toastmasters

How To Learn Powerful Communication and Leadership Skills

Our ability to communicate authentically with other people is one of the most important life skills that we can possess. We often spend a great deal of our education learning how to analyse, think, solve problems, and understand how things work; but tend to downplay the importance of subjects that teach us how to communicate. The ability to communicate, inspire and influence other people is also a key leadership skill. Whether in business, relationships, or just in our personal lives, our ability to communicate our thoughts, feelings and ideas to other people is absolutely crucial to our success… and ultimately our happiness.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

The Dance of Fear by Harriet Lerner

The main thing I got from Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Fear is that fear and anxiety aren’t just individual problems; they totally impact the way we relate with each other. Anxiety is contagious and gets passed around between us whenever we interact with anxious people. Families, companies, organisations, churches, countries and social groups of all kinds can become infected with anxiety that affects everyone in the group. When a social system becomes fear-based or shame-based, everyone in it suffers.

Fear can be like a dance, often involving other people

Since anxiety causes suffering, we naturally want to escape. One way of escaping is to dump our anxiety on someone else. Being a sensitive person, I’ve always been susceptible to having other people’s anxiety dumped on me, but it’s only now that I’m learning to recognise when this is happening.

This book helped me identify such a situation once when I volunteered to lead a public speaking training course run by my Toastmaster’s club. I had run it successfully several times before and we always got great feedback from the participants on how valuable it was. But this time I wanted to make it even better by talking more about how anxiety works physiologically, and throwing in some exercises I had learned during my acting classes to help deal with fear right up front.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Deal With Setbacks

Time for some truth-telling: things haven’t been entirely rosy here at Confident Man Headquarters in the last few months. Life has ups and downs, and I’m certainly not immune to the emotional roller-coaster effect they can cause. They say bad luck comes in threes and I don’t know if it’s just bad luck, bad karma or whatever, but I do know it hasn’t felt all that great lately.

So what’s been going on?

Well, firstly I started a new treatment program for Chronic Fatigue and although I’m cautiously optimistic of my health improving, one of the initial side-effects was being hit with a truckload of anxiety which left me feeling despondent, depressed and hopeless.

Around the same time I entered a Theatrical Improvisation (a.k.a. Improv) contest with some new friends of mine; only to withdraw before the contest had even begun because I was feeling overwhelmed with anxiety and stress. Something I loved doing suddenly stopped being fun.

I also quit Toastmasters because I now know enough about public speaking and it doesn’t make sense to pursue it any further until my health improves. This meant my social world was shrinking, right at the time I was feeling isolated, ill and anxious already.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Gain Confidence by Public Speaking

Public speaking is often seen as the ultimate in self-confidence. After all, if you can get up in front of an audience and talk from a platform, surely you must have amazing confidence. Well, yes and no. The truth is that public speaking is a skill that anyone can learn. You don’t have to have amazing confidence to do it. But like learning any new skill, particularly one that involves overcoming a fear, this will boost your general level of self-confidence; which is why learning public speaking is so appealing.

The key to effective public speaking is to tell stories in which you have some emotional investment. Your emotions are what connect you with your audience. If you can get up on stage an relive an exciting or emotionally engaging story, and tie it to some lesson or point that you learned, people will want to hear what you have to say. The secret is to avoid going into presenter mode where you lecture people, which audiences hate. And the way to avoid lecturing is to tell stories.

Storytelling is fun, entertaining, and helps you overcome your self-consciousness in front of other people. Plus you’ll find that if you tell personal stories, other people will relate to what you have to say and you’ll get positive reinforcement from them, further adding to your growing confidence.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago