I am passionate about helping and coaching people to become better public speakers. But I don't necessarily do it in the structured way that Toastmasters or our school system might teach us.
So today I want to deconstruct the coaching process and give some tips to people out there who may be coaching others about how they can become better and more effective speakers.
The majority of these methods are actually taken from Tim Ferris – the author of The Four Hour Work Week. He is a professional at learning things very quickly and I've taken the way that he goes about learning new skills and applied it to public speaking to help you be a more effective speech coach.
Tip#1: Question best practices
Just because people have been taught the same way every single time doesn't mean that it's the best way to teach.
Questioning best practices can help our students accelerate and learn faster.
A best practice in public speaking is to focus heavily on technique. We do this by doing two things.
We firstly study the greatest speeches of all time. We break them down and analyse their techniques. We learn about pauses and repetition and using metaphors and stories.  And then we try and teach our students to add these into their own speeches.
But what if we didn't follow this progression? What is we changed the way that we taught people public speaking?
We will later look at the notion of sequencing but I believe that the way that we teach people is not the way that we should be going about doing it.
Changing the order of the way we teach people can actually help to build confidence. And that is probably the biggest thing we need to teach people.
Tip#2: Establish a base line
We want to establish the competency of our students.
We want to understand where they're at in their level of public speaking. You can do this in a number of ways.
But I suggest that the best way is two-fold and both would be while filming them on camera.
The first thing would be to get them to deliver a prepared speech of three to five minutes. Use that as a baseline of their speaking skills. How much do they refer to notes? How much do they say "umm" and "uhh"? How much do they stammer?
And the second thing would be to get them to give an impromptu speech of approximately two minutes and measure how well they did when they were put on the spot.
Obviously there's a myriad of different ways that you can measure their ability. It's up to you how you go about doing that. But that's what I would recommend and something that I've found to be effective.
Tip#3: Deconstruction
Deconstruction is so important in public speaking because so often we fail to realise that public speaking is actually a multidimensional task.
We don't just get up and public speak. It's not one thing that we do.
We need to learn how to prepare our speeches. We need to learn how to deliver our speeches. We need to learn how to pause. We need to learn how to avoid stuttering. We need to learn how to use body language. We need to learn how to move across the stage. We need to learn how to hold a microphone and many other things as well.
So deconstructing the many skills that we need to learn can help our students become better public speakers.
It is the same as learning to drive a car. Your teacher hopefully deconstructed the driving process for you. You’d learn one step and then the next. You’d progress from straight lines to turning, from back roads to highways. You slowly build up to the big leagues.
Look at every single aspect of public speaking and deconstruct it so you can teach your students each individual aspect.
Don't just throw it all at them at once. Give them a chance to learn some parts of it and then move up to the next parts.
Tip#4: Use the “80/20” Rule
The 80/20 rule states that 80% of the results that we ge...