If you’re not a natural, you’ll never be a good public speaker.

Crap!

Everything you always wanted is within reach.

Want to do a confident presentation? You can do it.

Want to persuade your audience to take some action? You can do it.

Want to have participants look forward to attending your weekly presentations? You can do it.

Want to do speeches without panic and sleepless nights? You can do it.

You can have everything you want and all you need to do is focus on three areas:

• Small goal achievement
• Say no to fear
• Change your thinking

Small goal achievement

It’s good to set goals.

The trouble with goals is that we tend to set distant goals. We set goals that we can’t achieve easily or quickly: do a popular TED talk in the first three months of the year, become the next Tony Robbins…

Setting lofty long-term goals is good, but we should also set smaller more achievable goals that will move us along the path towards the lofty goal.

Take project management, for example. If project managers didn’t break down goals into a set of small achievable tasks nothing would ever get done. The implementation of a new banking system is huge undertaking but is actually just a series of thousands of small, achievable goals all rolled into one.

If you want to be a more confident public speaker, improve your audience engagement, or be better at speaking off the cuff, you can do it, provided you break down the large goal into small achievable chunks of work.

Say no to fear

You want to talk to that girl standing at the other side of the bar.

You want to convince a bunch of delegates that your product is the best.

But something is stopping you.

There’s a little voice inside your head saying What if you fail? This is really scary. Be careful. Don’t do it. It’s easier just to stay in bed. It’s easier to sit at the bar on your own.

You can listen to that little voice and not do anything. The voice is right… it is easier. The trouble with listening to the little voice? The issue with not doing something because of fear? Nothing will ever change, nothing will ever get better.

It’s comfortable for everything to stay the same, but if you don’t try something you’ll never ever know.

Next time the little voice says don’t do it, do it anyway. Get on stage. You’ll make mistakes. Sometimes you’ll regret it, but many times it will be the smartest thing you ever did. And every time you will learn something. Every time you will develop.

As a famous author once said: Feel the fear and do it anyway.

Change your thinking

You can’t wish for something and it will magically appear. But if you constantly think about things going wrong, they will.

The more you think about failure the more likely you are to fail. The more likely you are to be unhappy. And it becomes a cycle that feeds on itself.

Focus on how you are going to forget your lines and you will.

Focus on your nervousness and you will be more nervous.

Change your thinking about your public speaking and you’ll change your results.

Think positive. Just think positive thoughts.

Don’t buy in to the lie: You don’t need to be a natural. You have the potential to be a good speaker.