Presenting is just like hypnosis. Watching how some people present sometimes makes your pants drop off. When I think about the teachers I used to have in high school, you always have a few types of teachers.
- Who takes authority in an authoritative way.
Do this, do that, do this, do this, do that. A bit of a dictatorship, a strict way of teaching. Children listen, but to a certain extent.
- Teachers everyone walks over.
There's just nothing you can do about that.
- Teachers who have natural authority.
That's what you listen to, that's what you do everything for.
The latter is very interesting, because what do they actually do? Why does the class keep their attention?
If you copy this from people who can do this well and use it in your own presentations, you will benefit. It is very difficult to teach or present something where 80% of your audience - the class - does not want to hear it.
They may want to listen for a while, but then it goes downhill. It is said that 13-year-olds have a 30-minute concentration span, but I think it is even less if something is very boring.
Grabbing attention
Jerry Seinfeld also says you have to grab the audience in the first minute or it will be a very long evening. Because people know him, he wins the first minute, but then the second minute becomes the first minute.
So you have to grab people in the first minute, and that's hypnosis. You have a lot of hypnotic language that you need for this and your mental state, your own energy, which affects people.
The three E's for an interesting presentation
And the three E's, I got those from Remco Klaassen. He wrote a book about them: Verbal Mastery.
The three E's stand for Education, Entertainment and Empowerment.
With teachers where you fall asleep during class you miss out on entertainment and empowerment.
The teachers you stay with do involve entertainment and empowerment. Empowerment is that you think, "Hey, I can do something with this, I really learned something here, this makes me feel good." It empowers you to go do something, leave something, or never forget something.
Entertaining, the material must be brought entertaining, naturally with education and empowerment. When you mix these three E's together, you've created something cool.
People can't take a lot of information with them. Therefore, it's better to put a principle in it, and it also depends on how long you have.
Stick to a principle
For example, I have a two-day seminar and in it we're only going to hypnotize. We're not going to do regression, we're not going to do anything with ideomotor signals, we're not going to do NLP. We're only going to do hypnosis.
Because all together, that's too much information. I used to do this, as much as possible in it, but they didn't do anything with it, because the empowering was missing.
But now that we do two days of hypnosis, I do empower people. People are thinking, "Wow, I can just do this. I can hypnotize people safely and I'm going to do this at home sometime."
People go home with more energy. This sounds very strange, but this is because the seminar also has lots of entertainment and exercise. This helps to get energy from such a seminar and thus you keep the audience and attention.
Why do they want to listen to you?
- They learn something from you.
- They are entertained.
- They should get something out of it.
They are there because they want to get something out of it for themselves, otherwise they could have gone to the theater. If all you do is empower and lecture, then people also fall asleep. Then little is recorded because there was no entertainment in it.
Care for emotion
Emile Ratelband has said about this that something has to happen every 12 minutes. For example, he once held a 24-hour training session and those people miraculously left with more energy.
Just by using the strategy of every twelve minutes something must happen, a dance, a thingy, or a crude comment I do like.
Stories that are emotional, they also hold attention much longer. If you tell a good story, you can listen to it for hours. Those are also ways to hold attention.
For me, it's all hypnosis. You address the language of the unconscious with emotions and symbols. A story is full of symbols and emotional when you tell it a certain way. That combo is gold.
If you also throw in tile wisdom in between - in the sense that you want people to take that with them - and you're fun to listen to or watch too, then you've got gold in your hands. You can learn all this.
Take advantage of this.
Be sure to listen to this podcast as well:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/195236/1332241-spreken-in-het-openbaar-als-een-hypnotiseur
Overcoming fear of public speaking
Now that you know what elements make for an enjoyable presentation where the audience hangs on your every word, it's time to do it too. Except that public speaking is a fear common to many people.
So how best to overcome them? Having prepared a good presentation with the above techniques can already work a lot, knowing you know it well.
In addition, there are now training sessions with VR glasses, which make it seem like you are presenting in front of a large audience. A study, in which people presented every week for four weeks in front of an ever-growing "audience," found that this dramatically lowered the fear of presenting[1].
Now not everyone can take such a training course, but fortunately you can also achieve these kinds of effects with hypnosis. For example, through a guided visualization, in which you imagine that you have a large audience and that the presentation will go smoothly. This is something a hypnotherapist can help you with, and this way you can also prepare yourself well for public speaking.
In addition, mindfulness can also help you prepare to give a presentation. For example, this helps you to be aware of using "um," to break silences and recognize clicking with your tongue. These are things that often cause you to come across as somewhat nervous. For example, you can first practice your presentation in front of a smaller audience, such as your colleagues or family, and then apply mindfulness[2].
Changing beliefs about public speaking
Now that you have incorporated the three E's into your presentation and practiced with or without hypnosis, there is really little stopping you from giving a great presentation.
Still not feeling quite sure about this? If so, there may be something blocking you from doing what you actually want to do. Maybe you feel like no one takes you seriously, maybe you think people won't listen to you anyway, it could be anything.
In that case, hypnosis can also help you remove such blocking beliefs. This can be done in many ways.
If you know what bothers you, such as the idea that no one wants to listen to you, you can ridicule this feeling. You go into hypnosis and then say, for example, in a weird voice, "No one wants to listen to me." You do this idiotically until it makes you laugh. You laugh the conviction out of your system 😊.
Not sure where the fear of public speaking comes from? Then you can use two techniques to figure out that fear. For example, with a socratic conversation while in hypnosis or with regression. With socratic conversation, the why question or a variation of it is repeated several times to get to the heart of your problem. Then you can ridicule it again or - if you find out that your fears make no sense - you can actually install new beliefs such as:
"I'm interesting."
"I'm fun."
"People love to listen to me," says Mr. K.
These are just examples, depending on your beliefs, a hypnotist may give you other suggestions.
The second way is regression. With regression, you go back to when your fear of public speaking began. This can be anything, often fears arise in early childhood to age seven, because that's when you pick up on anything. This could be a comment from someone about a completely different presentation. This could be that you were interrupted once when you were telling something, it could be anything.
In hypnosis, you go back to that moment and revisit it, but with the knowledge of now. That alone can be enough to overcome the fear of public speaking.
Want to learn more about hypnosis? Then come to a playshop. The playshops are held in Wormerveer and Zwolle.
Just want to see a seminar, engage in hypnosis there and see a demonstration of regression? Then come to a seminar.
Want to learn how hypnosis works to help yourself and others yourself? Then enroll in one of our training courses.
[1] https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2017.0174
[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jaba.362
