BOOK EXCERPTS

We know that whoever you are, whatever success you’ve already achieved, whatever challenges you are currently experiencing, it’s our desire that reading this book will make an inspiring and positive impact on your life!

This book flows from our dad’s instruction for giving solid presentations: “Son, have a Great Beginning, a Great Ending, and keep them very close together.”

We believe that all lectures, speeches, meetings, sermons, and corporate presentations should be written simply and kept short and sweet. We wrote this book based on our personal experiences from delivering over 1400 presentations around the world and having made all the mistakes for you. This guidebook should fit easily into your busy lifestyle and should not take you more than an afternoon. If it does, please read our next book, Speed-Reading Mastery!

We’re curious: Have you ever stood up to speak but your mind sat down? Or perhaps you started to speak and nothing came out? These pages will provide you strategies of style—saying it well. We will also share ideas on substance—what to say. Finally, we will help you put it all together and talk about how easy it is to perform at your best and deliver every presentation without fear.

While there are plenty of books available on public speaking, presenting in front of an audience is still considered one of the scariest things one can do. We know. We used to get incredibly nervous.

Consider these facts:

• Fear of public speaking is the third most common psychiatric disorder and was named by the Book of Lists as the #1 fear among Americans.
• Fear of public speaking ranks above fear of creepy things like spiders, (that’s #3), and it even rates well ahead of the fear of death, which comes in at a lowly 7th place on the list.
• The Daily Mail reported that fear of public speaking is the most common phobia worldwide.
• The Wall Street Journal reported that stage fright afflicts 20 million people at some point during their lifetimes.

Since 1987, we’ve had the privilege of teaching thousands of people all over the world to improve their presentation skills and overcome their fears. In this book you will learn how to use the Speaking Mastery system. This is the system that we personally use to perform consistently at our best when we speak to audiences of all sizes. Our book also draws from others’ expertise, as we have hired and worked with some of the best speakers and leaders in the world including: