The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking

The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking

By Dale Carnegie

• Business, social and personal satisfaction depend heavily upon our ability to communicate clearly to others what we are, what we desire, and what we believe in.

• When Julius Caesar sailed over the channel from gall and landed with his legions and what is now England, what did he do to ensure the success of his army? A very clever thing: he halted his soldiers on the chocolates of Dover; and, looking down over the waves 200 feet below, this already tongues of fire consume every ship in which they had crossed. And enemies country, with the last link with the continent gone, the last means of retreat burned, there was but one thing left to do for them to do: to advance, to conquer. That is precisely what they did.

• If you want to develop confidence, why not do the one thing that will give you security as a speaker? Perfect love, wrote the apostle John, casteth out fear. So does perfect preparation. Daniel Webster said he would as soon think of appearing before an audience half closed as have prepared.

• Abe Lincoln once said: I don’t like to hear a cut and dried sermon. When I hear man preach, I like to see him act as if you were fighting bees. Lincoln said he wanted to hear speaker cut loose and get excited.

• You must sell yourself on the importance of your subject. You must have the attitude that has inspired all truly great percentages of history – a belief in your cause.

• Joy yourself up to your full height and look your audience straight in the eyes, and begin to talk as confidently as if everyone of them owed you money.

• Almost every man is frightened when he goes into action, but that the course to follow is for the man to keep such a grip on himself that he can act just as if you were not frightened. After this is kept up long enough, it changes from pretense to reality.

• Speaking effectively the quick and easy way

• Speak about something you earned the right to talk about through experience or study
  • Tell us what life has taught you
    • Speakers who talk about what life has taught them never fail to keep attention of their listeners.
    • Speak of what life has taught you and I will be your devoted listener.
    • I’ve never heard of boring talk when the speaker related what life has taught him.
  • Look for topics and your background
    • How do you find topics? By dipping into your memory and searching your background for this those significant aspects of your life that made a vivid impression to you.
    • Most of us are interested in the way other people met and overcame obstacles and the environment in which they are reared.
    • Illustrations and examples from your early years.
    • But how can you be sure anyone will be interested in what happened to you when you’re young? There’s one test. If something standup Italy and your memory after many years of gone by, that almost guarantees that it will be of interest to an audience.
    • A real life picture of almost anyone’s life – if told modestly – is almost surefire material.
    • Your natural enthusiasm for your particular hobby will help get this topic across to any audience.
    • Unusual experiences. These are experiences that make the best kind of speech material.
    • Beliefs and convictions. Audiences do not relish a talk filled with generalizations. Please don’t consider the casual reading of a newspaper articles Fisher preparation to talk on these topics. If you know little more about a subject than the people in your audience, it is best to avoid it. On the other hand, if you have devoted years of study to some subject, it is undoubtedly a topic that is made to order for you. By all means, use it.
• Be sure you are excited about your subject
  • The only way to gauge the interest value subject was to ask yourself how interested you are in it.
• Be eager to share your talk with listeners
  • Three factors in every speaking situation: the speaker, the speech for the message, and audience.
  • The speaker must make his listeners feel that what he has to say is important to them.

• Prepare your talk with authority on the topic you have chosen: what do you believe this? When did I ever see this point exemplified in real life? What precisely Mike trying to prove? Exactly how did that happen?

• Assembly hundred thoughts around your team, then discard 90.

• The two examples the finest method I know to make an idea clear, interesting, and persuasive. Usually, are you several examples to support each major point.

• How can we cut acquire this most important technique of using illustrative material? Five ways of doing this: humanize, personalize, specify, dramatize, and visualize.

