TCC Podcast #161: Up Your Speaking Game with Lanie Presswood

Speaking coach and consultant, Lanie Presswood, is our guest for the 161st episode of The Copywriter Club podcast. Lanie coached both of us (Kira and Rob) as we scripted and delivered our presentations at our copywriting event, The Copywriter Club In Real Life. We asked Lanie to join us to talk about public speaking, what to do (and not do) on stage and this long list of other topics we covered: •  her journey to becoming a public speaker and speaking consultant •  some of Lanie's early successes •  the time Rob ruined Hillary Weiss’ presentation at TCCIRL •  how to deal with stage fright when getting up to speak •  the best ways to prepare a presentation that an audience wants to see •  how to “lay out” a presentation to get attention and persuade •  the 5 parts of a speech: definitions, scope, explanation, description, illustration •  the biggest mistake presenters make when giving a speech •  what a speaker can expect from the audience •  physicality—what to do with your hands and body as you speak •  things you should never do as a speaker •  whether you should play a “role” on stage (you don’t have to be Gary V) •  developing the “skill” of public speaking… no one is born an expert •  Lanie’s advice to anyone who thinks they don’t have anything to talk about •  whether or not you should write out your speech ahead of time •  the difference between video presentations and live presentations We also asked Lanie about the future of public speaking (a little twist on the question we usually end with). To learn more about how you can use public speaking to grow your authority, click the play button below, or download the episode to your favorite podcast player. Readers scroll down for a full transcript.   The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Hillary Weiss Presswood Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Rob:   What if you could hang out with seriously talented copywriters and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work? That's what Kira and I do every week at The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira:   You're invited to join the club for episode 161 as we chat with professor, communications expert, and public speaking consultant Lanie Presswood about speaking from the stage, what makes a good presentation, the simple things we can do to communicate more clearly, and how to avoid the worst mistakes speakers make. Welcome, Lanie. Lanie:            Hello. Thank you so much for having me here. Kira:   I feel like this was a long time coming. Especially considering you helped both of us with our presentations at TCC In Real Life this past year. So, we're excited to dig into that and talk more about you and your story. Let's kick it off with your story. How did you end up as a public speaking consultant and professor? Lanie:            So, I got into competitive speech and debate as a high schooler. And I was very bent on being a journalist at this point in time. I'm about 15, very, very opinionated, have lots of thoughts, and I think I'm going to storm down the doors of a newsroom somewhere in the nebulous future and right away they're going to hire me to just take on big names and bash in some skulls and change the world. This was my vision for myself. So, I knew that to do that I needed to get into a good college and therefore I needed a lot of extracurriculars. But unfortunately, I was really not particularly physically gifted and therefore I was really looking for a lot of things to do that didn't involve me having to go outside and run. I also wanted to get away from the legacy of my older brothers. Two years older than me, and he was very talented and very smart and extremely popular. So, I was really trying to find something to do at that point in my high school career that would just belong to me. And that's how I wandered into forensics, which is speech and debate, not cutting apart dead bodies and investigating crime scenes for the purposes of the next hour. And I was terrible. So, so bad. I just had paralyzing stage fright whenever I had to get up in front of people. Would turn this bright purple color. It's a flush that started in my chest and kind of worked its way up my face. My hands would shake, my knees would knock, my voice would shake. Just all the sights and sounds of terrible public speaking. I was so, so bad. But, I started to learn very slowly, a little bit about what different audiences and different types of judges were looking for, about what was consistent across every different kind of speaking occasion and what sort of changed every time you stood up in front of a different group of people. But I got to the end of my high school career and I was like all right, I've learned things, I have improved, I've started to gently chip away at that stage fright, but I think I want to do other things. So, I went to college, I got in, my boodle of extracurriculars worked. And I was like, ‘All right, I'm don't with that now, I'm going to do something else. Maybe the radio station.’ I was excited about the radio station. And so I had a friend who was two years older than me, who I'd gone to high school with, who knew someone else on the speech team and was like, ‘Hey, you got to join the speech team here like you were in high school, because my friend needs a partner for this paired event.’ And I said, ‘Eh’. I wasn't super into that idea. But I didn't have any friends, and I was like, okay, I'll give it a try to get some friends and maybe I'll just do it for a little bit and then jump ship and do something else instead. Which of course is not what happened. I got immediately sucked in and really just loved it. I loved being able to travel around the country. That team took me to Portland, Oregon, to Austin, Texas, to everywhere in between. And I got intoxicated with the thought of winning. Because I figured out that once you actually spent hours per week planning and writing and practicing and being coached one on one by a professional, you can improve pretty quickly. So, I started to get better, I started to get over my stage fright, and then I started to win. And once I started to win, I was just hooked for life. So eventually over the course of my four years in college, I won multiple individual state championships. I went to out rounds, to final rounds in multiple events at one of our national tournaments. And I was even a national championship winner in impromptu speaking at one of our national championships, which was very exciting. And I'm still proud of that, bring it up whenever possible. So, got very successful through college, really learned how to shape my arguments and what worked well for me as a speaker. Once again, throughout the course of this somehow realized that I was never going to be a journalist. So I decided well, if I can't be a journalist, I'm just going to stay in school. Ended up going to graduate school to focus on rhetoric and communication. Which is the fancy words for public speaking, really. I was like, ‘Okay, now I'm definitely done with forensics. I've been doing it for seven years, that's a lot. I'm definitely going to move on.’ And then they offered me an assistantship position. They offered to pay for my graduate school if I went to Ohio University and coached. And I said, ‘Well, all right, I guess if I have to.’ So once again I got drawn back in and I spent another four years on the other side of the bench coaching students and shepherding them around the country. And learned a lot about what some common errors are and how other people manifest those same feelings of stage fright that I had been feeling all those years ago. And how to used my own experience to talk them through it. At the same time was teaching in the classroom as a graduate instructor. And kind of started to think about how students who weren't motivated to spend all of their free time doing competitive speaking, needed to be worked through some of those issues. So that takes us up to the graduation from my PhD program and becoming Dr. Presswood and my first real grown up lady job, which was at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. And I was running their Gen Ed public speaking program and giving other professors ideas for how to help their students. And I created this lovely toolkit that we handed out to everybody in this instructor's handbook. And it was wonderful, but the school was very small. We're talking like 800 students small. So, I had a lot of free time. And that's about the point where Hillary Weiss, who is now, just as of a few weeks ago, my sister-in-law, came up to me and said, ‘Hey, I have this large speaking event coming up. Can you help me prepare for it?’ And I said, ‘I would love nothing more in the entire world than that.’ And that's what launched me into consulting and specifically into working with copywriters who need some help or assistance turning their brilliant written thoughts into brilliant spoken thoughts. And that just about catches us up to how I met you, Rob and Kira and where I am today. Rob:   Yeah, speaking of copywriters who need help with their spoken thoughts. I think we both qualify there for sure. There's so much to unpack here Lanie, but before we do that, I want to know about those first couple of speeches that you were giving or even in college, what kinds of things were you talking about? Maybe you even still have some of them memorized, you can give us a [crosstalk 00:07:31]. Lanie:            Oh lord, I really do not. I wish I did for you, that would be excellent. In high school I was doing some of the more ... Like I started some of the more theatrical events because competitive speech and debate also involves some interpretive theatrical monologue kind of events.