Hello! A video for you with transcript below about one powerful way to increase your confidence in speaking.
Transcript:
Ok, we talk to ourselves all the time, don’t we?
And we have automatic thoughts, and some of those thoughts and questions that we might be asking ourselves all day long, are, variations on different categories such as reassuring ourselves about something: we might be giving ourselves advice about what to do next.
We might be talking negatively to ourselves that we’re not capable of doing something or this is not going well.
And a 4th category, and one that I particularly like that is very powerful is – asking yourself a positive question.
Now, questions are amazing things because they’re an open loop for our brain. And as the helicopter goes overhead! They’re an open loop for our brain and they’re generative. So they create thought.
And they create with a high quality question, they’re going to create positive thought and possibility thinking and openness, rather than the shut down questions that happen when we do the “what if” questions about “well, what if this doesn’t work? Or what if my boss hates this” – whatever it is that’s going on for us.
So it has to be a high quality question.
The action step that you might like to take for this is to start to notice the questions that you’re asking yourself, particularly if you’re going downwards, notice the negative ones.
And you’re going to deliberately come up with and preload for future reference when you actually need it in the situation, you’re going to be saying to yourself, Ok, what is a high quality question that’s going to get me the result that I want?
So if you want to be particularly influential in a presentation, or you want to just get through it without a mind blank, it’s like, “well, what is going to give me the best chance of fluently and coherently thinking, as I’m speaking”? And then your your brain will start to generate answers for you, it really will. And you come up with those.
And then you you build on a question that you like, and you use this question over and over again. It becomes a routine, it becomes something that works for you, that you can go to that is going to move you towards high performance rather than the other way around.
So it’s powerful, it’s high quality, it’s “ok, what’s my very next action step to get the outcome that I want? Or what’s going to make me feel good about what I’m achieving here?” All of those things.
And if I give you a classic example, for me, if I’m having to do admin work or particular work that I’m not enjoying, I say, you know, how can I let this be easy? How can I have fun with this?
So on a completely different topic, but those two questions are very powerful for me and I will automatically go into them if I feel myself slumping into an “Oh, do I really have to do this?”
I trust that’s been helpful and best wishes with your speaking and presentations.
