Tips on how to gain confidence in public speaking with Mike Acker

• When it comes to public speaking it’s either confidence that’s holding someone back or understanding that’s holding someone back.


• Communication is currency. It’s the currency we use in everything.


• Ultimately, anytime someone’s giving a message, you are the message.


• A huge aspect of speaking. It’s “Let me help you get what you want.”

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When it comes to public speaking it’s either confidence that’s holding someone back or understanding that’s holding someone back.

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Doug: Well welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. In-studio today, I’ve got joining me, Mike Acker. Now Mike is a speaker, a leadership coach, he is a best-selling author, he has over 19 years of experience in speaking in leadership development and organizational management. In our conversation today, he revealed what was shocking to me but maybe common knowledge to you is that confidence comes from your identity. And one of the biggest issues that speakers have is confidence. So Mike is known for his authenticity, his humor, and his engaging presence. He specializes in fostering personal and organizational awareness, allowing the audience to personalize his presentations. And I’m sure you’ll get that as you listen in to our conversation.

Doug: His expertise is in communications and leadership and he’s drawn a wide range of engagements, including executive teams, emerging leaders, not for profits, churches and public schools. Well hey Mike, welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today.

Mike: Thank you so much, Doug. Great being here with you.

Doug: I’m super excited to talk to you. I’ve done some speaking. Not that it doesn’t scare me every once in a while, but I still like to get out there and share my message. So you’re the expert on this, so you do you want to give our audience just a little bit of background on what you do and how you help your clients?

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. It started really with me being a speaker for many, many years. So after traveling around doing conferences, doing workshops, speaking at churches and all these different environments, I started leading. And as I started leading people, I had a lot of people come to me and say, “Mike, can you help me get better?” And so people were [inaudible 00:01:44 ] just to show up at the church that I was leading at the time. And I would train speakers up and help them out, give them some feedback and it was really from this faith perspective.

Mike: Then as time passed, I started seeing that there was a need outside of the realm of the small world that I was living in. That people in all these different environments were needing help as communicators, as leaders, as CEOs, as executives. And I started developing little by little, just working with them on a speech here, speech there. But as people came, we started talking about, “How do I develop confidence? How do I do this? How do I do that?” They brought questions to me and I started writing that content. This turned into a book, so I wrote a book called Speak with No Fear. That’s one of the biggest aspects that people would come to me, would be about, “How do I speak without feeling so anxious and nervous and I want to throw up. How do I get over that?” So I wrote a book about that. Extremely well received, picked up by Forbes. I wrote a second book on how to write a speech. So all this together created really this whole company that I developed on how can people take their potential and turn it into their actual?

Mike: So I do that speech coaching, through programs, through books, through workshops. Helping people take their potential as a speaker, their potential as a communicator, their potential as a leader and turn it into their actual reality.

Doug: So you know why should a business owner, entrepreneur or marketer consider adding speaking to their repertoire of marketing tactics?

Mike: Yes. Communication is currency. It’s the currency we use in everything. If you’re in sales and you can’t communicate, you’re not going to be very good at sales. If you’re in marketing and you can’t get your point across, then you’re not going to be marketing your product very well. If you’re a leader and you’re advancing and you can’t get your point across, you can’t rally people to your side, then you’re not going to be able to effectively lead. So really, communication is currency. And if you don’t extend your market. If you wanted to get out there more, developing your ability to speak and then creating avenues where you can be on that platform to get your message across, to get your product across, to get your services, across, will help you.

Doug: So where’s the low hanging fruit? You’ve obviously worked with a lot of people and you’ve got expertise in this yourself. When people come to you, what’s normally the number one thing that’s holding them back from actually executing?

Mike: Really there are two different sets of fruits. So there’s a set of three aspects of where’s your confidence coming from. And there are three questions that you need to answer. Those are typically one of the two areas that are holding people back. The questions reveal the purpose of the way, the reason, and what they’re going to say. And then the other area, the other three are really the sources of confidence. And it’s either confidence that’s holding someone back or really understanding that’s holding someone back. So if it’s a confidence that’s holding someone back, someone might say, “You know, I just don’t feel comfortable doing it. I just don’t know how to do it, the mechanics of doing it.” So really it’s this aspect of, you need to learn how to develop confidence and confidence that carries you on stage. Because if you don’t have that confidence, you’re not going to want to get up there, you’re not going to [inaudible 00:05:12 ] that are there.

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HOW TO GAIN CONFIDENCE IN PUBLIC SPEAKING

When it comes to public speaking it’s either confidence that’s holding someone back or understanding that’s holding someone back.

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Mike: Now, on the other hand, it might be they don’t understand the questions that give a purpose for it. They don’t understand how it’s coming across. So I work on both of those sets of people and it really depends. Some of the people I work with, they’re these high powered executives. I have some CEOs of multi-million and even billion-dollar companies that have done incredible starting some of these businesses and that they just don’t … And they know that they actually should be on stage. They know that it would help them, which is why they come to me. They understand the value of marketing it has. But they just don’t either have that confidence, on one hand. Or they just don’t know what questions they should be answering on the other hand.

Mike: So which do you think this would be for your audience? Do you think that confidence would be more helpful or going through these clarifying questions?

Doug: I’m not sure, because when you mentioned that, and this is mine … I’m a survey of one. And I tell my clients, we don’t make marketing decisions based on what we like. But in this case, I’m really not sure because I’ve never considered confidence an issue. For myself, speaking has been more around developing a clear message and creating the content. But, this is your expertise, so I’ll let you decide. How’s that?

Mike: Yeah. Sounds good. So let me just take it back to one of the clients I was working with. So he’s an entrepreneur. I got this great idea. He started a company in the UK. I did very well, started hiring people. He’s very good at just doing it, very hard worker, has incredible ideas, technical experience. Then he took that company and expanded to another place in Africa. From there he took it and moved it over to the United States, where he moved his headquarters. So now he’s over here and his company has grown to about 500 people. It’s a really good and very valuable company and they’re doing some amazing work. They’re constantly getting recognized. So he reaches out to me and he says, “You know, I know that I could extend my market by doing something very simple.” How would you like that, right?

Doug: Yep.

Mike: All I got to do is something