lots of it. The purpose behind this introspection isn’t to indulge in endless navel-gazing.  That’s what Facebook and Instagram are for.  This self-reflection is to develop an acute awareness of your values, your personal drivers,…

Hard work

Famous speakers

I’m currently watching yesterday’s episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.  His guest was Bill Clinton, who recently delivered an extraordinary speech at the Democratic National Convention.  Clinton is one of the most highly regarded contemporary public speakers and delivers hundreds of speeches every year. When Jon Steward asked Clinton if he could tell that…