Show Notes
"Whenever you're doing a speech or a presentation, you've got to say the lines out loud as you're doing it. If you wait till you're all done, you're going to have twice as much work." - Anne Freedman
Anne started as a journalist before becoming a speaking coach, and assumed a speech was a speech, until an early client bombed a presentation she'd written for him.
It read perfectly on the page. Out loud, from him, it was a disaster.
That's when she realized writing for the eyes and writing for the mouth aren't the same skill at all.
She founded Speak Out in 1990 and has spent thirty-five years since working with people who are wildly accomplished by every measure and still terrified to stand up and talk.
She doesn't treat that fear as a character flaw, she treats it as a skill gap: structuring the content, controlling your body and voice while delivering it, and being ready for the law of averages, because the mic will cut out or the coffee will spill eventually.
Her practice method cuts against instinct: rehearse a speech out of order, closing first, then opening, then the middle.
Only in the last few run-throughs do you go start to finish, timed.
And she's blunt about what separates people who break through from those who avoid the podium their whole career: they actually rehearse instead of trusting decades of expertise to carry them through unprepared.
"Keeping all this knowledge to yourself instead of sharing it is being selfish."
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