• Humanize your talk
  • The average speech would be far more appealing if it were rich with human-interest stories.
  • The richest source of such human interest material is your own background.
  • Personal story speakers tell are the suriest means of holding attention; don’t neglect them.
• Personalize your talk by using names
  • Usernames or use fictitious names
  • Nothing adds more realism to a story the names.
  • Imagine a story whose hero has no name.
  • If you talk is full of names and personal pronouns you can be sure of high listenability, for you will have the priceless ingredients of human interest in your speech.
• Be specific – fill your talk with detail
  • Use the 5-W formula every reporter follows when he writes a new story: answer the questions when? Where? Who? What? And why?
• Dramatize your talk by using dialogue
• Visualize by demonstrating what you’re talking about
  • Psychologists tell us that more than 85% of our knowledge comes to us through visual impressions. Public speaking, too, is a visual as well as auditory art.
  • When the best ways to enrich a talk with detail as to incorporate visual demonstration into it. You might spend hours just telling me how to swing a golf club, and I might be bored by it. But get up and show me what you do when you drive a ball down the fairway and I am all eyes and ears. Likewise, if you describe the air erratic maneuvers of an airplane with your arms and shoulders, I am more intent on the outcome of your brush with death.
  • Visual details makes talks memorable
  • It is a good idea to ask yourself, how can I put some visual detail to my talk? Then proceed to demonstrate, for, as the ancient Chinese observed, one picture is worth 10,000 words.

• The speaker who is easy to listen to is the one who sets images floating before your eyes.

• Paint mental pictures that stand out sharp and clear

• The greatest writers – Homer, Dante, Shakespeare – are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter. Their words call up pictures.

• Finalizing the talk

• Choose subjects you Ernest about.

• Almost all speakers wonder whether the topic chosen will interested audience. There’s only one way to make sure that they will be interested: stoke the fires of your enthusiasm for the subject and you will have no difficulty holding the interest of a group of people.
• Richard Washburn Child, a former American Ambassador to Italy, was once asked the secret of his success as an interesting writer. He replied: I am so excited about life that I cannot keep still. I just have to tell people about it. One cannot keep from being enthralled with a speaker or writer like that.
• I always rely on the speaker to supply the enthusiasm and interest.
• You cannot help us succeed if you choose the right topic for you. One area of topic is surefire: talk about your convictions!
• The greatest appeals and history of eloquence of all been made out of the depths of someone’s deep convictions and feelings.
• Learn more and more about what you can now consider a pretty good topic. The more you know about something the more earnest and excitedly enthusiastic you will become.

• Relive the feelings you have about your topic
  • The third person approach will not make much of an impression on your audience.
  • The more you relive the scene you’re describing, or re-create the emotions you fell originally, the more vividly you will express yourself.
  • Show your listeners how eager you are to talk about your subject, and you will hold their attention.
• Act in earnest
  • When you walk before your audience to speak, do so with an air of anticipation.
  • The spring in your walk gives the audience the feeling that you have something you are eager to talk about.

• Successful communication depends upon how well the speaker can make his talk a part of the listeners and the listeners a part of the talk.

• Here are some rules that will help you build up a strong feeling of rapport with your listeners:

• Talk in terms of your listeners interest
  • Dr. Conwell made a point of working his lecture plenty of local allusions and examples.
  • His audiences were interested because his talks concern them, their interests, and their problems.
  • A linkage with what your hearers
  • He made him feel that his talk was no mimeographed copy – it was freshly created for them.
  • People are selfish, they are interested chiefly in themselves.
  • Visualize them as eager to hear what you have to say – as long as it applies to them.
• Give honest, sincere appreciation
  • Show your appreciation for something they have done that is worthy of praise, and you win a passport into the heart.
  • This often require some research on your part
• Identify yourself with the audience
  • The first words you a letter, indicate some direct relationship with the group you’re addressing.
  • Another way to open the lines of communication is use the names of people in the audience.
• Make your audience a partner in your talk
  • One of my favorite methods of getting audience participation is simply to ask questions and get into get responses. I like to get the audience on his feet, repeating a sentence after me, or answering my questions by raising their hands.
  • Have your listeners vote on something, or invite them to help you solve a problem.
• Play yourself down
  • One of the best ways for a speaker to endear himself to an audience is to play himself down.
  • The surest way to antagonize an audience is to indicate that you consider yourself to be above them. The slightest hint of braggadocio’s fatal. On the other hand, modesty inspires confidence and goodwill. You could be modest without being apologetic. Your audience will like and respect you for suggesting your limitations as long as you show you are determined to do your best

• There are four major goals in the purpose of a talk

• To persuade or get action.
• To inform.
• To impress and convince.
• To entertain.

