How to Build Confidence in Public Speaking

Video Transcript

DON VARNEY: Hi, I'm Don Varney, founder of Varney Speaks, and I'm here on behalf of Expert Village. If you're a confident person and you've been making decisions based on your confidence and your ability to get the job done, then people might say to you, "How important is confidence in your life?" Well, I don't know about you, but everything that I've-- WOMAN: Excuse me, Mr. Varney. DON VARNEY: Yes? WOMAN: I have a question. Earlier, you were talking about training. How would you train somebody who stutters? DON VARNEY: Great question. You know what--please have a seat. If I were you, think about the confidence involved in handling this young lady's question. She just opened up and said, "I want to know about something you just spoke about." Hey, I'm on confidence. I'm having a great time, great question. Thanks for being confident and asking. Well, let's go back to what it means to being confident in life. Now, let's back away from the stage for a moment and let's talk about what just happened. You're in the middle of your presentation. You've been talking for 25 minutes. You're 5 minutes from being done with that 30-minute presentation. And out of nowhere, you're like, "What?" Wait a minute. You're--inside, you're like almost reeling backwards as if you'd just been hit with a one-two-three punch from the greatest boxer in the world and you go, "I cannot believe this person is interrupting me!" But as a professional, what you do is, hopefully, similar to what I just did. You smile. You listen. You pause. You make that person feel like you're genuinely interested in them and not in killing them. And then you go, right back to where you were, letting them know you'll handle that later by the fact that you just moved on. In the 30-plus years that I've been speaking, the few times that I have been interrupted like that, by taking it in a positive, smiling, confident approach, I've never had anybody come back at me. They get the idea. But even more than that, the people sitting around them hold them down. You don't have to. So don't worry about them. Just answer it, move on, and take off and go right back where you were.

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