“Perhaps the most important physical act onstage is making eye contact.”
– Chris Anderson, TED Conference curator, from his article, How to Give a Killer Presentation, Harvard Business Review (June 2013)

So, where the heck do we get a chance to practice making eye contact, anyway? We can’t wait until we’re in front of an audience. We need a way to practice making good eye contact ahead of time. Here’s how I do it:

• Practice making eye contact (one-on-one): Look directly into the eyes of people that are paid to look right at you: cashiers, baristas, food servers, gas station attendants, car valets, doormen, taxi cab drivers, front desk hotel personnel, hair stylists. Since these people are paid to look directly at you they won’t feel uneasy being looked at. And you’ll get a chance to practice in broad daylight.
• Practice making eye contact (room full of strangers): This step is a couple notches up from making eye contact with people that are paid to look at you. And it’s well worth the exercise. While at my local coffeehouse (which is perfect because it’s public and semi-social) I take the opportunity to look up and scan the faces of everybody in the room. This is more scary than looking directly into the eyes of people that are paid to look at me, but the circumstance – a room full of strangers – is one of the best places for me to practice looking directly into people’s faces. It’s very close to what it’s like to stand in front of an audience and give a speech.
  • I don’t “stare” at people from across the coffeehouse. I casually glance, slowly, across the crowd.
  • Sometimes people catch me looking at them. That’s okay! I just continue to glance around the room. I must get used to strangers looking back at me, especially if they think I’m being weird. Being comfortable with people thinking I’m weird is the biggest step toward being good at public speaking!
  • Public speaking is being weird. That’s why good public speaking makes you a badass!

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1. I breathe.
2. I smile.
3. I stand up, often. I shake my legs out periodically. And I also stand on one leg and roll the other leg’s ankle.
4. During soundcheck, I specifically stand on the stage and look out over the empty chairs in the event room and I take a couple of deep breaths and bring the room into my body. I also do a “twisting” dance with my feet so my shoes get a good feel for the stage. Getting “in touch” with the stage is important (at least for me).
5. During the contest, I stand and watch each of my competitors and purposefully cheer them on. This really helps me stay active, alert and “in the zone.”
6. Mini plastic bottle of water. Keeping my mouth and throat hydrated. Because dry-mouth is a confidence-killer.
7. When I’m in the back of the room getting mic’d (before I go on stage), I take a couple of easy deep breaths, smile, stand straight and make sure my shoulders are squared. It’s a bit of a fighter’s stance, and that “imagery” is on purpose.
8. When I stand in the wings with my handler, waiting for my name to be called, I look out over the packed conference room and smile at the whole audience – taking in the whole moment. They’re not looking at me yet because I’m not on stage yet, but all the other contestants just stared at the stage (or the floor) while they waited for their name to be called. I wanted to be more proactive with the audience before I was actually in front of them on stage. It helped me feel natural.
9. Whenever I have self doubt I take immediate action: I smile, breathe and square my shoulders and “lean into” it! And I’ll take a step forward so that I’m physically moving “in front of” doubt.
10. Mental alchemy: About 24 hours before the contest, I started to think in terms of “being invited to speak” rather than competing against other speakers. This changed how I “felt” about the whole event. I had been “invited to speak.”

Screaming confidence™ comes from on-the-spot re-direction of all incoming doubts. It’s like steering a car to avoid potholes and on-coming traffic. Smiling, breathing and standing “forward” – all these physical adjustments – really helps me stay in the zone!

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1st-place Reid Walley – 2013 District 39 Toastmasters International Speech Winner

On behalf of Capital City Toastmasters, we wish to congratulate you for winning the speech competition at the District 39 Conference last night. You delivered a heartfelt and dynamic speech which engaged the audience right from the beginning to the very end! It proved to be a challenging competition with 8 participants, but you did it!!

Reid, we are so proud of you and wish you success at the International Conference in Cincinnati in August. You have our support and we will be cheering you on!

Best,
Ceci Perez Dunn
President, Capital City Toastmasters #142

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For me, my “fear of being judged by others” is most acute when I discover myself judging someone else. Would I have the guts to speak my judgement out loud to that person’s face? Absolutely not.

I’m a hypocrite. I’m a hypocrite because I say I don’t like being judged but I judge others ALL the time. And I’m also a recovering judgementalist, as I catch myself judging people’s grammar, mannerisms, clothing, music, car – everything. I’m totally guilty.

I now work toward “catching” myself while I’m making a flash judgement and correcting (“releasing”) myself. I follow up my judgement of another person with a blessing (a “release”). I don’t always catch myself, though, so the person doesn’t always get released with a blessing. But I try and correct myself halfway through the mental punch that I’m wielding at them and redirect it into a mental thumb’s-up.

It ain’t easy. People are rude, loud, slow and arrogant. They listen to crappy music and talk about boring subjects. But who am I to judge. I have my own happiness to cultivate and all the negative judgements that pop into my head just mean I get off track and lose focus. It’d be a lot easier if I just didn’t have negative judgements of others in the first place. One step at a time.