• Audiences are not interested in apologies or excuses, real or simulated. They want action

• It is the story, for example, that prepares the way for the desired action.

• Give your example, an incident from your life – psychologists say we learned two ways: one, by the law of exercise, in which he sears of similar incidents lead to a change of our behavioral patterns; and two, by the law of effect, in which a single event maybe so startling as to cause a change in our conduct.

• Build your example bought a single personal experience
• Start your talk with a detail of your example – catch attention at once.
  • Once upon a time are the magic words that open the floodgates of a child’s imagination. With the same human interest approach you can captivate the minds of your listeners with your first words.
• Fill your example with relevant detail
  • Answer the questions who? When? Where? What? And why?
  • You must stimulate the visual imagination of your listeners by painting word pictures
• Relive your experience as you relates it – the speaker should relive the experience is describing

• State the point, what you want the audience to do

• Make the point brief and specific – people will do only what they clearly understand
• Make the point easy for listeners to do
• State the point with force and conviction

• Make your meeting clear when you set out to inform your listeners

• Language is the principal conveyor of understanding, and so we must learn to use it, not currently but discriminatingly

• Arrange your ideas and sequence – logical sequence based on time, space, or special topics. Past, present, future

• Turning fact into a picture

• Pick out the least intelligent looking person in the audience is try to make that person interested in your argument. Center talk on some small boy or girl present with their parents.

• Think is wise men do, but speak of the common people do. Aristotle

• Use visual aids

• the nerves that lead from the eye to the brain are many times larger than those leading from the ear; and science tells us that we give 25 times as much attention to I suggestion as we do to your suggestions.
• One seeing, says an old Japanese proverb, is better than 100 times telling about.
• I early found that in dealing with man, a picture was worth more than anything I could say.

• We must first be convinced before we attempt to convince others.

• The more yeses we can, at the very outset, induce, the more likely we are to succeed in capturing the attention for our ultimate proposal.

• My way of opening in winning an argument, confided Lincoln, is to first find a common ground of agreement. Lincoln found it even when he was discussing the highly inflammable subject of slavery. For the first half-hour, declared the mirror, a neutral paper reporting one of his talks, his opponents would agree with every word he uttered. From that point he began them off, little by little, until it seemed as if he had got them all into his fold.

• Speak with contagious enthusiasm

• I say contagious, for enthusiasm is just that.
• When your aim is to convince, remember it is more productive to stir emotions than to arouse thoughts.
• If you would impress an audience, be impressed yourself. Your spirit, shining through your eyes, radiating through your voice, and proclaiming itself through your manner, will communicate itself to your audience.
• Every time you speak, and especially when you’re about purpose is to convince, what you do determines the attitude of your listeners. If you are lukewarm, so will they be; if you are flippant and antagonistic, so will baby. When the congregation falls asleep, wrote Henry Ward Beecher, there’s only one thing to do; provide the usher with a sharp stick and have him prod the preacher.

• Show respect and affection for your audience

• Every human being has an inner sense of worth, of importance, of dignity. Wound that up and you have lost that person forever. So when you love and respect the person you build him up and, accordingly, he loves it seems you.

• Begin in a friendly way. Since pride is such a fundamental explosive characteristic of human nature, would be the part of wisdom to get a man’s pride working for us, instead of against us?

• Get into an example immediately – why? For three reasons:

• You will free yourself at once of the necessity to think hard about your next sentence, for experiences are easily recounted even in an impromptu situation.
• You will get into the swing of speaking, and your first moment jitters will fly away, giving you the opportunity to warm up to your subject matter.
• You will enlist the attention of your audience at once. As pointed out earlier, the incident example is a surefire method of capturing attention immediately.

