It is said that most people fear speaking in public more than death. Personally, I have been running Public Speaking Courses for over 20 years for management and staff of most corporates in Southern Africa and I don’t buy it. I think if someone put a gun to your head and said speak in public or die—you’d find that lost Winston Churchill oration within you. So before you decide to send your whole team on one of our Public Speaking Courses, read about what the real benefits are to your organisation.
By far the biggest fear of most striving individuals is fear of failure. We have seen it in our public speaking courses. It has a cousin—fear of rejection. Rejection is the pathway to failure—if you fear it. While failure itself is real, the fear of it is a condition of the mind.
Earl Nightingale’s legendary tape “The Strangest Secret” says, “You become what you think about.” If that’s true, why doesn’t everyone think “success?” The answer is a combination of what we expose ourselves to, and how we condition ourselves. We live in a world of negative conditioning. The three big motivators are...fear, greed and ego. They drive the world business process—and they drive the world economies.
Our society preys on the fear factor. It’s in 50% of the ads we see (the rest are greed or vanity). Ads about life insurance for death and disability, ATM and credit cards being stolen, injuries caused through road accidents, tyres that grip the road in the rain and security systems which will prevent your home from being robbed or you being “attacked”. If you are exposed to this nega-hype for long enough, you will become “fear-conditioned.” The delegates attending our hundreds of public speaking courses are proof of that. You will not believe their transformation.
Once society instils fear in you (or if you allow it to), it’s natural that you take it with you into the workplace. It transmutes into a fear of failure. This fear intensifies in workplaces with hostile environments and bosses and managers who threaten, intimidate and ridicule.
In the midst of this we struggle for success. And while we think we fear failure, or at least don’t want it around us—we all face it in one form or another every day. Everyone fails. But, failure is relative. It’s measurement is subjective. Mostly it occurs in your mind. If you exchange “I failed” for “I learned what never to do again,” it’s a completely different mindset. The status of failure is up to you.
During my lifetime I have experienced many “failures’’ but through experience I have developed a different way of looking at it (lots of practice and from saying it over and over at my public speaking courses around South Africa). The failure or result was linked to my thoughts and actions at the time I learn from it, or I ignore it.
Thomas Edison - failed over 10,000 times before the discovering light bulb. Jake White, Joost van der Westhuizen, Percy Montgomery, Sean Pollock, and Mark Boucher all had huge disappointments on their way to the top - some are still having them :). Were these men failures or have they simply refused to quit?
Here are the five typical reactions to rejection or failure:
1. Curse it.
2. Deny it (a nice way of saying lie about it).
3. Avoid it and let it “fester”.
4. Make an excuse about it.
5. Blame others (the easiest thing to do).
6. Quit.
Failure actually only occurs when you decide to quit. You choose your results.
Here are a few simple things you can do to avoid getting to the “quit” stage:
o Look at a failure as an event or as a result.
o Look for the why, and find the solution (If you look at ”no” hard enough, it will lead you to yes).
o List possible opportunities which have arisen as a result of this “event’.
o Ask yourself what have I learned, and try again.
o Don’t mope around with other failures—go find a successful person, and hang around him/her.
Here are a few complicated things you can do to avoid getting to the “I quit” stage:
o Create a new environment- reset your vision and your goals
o Cultivate new associations – find and mix more with successful people.
o Constantly strive to acquire more knowledge – most importantly, apply it.
o Create a new mind set – take a check up from the neck up/ read more self help books and attend more seminars.
It’s always too soon to quit.
Afraid to speak, or afraid to fail? Which is the greater fear? When you consider the complications and ramifications of failure, making a speech to 1,000 people, by comparison, is a walk in the park .. come and experience this for yourself on our public speaking courses
Dynamic Presentations and The Training Corporation present Collin Jennings who trains and coaches blue chip corporates, sports professionals and individuals. Products include leadership Development, Interpersonal Skills, Transformational Coaching and Body and Mind practices.
Dynamic Presentations is a Division of The Training Corporation of South Africa and can provide effective management communication, leadership and team management courses for corporates around the country to a minimum of 8 delegates in
1. Leadership & Management
2. Presentation Skills-Effective Speaking
3. Interpersonal Skills & Team Management
Click the Contact buttons above for more information - top corporates have used and adopted Dynamic Presentations training courses. references from South African top management and corporates are available on request.
Public speaking is an essential skill that can improve the effectiveness of management communication and is essential management training for getting results. Leadership and management skills and interpersonal skills and team management, produce exceptional bottom line results for businesses interested in improving their management training. So if it is personal transformation of your management team through public speaking courses then contact us now.
