Public Speaking Opportunities
If you love public speaking then you have to love Buckminster Fuller quotes like this: ”Everyone is born a genius. Society degeniuses them.” This quote is sadly too true for far too many. We are habitual rule-followers. Both formal education and socialization work together to “drive us along with the herd.” But it needn’t be that way. We can regain our genius. But we can’t achieve it by always following in another’s footsteps. “The man who follows the crowd,” Alan Ashley-Pitts tells us, “will usually get no further than the crowd.” Writing this blog post has led me to request this of you:
Be unique. Develop your own style. Break some rules, even ones that I’ve recommended. I insist! Recapture your genius. And when we couple courage and risk-taking, that genius will manifest itself in our presentations. I like what Neil Postman wrote: “Children enter school as question marks and come out as periods.” Not good but often true. Rid yourself of “periods” and any other conforming punctuation. Dare to be different. Dare to be very different. Dare to be yourself.
From Dave Schwenson’s book, How to Be a Comedian: You should never sit down. This is a “stand up” comedy. (Yeah? Try telling that to Bill Cosby.) Don’t do pratfalls or slapstick. It makes a comic look silly. (Are you listening, Jim Carrey and Michael Richards?) Center yourself at the middle of the stage and don’t pace around. You’ll keep the audience’s attention better.
(Do you think Robin Williams and Steven Wright would agree?) Be different! Be yourself! Build your own firey speeches in your public speaking jobs! Like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africa, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins. – Aldous Huxley
There is perhaps no application of this quote more fitting than in the realm of public speaking opportunities. How much has speaking really changed and improved in the last one hundred years? Pause for a moment to consider the past 100 years: How much has technology changed? How much has health care changed? How much has transportation changed? How much has athletics changed? How about motivational speaking? Has motivational speaking changed at all in the past century? Our public speaking jobs seem to be still hiding in the comfort of rules and traditions. But we have unmapped territories to explore. New communication horizons await you in our motivational speaker training course.