Dodging Public Speaking

Each week at the BNI networking group we go around the table of 30+ small business owners and talk for 1 minute about our business. This makes me so nervous and, from what I hear,  makes a lot of other folks nervous too.  If I memorize what I am going to say, I freeze.  If I don’t memorize then I’ll probably go off track followed by freezing. 

So this one week I stand up to talk and it happens.  A 55 second script I had practiced a hundred times and memorized completely escaped my brain about 4 seconds in.  Totally angst ridden to go talk the following week my friend Tony had a suggestion.

“You are selling video right?”

I reply “Yes that is right”

“Well make a video of your one minute speech. They do call it a commercial don’t they?”

Great suggestion I thought.  This is the Result.

Logistics

I presented the video on my 15in Macbook Pro. Concerned about how that would be seen with 30 sets of eyes on it I kept the composition simple and bold so those is the distance would not struggle to catch details and boosted the audio in editing to make sure the lap top’s speakers could reach all 30 people. (No time in the minute to have any  a/v set up.  You got one minute and a bell to tell you to sit your butt back down)