Speaking in public: The three key issues

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

1. 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.

2. Teachers everyone walks over.

There's just nothing you can do about that.

3. 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’s attention in the first minute, and that’s hypnosis. You need to use a lot of hypnotic language to do this, and your mental state and your own energy influence 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 focus exclusively on hypnosis. We don’t deal with regression, we don’t work with ideomotor signals, and we don’t practice NLP. We focus solely on 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 evoke emotion also hold people’s attention for much longer. If you tell a good story, you can listen to it for hours. These are also ways to hold people’s attention.

For me, it’s all about hypnosis. You speak the language of the subconscious through emotions and symbols. A story is full of symbols and evokes emotion when you tell it in a certain way. That combination is worth its weight in 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 engaging presentation that has the audience hanging on your every word, it’s time to put it into practice. However, public speaking is a fear that many people share.

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 course, but fortunately, you can achieve these kinds of results with hypnosis as well. For example, through guided visualization, in which you imagine that you’re addressing a large audience and that the presentation goes flawlessly. This is something a hypnotherapist can help you with, allowing you to prepare well for public speaking.

In addition, mindfulness can also help you prepare for giving a presentation. For example, it helps you become aware of using “um,” breaking silences, and recognizing when you click your tongue. These are things that often make you come across as a bit 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 eliminate such a limiting belief. This can be done in all sorts of 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 your fear of public speaking comes from? You can use two techniques to get to the root of that fear. For example, through a Socratic dialogue while under hypnosis or through regression. In a Socratic dialogue, the question “Why?”—or a variation thereof—is repeated several times to get to the root of your problem. You can then challenge that fear or—if you realize your fear is unfounded—you can instead instill 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.

Would you like to learn more about hypnosis? Then come to a workshop. The workshops are held in Wormerveer and Zwolle.

Would you like to attend a seminar, engage in hypnosis, and see a regression demonstration? Then come to one of our seminars.

Would you like to learn how hypnosis works to help yourself and others? Then sign up for one of our courses.

[1] https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2017.0174

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jaba.362