Run to the Roar!
Run to the Roar
Please forgive me; I’m on a bit of a face your fears tangent. I guess you know where I’m at in life! I’ve got a concept that I teach my one on one clients and in my membership program (you should check it out). It’s called Run to the Roar. The concept, face your fears like a boss! Here’s a little secret, while I’m not afraid to have the spotlight shine on me…ever, I do have lots of fears. At one point several years ago I became paralyzed, literally could not make a decision. I’m the single mother of a child whom I’ve recovered from autism, yes, recovered, talk about run to the roar! For years I never was afraid, I just moved forward and did what had to be done, never fearing hearing no or anything else. Once my son was recovered, I somewhat lost my identity and became terrified of any making any decisions. It was driving me crazy! I understood the concept of facing fears, sure, no problem, but that was not enough for me because I had some Goliath size fears. One day on the phone my mother said to me, “run to the roar Tracy, because the fears aren’t going anywhere until you do”. She was right. The roar to me was HUGE, just as big as my fears. I started taking my fears head on, running right to them and do you know what happened? They weren’t so big after all and just about everything I thought was going to happen, the bad stuff, well, it didn’t!
Because I had such success with this concept and because my clients were indeed themselves paralyzed, I started using it in my consulting. Guess what, it worked! Many of my clients are visual, all of them are smart beyond measure, they all were dealing with huge fears of speaking, presenting, getting on camera, even just communicating with challenging people in the office. Understanding the concept of the fears not going away and the idea of running right up to them and dealing with them head on, in the moment resounded and what it also did was it created a framework to face fears and truly get past them. Because, when you run to the roar, the big old fear and face it head on, you see that what you thought was going to happen, the horrible outcome, 99% of the time doesn’t happen anyway.
So, whatever you are afraid whether it’s presenting live, doing a video, speaking on a podcast or guest show or even day to day communication in business and in relationships, RUN to the roar. Face the fear head on and get to the other side. It is not until you get to the other side of your communication and/or speaking fear that you can truly, truly get your message out loudly and proudly for the entire world to hear. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, someone out in the world, possibly lots of someone’s, really need to hear your message, don’t rob them of that, RUN TO THE ROAR!
Organizing Thoughts for Presenting Live and On Camera
Organizing Your Thoughts for Video and Presentations
One of the challenges many face is where to begin when they start trying to plan a presentation or even a video. Here are some techniques that have really helped me and my clients over the years.
First, if you can, pick something you love or are an expert at, which is usually something you love! I realize that sometimes you can’t pick something you love if it’s for a work thing, but if you can, it helps. If you are not even sure what you want to talk about, brainstorm a list of topics, everything you can talk about, everything you are an expert at and then start scratching items off the list that won’t work because of time or audience or knowledge or that you don’t love.
Write down everything you want to talk about. It might even be good to brainstorm everything you can talk about within the topic first, just jotting the information, or the bits as I call them down on a piece of paper. Once you have all of your thoughts or ideas written down, start grouping them together in categories that fit.
Be mindful at this time of how long you want your presentation to be, is it 5 minutes? Is it 20 minutes? Videos are shorter, E-Course lectures a little longer, webinars and presentations, even longer. Statistics show that a good length of time for video is 3 to 5 minutes max. A webinar is usually an hour although I have seen many marathon webinar trainings that last 2, 4 even 6 hours.
Now, try to fit everything in a grouping. If you have strays, will they stand alone? Meaning, can you talk for several minutes on that issue or piece of a topic? If yes, let it stand alone, if not, try and find other pieces that will go with it, or evaluate if you need/want it. Now, with each grouping, come up with a heading. Now your bits are nicely grouped and organized so not to be so overwhelming.
As you start to work on content, work within each grouping. You will find, at this time that you might have too much information in a group or maybe a bit can stand on it’s own or maybe there is a bit you don’t need or want at all. If you work on building content in only one grouping at a time, you won’t get so overwhelmed. Take each group one by one and build your content. As you go along, see what you need, want and discard the rest.
Always keep in mind, with regards to your time, that you will need an introduction and a conclusion. You might want to wait until all of your groupings are done to write your introduction and conclusion but always have an official introduction and conclusion rather than just random chatter. I talk about this in videos and other blog posts, exactly what makes a strong introduction and conclusion. The priority here is that you don’t get overwhelmed and that you create a nice and logical flow for your audience.