The rapport thus established between speaker and audience is the key to all successful speaking – begin with an example

• Speak with animation of force

• As has been said several times before in this book, if you speak with energy and forcefulness, your external animation will have a beneficial effect upon your mental process. Have you ever watched a man in a conversational group who suddenly begins to gesture as he speaks? Soon he is talking fluently, sometimes brilliantly, and he begins to attract a group of eager listeners.

• Don’t talk impromptu – given impromptu talk

• Be ready to condense your ideas into a few words. When the time comes, see what you have in mind as plain as you can. Give them briefly, and sit down

• There are only four ways in which we have contact with the world: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.
• The biggest stumbling block, of course, is stiffness, not only of the physical, but of the mental as well.

• It is not so much just what you say is how you say it.

• A young man ought to get that idea about himself; he should look for the single spark of individuality that makes him different from other folks, and develop that for all he is worth.

• Do not attempt to force yourself any mold thereby lose your distinctiveness.

• An introduction on to sell the topic to the audience and the speaker. Do these things in the briefest amount of time possible

• Here’s some suggestions to help you make a well-organized beach of introduction:

• Thoroughly prepare what you’re going to say
  • Even though the introductory talk is short, hardly ever exceeding one minute, it demands careful preparation.
  • It centers around three items: the subject of the speakers talk, his qualifications to speak on that subject, and his name.
• Fold T – I – S formula. T stands for topic. I stands for important. S stands for speaker.
• Be enthusiastic
• Be warmly sincere
• Thoroughly prepare the talk of presentation
• Express your sincere feelings in the talk of acceptance

• A talk as a voyage with purpose, and it must be charted.

• Get interesting opening, something that will seize favorable attention immediately
• Begin your talk with an incident, example.

• A story of your experience hooks attention
• I know of no more compelling method of opening a talk then by the use of a story.
• No stalling. No warm-up statements. By launching directly into an incident, you can make it easy to capture the audiences attention.

• Aroused suspense
  • Arouse curiosity and hold suspense
  • Creating suspense is a surefire method of getting your listeners interested.
• State interesting fact
  • Establishes contact with the listener because it jars the mind.
  • It is a kind of shocked to make that a list attention by using the unexpected to focus attention on the subject matter of the talk.
  • If you want to interest your listeners, don’t begin with an introduction. Begin by leaping right into the heart of your story.
• Ask for a show of hands
  • The ice is broken. You, the speaker, Ortiz, and so the audience.
• Promise to tell the audience how they can get something they want
  • The promise type of opener is sure to get attention because it goes straight to the self-interest of the audience.
• Using exhibit

• Avoid getting unfavorable attention

• Do not open with an apology
  • Lack of preparation or lack of ability.
  • Suggesting that you did not think worth preparing for.
  • No, we don’t want to hear your apologies; we want to be informed and interested – to be interested
• Avoid the funny story opening

• Support your main ideas

• Use statistics – mere numbers and amounts, taken by themselves, are never very impressive. They have to be illustrated; they ought, if possible, to be put in terms of our experiences.
• Use the testimony of experts
• Use analogies
• Use a demonstration with her without an exhibit

• Appeal for action

• The close is really the most strategic point in a talk, what one says last, the final words left ringing in the ears when one ceases – these are likely to be remembered longest.
• How do you go about bringing your talk to the climatic clothes? Here are a few suggestions some:
  • Summarize – first tell them what you’re going to tell them; then tell them; then tell them what you’ve told them.
  • Ask for action
    • Ask them to do something specific
    • Ask the audience for some response that is within their power to give
    • Make it as easy as you can for your audience to act on your appeal

• One time young man who aspired to study law, wrote to Lincoln for advice. Lincoln replied: if you are resolutely determined to make a longer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already… Always bear in mind that you own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.