“I have a clear sense of the situation.”

The audience was leaning in.

Thomas was one of three experts on a cyber-security panel, a media interview with a live audience televised across the world.

Thomas was looking directly into the camera, eye contact strong, executive presence strong, confidence strong, competence undeniable.

The interviewers became increasingly deferential to Thomas as they listened to him.  You could see growing respect in their eyes and hear it in their voices.  By the end they were treating Thomas as an expert opinion leader with a valuable sense of direction.  And so was the audience.

The other two experts were pale by comparison. One was so nervous, her hands were visibly shaking.  The other was overwhelmingly monotonous, boring, a corporate robot, speaking incomprehensible corporate lingo.  You could go out for a cup of coffee while he was talking, come back and you wouldn’t have missed anything.

I started coaching Thomas about two years ago. The presentations he was giving back then had much less visibility. As his competence increased, he was asked to present more frequently, his speaking engagements became more visible, attracting larger audiences, creating greater significance.

His most recent audience before this one was 25,000. They loved him.

When you see Thomas now, you would say he’s a natural.

You would be absolutely correct.  He is completely natural.

A truly competent speaker IS completely natural.

That doesn’t mean they started out that way.

This is the challenge for aspiring communicators. To develop the skills to be natural at something that at first feels completely unnatural:  communicating successfully to a bigger world outside your comfort zone.

There’s nothing more exhilarating than developing the ability to communicate successfully to more and more people. By the time you’re communicating competently with 25,000 people, going on television and hitting it out of the park, life is pretty good. Your career potential goes from good to amazing. The joy you feel while you’re speaking is thrilling.

Thomas started as someone who was really good one-on-one. Give him one person, he did really well. He was also good in small groups of 10 people or under.  

As we worked together this number expanded.

Thomas is not done. He’s young. He has big goals and a lot of future ahead of him. He’s simply in a new league, playing a much bigger game. So this isn’t the end of personal growth for him, it’s a new level, a higher launching pad toward the next goal.

Thomas is continuing his personal and professional development, working just as aggressively today as two years ago, and even more so as the sweet taste for winning becomes its own reward.

I’m writing this to you because you may have heard that you have to be a natural to be any good at public speaking.  I am here to tell you being a natural at public speaking is something you can become.

It’s irrelevant whether it’s natural or unnatural at first for you.  If it’s unnatural, I completely understand.  You will become natural as you do the work to make it happen.

Before you take that first step, the journey might look like an impossible one to complete. But it’s not. Many have done it. I know, because I have seen enough people do it to know there’s a natural born communicator in everyone.  They sometimes just need someone to shine the light on the path for them, but once they see it, they can come out of the shadows and take the big strides needed to get there.

The most important part of the journey is the moment when you make the decision to start.

From there, the only requirement is that you keep going.

The time will come, probably sooner than later, when you too will wake-up and find others calling you a “natural” when it comes to public speaking.

There are few feelings more satisfying than that. 

My wish for you is that you gain the full satisfaction of replacing any feelings you have of self-doubt with the richness of real communication competence.

Be the cause!