New 5 to Speak Podcast: Speaking from a Podium, Yes or No. Ep. 29
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This week, Drew talks about the benefits and the challenges of speaking from a podium.
Ep. 28 – Learning from Steve Ballmer Speech
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Drew reviews Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s speech at CES and tells you three things you can learn
PowerPoint 2010 tip: Turn your Powerpoint into a movie
One of the functions of Powerpoint 2010 is that it makes it easier to make a movie out of your powerpoint slides.
What I would do is to prepare the slides, make the movie and have it playing in the background while you speak. Another thing to keep in mind, images and photos work best if you wanted to do this.
Essentially, in PowerPoint 2010, you go to the “File”, then look for “Create A Video” under the “Share” tab. See this post from Microsoft for more information.
Here is a YouTube video of an example of a video produced in Powerpoint 2010.
Tip: Use your own images in PowerPoint Slides
Sticky Slides gives a great tip for taking one of your pictures and turning it into something you can use in your PowerPoint presentations. So those pictures that you took on your digital camera or cell phone can be incorporated into your presentation.
One tip: If you need a photo, make sure you search for “Creative Commons” photos or royalty-free photos to use in your presentations.
Can Fear of Public Speaking be “rewritten”?
When I talk about speech anxiety, I always talk about rerecording the “negative” tape recorder in our head. That tape recorder tells us that “I won’t be interesting”, “I’ll make a mistake”, etc. I believe that people have anxiety because they keep listening to that tape recorder.
I tell people that the recorder needs to change and you can experience a reduction of anxiety.
Researchers at NYU have a study talking about this very concept. Quote from an article in The Guardian:
In a breakthrough that has major implications for treating phobias and anxiety disorders, psychologists have helped people conquer their fears by “rewriting” their memories to make them less traumatic.
The therapy takes advantage of the discovery that human memories can be modified and made less frightening if they are manipulated soon after they are retrieved.
Scientists at New York University found peoples’ memories were susceptible to being rewritten between three minutes and six hours of a memory being recalled. Only memories that were rewritten in this time frame remained changed a year after the treatment.
Of course, they did this with electric shocks and viewing red or blue squares.
But if you can recall the memory and “rewrite” it while experiencing the anxiety, it could curb apprehension. I would love to see a study using the same methodology involving speech anxiety.