Abraham Lincoln’s quote comes to mind: “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.”

So I continue to catch myself in the middle of judging someone and release it into giving them a blessing, a thumbs-up. Which frees me up to get back to work on building my business, writing my next speech and beautifying life’s garden. My goal is to literally bless everything as it comes into contact with my 6 senses.

Until then, “catch and release.”

Image credit: Freds | Dreamstime.com

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The best public speaking tip I ever received was from my former Toastmasters Area Governor, Kevin Hrim, who said:

Reid, you were speaking so fast, cramming so much into your speech, that I couldn’t keep up with all of the information. I won’t remember any of it. Your speech would have been 10x better, and made more impact, if you cut out half of the content.

I didn’t believe Kevin at first, but I eventually followed his advice. And my audiences have been more positively impacted ever since!

Less is more.

Cutting your speech content in half means you’ll look like you know what you’re doing. You’ll come across as calm, composed and confident. Let your excitement speak for itself in bite-sized, memorable content. Don’t drown your audience with a fire-hose of information. Just use the sprinklers. You’ll have more positive impact!

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Business Model Canvas, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), stacks and stacks and stacks of empty pizza boxes and enough Red Bull to power an army. When I arrived in the evening everybody was busily hunkered down and crankin out code, design, marketing, iPhone emulators, iPad demos, Facebook graphics, logos – the works.

A creative, buzzing, energetic vibe filled Hacker Lab‘s coworking space. And while most of the teams filled the open workspace area, other teams worked in cozy office spaces.

I got a chance to demo a few products and talk to a few entrepreneurs who pivoted from their idea the previous night. Good to see fast iteration cycles, validated learning, customer development, multiple business models and light-weight MVPs.

There were Business Model Canvas printouts everywhere. Some peeps even re-drew them on Hacker Lab’s wall-sized whiteboards, while others captured them in PowerPoint. In fact, almost all of Hacker Lab’s walls are actual whiteboards. And almost every inch was jam-packed with multicolored Business Model Canvas diagrams, MVP requirements and User Interface mockups.

My brother, Lance Walley (co-founder & CEO of Chargify) also happened to make it by for a quick look around and talk shop with a few of the startups.

Looking forward to Sunday’s final presentations!

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Entrepreneurs then had to form teams with who they thought were the best developers, designers and marketers available in the audience. Everybody’s basically getting “married” for the next 54 hours. One of the early presenters, after pitching his idea, taped his letter-sized pitch sheet (which read: “DIY Video Content”) to the brush-end of a broom and held it up for the rest of the pitching portion of the evening. I liked his idea of keeping his pitch title in the eyes and minds of the developers, designers and marketers in the audience for the longest period of time.

Startup Weekend Sacramento continues for the next 2 days at Hacker Lab. Pretty excited to see who makes it out the other end as a winner on Sunday evening.

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Boy, was grandpa wrong!

How do you persist under the watchful eye of parents, grandparents, teachers, and other “adults” in your life? – when they can clearly be wrong. How do you follow your passion and instincts when it’s sometimes an uphill battle against the “wisdom” of your family, friends and well educated people?

How do you think for yourself long enough to actually make a difference?

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Paul Harvey’s full 1978 speech:

Harvey opens the speech with clarity and dignity. And he knows when to pause. Harvey also knows when to speed up and cram a bunch of words together so that we experience the hustle and strain of being a farmer. His delivery highlights the fine balance of a farmer’s life of grit and tenderness. This is the power of Harvey’s speech. It sticks to your heart. It’s well worth studying his delivery.

Dodge Ram’s Superbowl 2013 TV spot (Harvey’s speech is edited to fit the TV ad timeframe. The above video contains the whole speech):

Farmland photo credit: © Rob Bouwman, Dreamstime.com

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You’ve just made your New Year resolutions. A brand new beginning. A brand new you! 365 days from now, you’ll stand as a winner!

Every one of the next 365 days wants to see you win! In fact, the very last day, day 365, is the most excited to see you win! That’s the day you prove you’re a winner to your family, your friends, your employees, even your naysayers – and TO YOURSELF!

Nothing great happens alone. Invest in you; make it happen. Invest in a life coach. Make a 365-day commitment to yourself. You CAN do it! We’ll make it happen together.

Hire me, Sacramento life coach Reid Walley, for lightening-fast analysis and deep impact, for stunning clarity and Screaming Confidence!™. Scroll down to the bottom of this page and get in touch with me. Do it right now!

We’ll stay on track, focused, committed. We’ll keep going when it’s tough. And every day you’ll be able to look yourself in the mirror and say:

“I’m kickin’ ass”!

And you’ll stand – a winner – every single day!

WARNING! My style ain’t* for everybody. And we may not be a good fit. After our initial consultation, we’ll see if we still wanna travel down this path.

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*Bad grammar is fun.

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