The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking

by Dale Carnegie

“In almost any subject, your passion for the subject will save you. If you care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it. If you wish to be good, you will be good. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich. If you wish to be learned, you will be learned. Only then you must really wish these things and wish them with exclusiveness and not wish one hundred other incompatible things just as strongly.”

Try your best to develop an ability to let others look into your head and heart. Learn to make your thoughts, your ideas, clear to others, individually, in groups, in public. You will find, as you improve in your effort to do this, that you—your real self—are making an impression, an impact, on people such as you never made before.

You must develop a buoyant optimism about the outcome of your efforts to speak before groups. You must set the seal of determination upon every word and action that you devote toward the development of this ability.

Because no one can learn to speak in public without speaking in public any more than a person can learn to swim without getting in the water. You could read every volume ever written about public speaking—including this one—and still not be able to speak. This book is a thorough guide. But you must put its suggestions into practice.

found that learning to speak in public is nature’s own method of overcoming self-consciousness and building up courage and self-confidence.

Yes, Albert Edward Wiggam learned that one of the surest ways of overcoming the devastating fear of speaking before groups is to get a record of successful experiences behind you.

Never memorize word for word: By “perfect preparation” do I mean that you should memorize your talk? To this question I give back a thunderous NO.

Once a victim of this type of mental dope addiction, the speaker is hopelessly bound to a time-consuming method of preparation that destroys effectiveness on the platform.

The man who writes out and memorizes his talks is wasting his time and energy, and courting disaster. All our lives we have been speaking spontaneously. We haven’t been thinking of words. We have been thinking of ideas. If our ideas are clear, the words come as naturally and unconsciously as the air we breathe.

If we memorize our talk word for word, we will probably forget it when we face our listeners.

Even if we do not forget our memorized talk, we will probably deliver it in a mechanical way. Why?

Because it will not come from our hearts, but fr...

Assemble and Arrange Your Ideas Beforehand:

search your background for significant experiences that have taught you something about life, and assemble your thoughts, your ideas, your convictions, that have welled up from these experiences.

True preparation means brooding over...

“Brood over your topic until it becomes mellow and expansive...then put all these ideas down in writing, just a few words, enough to fix the idea...put them down on scraps of paper—you will find it easier to arrange and organize these loose bits when you come to set your material in order.”

Rehearse Your Talk:

Use the ideas you have selected for your talk in everyday conversation with your friends and business associates.

Lose Yourself in Your Subject:

You must sell yourself on the importance of your subject You must have the attitude that has inspired all the truly great personages of history—a belief in your cause.

It is especially important to keep your attention off yourself just before your turn to speak. Concentrate on what the other speakers are saying, give them your wholehearted attention and you will not be able to work up excessive stage fright.

clear, straightforward terms tell yourself that your talk is the right one for you, because it comes out of your experience, out of your thinking about life. Say to yourself that you are more qualified than any member of the audience to give this particular talk and, by George, you are going to do your best to put it across.

fact, breathe deeply for thirty seconds before you ever face your audience. The increased supply of oxygen will buoy you up and give you courage.

Speakers who talk about what life has taught them never fail to keep the attention of their listeners.

How do you find topics? By dipping into your memory and searching your background for those significant aspects of your life that made a vivid impression on you.

Whenever possible, work into your talks illustrations and examples from your early years.

Special Areas of Knowledge. Many years of working in the same field have made you an expert in your line of endeavor.

Unusual Experiences.

But it does consist in digging deep into your mind and heart and bringing forth some of the essential convictions that life has stored there.

He must make his listeners feel that what he has to say is important to them.

He must not only be excited about his topic, but he must be eager to transfer this excitement to his listeners.

He is audience-centered and not self-centered. He knows that the success or failure of his talk is not for him to decide—it will be decided in the minds and hearts of his hearers.

An introduction—that term was fashioned from two Latin words, intro, to the inside, and ducere, to lead— ought to lead us to the inside of the topic sufficiently to make us want to hear it discussed.

It ought to lead us to the inside facts regarding the speaker, facts that demonstrate his fitness for discussing this particular topic. In other words, an introduction ought to “sell” the topic to the audience and it ought to “sell” the speaker. And it ought to do these things in the briefest amount of time possible.

Even though the introductory talk is short, hardly ever exceeding one minute, it demands careful preparation. First, you must gather your facts. These will center around three items: the subject of the speaker’s talk, his qualifications to speak on that subject, and his name. Often a fourth item will become apparent—why the subject chosen by the speaker is of special interest to the audience.

Introduction

An introduction should never be memorized.

A talk is a voyage with a purpose, and it must be charted. The man who starts nowhere, generally gets there.

No infallible rules can be given; but we can, at any rate, indicate the three major phases of the longer talk to get action: the attention step, the body, and conclusion. For each, there are some time-tested methods of developing each phase.

BEGIN YOUR TALK WITH AN INCIDENT

We follow because we identify ourselves as part of a situation and we want to know what is going to happen. I know of no more compelling method of opening a talk than by the use of a story.

No stalling. No “warm-up” statements. By launching directly into an incident, you can make it easy to capture an audience’s attention.

A speaker who begins a talk with a story from his experience is on safe ground, for there is no groping for words, no loss of ideas. The experience he is relating is his, a re-creation, as it were, of part of his life, the very fiber of his being. The result? A self-assured, relaxed manner which will help a speaker establish himself on a friendly basis with an audience.

AROUSE SU...

Curiosity! Who is not susceptible to it?

Creating suspense is a sure-fire method of getting your listeners interested.

STATE AN ARRESTING FACT

This method of making startling statements at the beginning of a talk is effective in establishing contact with the listener because it jars the mind.

Make your opening conversational in manner.

If the way you open your talk isn’t conversational enough to be spoken across the dinner table, it probably won’t be conversational enough for an audience either.

If you want to interest your listeners, don’t begin with an introduction. Begin by leaping right into the heart of your story.