Why You Might Want to Share a Failure Early In Your Speech

You can gain an instant and lasting connection with your audience by sharing your failures and flaws. Sometimes sharing your frustrations and firsts also helps. Why is this? Why Some People Don’t Like Motivational Speakers Lots of people don’t care for motivational speakers because they are used to hearing the kind that think a motivational […]

One Thing a Speaker Should Always Do Is…

Below there are two videos. In the first video, Taharka tells you that the police arrested him when he was a teenager. Take a look for yourself. https://cv-newsletteraudios.s3.amazonaws.com/T1.mp4 Now take a look at the 2nd video in which Taharka makes a key revision. https://cv-newsletteraudios.s3.amazonaws.com/T2.mp4 What’s the main difference between the first video and this second […]

3 Sacrifices that Will Take Your Stories to New Heights

My mother was an English teacher. My wife’s mother was an English teacher. My wife is an English teacher. Therefore, I try my best to be grammatically correct. However, in public speaking, I do not believe you must use good grammar at all times. There are times when I sacrifice correct grammar for something that […]

The Secret to Keep Your Audience from Checking Out

So often I watch speakers tell stories that sound like this: “I did this and I did that and then I did this and then I did that and then this happened to me and then I did that…” And then, at the end of the story, they turn to the audience and say, “And […]

3 Ways Speakers Can Shine Onstage

The speakers who make their audience members the stars will be the ones who shine. “When you make them the stars, you shine too.” Below are 3 ways you can shine as a speaker by making your audience members the stars of your speech. Way #1: Let them Speak! Just because you’re the speaker doesn’t […]

How to Breathe Life into Your Stories with Movement

Patricia Fripp once told me, “Craig, people won’t remember what you say as much as they’ll remember what they see when you say it.” In other words, you must make your speeches very visual. I often tell people that speaking involves a series of scenes. You move from one story and scene into another. But […]

One Surefire Way to Build Your Business With Each Speech

Whether you are speaking for fee or for free, you can still build your business with each speech. I recently held a call on 5 ways to build your business each time you speak. Here’s one of the ways. This way will become the gift that keeps on giving to your audience and to you. […]

How to Uncover Humor Throughout Your Speech by Asking One Question

For years I’ve been saying the following: “Don’t add humor to your speech; uncover humor within it.” But how do you do that? There are countless ways. One of my favorite is to take yourself through a process and keep asking yourself one question that is sure to uncover humor over and over again. Take […]

How to Breathe Life into Your Zoom Speeches

When you are giving a speech on Zoom and you get to your punch line only to be met with silence, how do you feel? It’s not the same as being in person, is it? It feels different. To combat this, I’ve been using a strategy that has been resonating with my Zoom audiences and […]

How to Immediately Make Your Speech More Interesting

As a speaker, whenever you make a general statement of the way things were all of the time or most of the time, the 2-step formula that will immediately make your speech much more interesting is this: Give a sample example At the end of your sample example, let your audience know, “And this is […]