Welcome To Speakers Who Get Results!

Welcome to Speakers Who Get Results! With interviews with global experts and her own 30 years of training presenters, Elizabeth Bachman will share strategies and ideas for presenting yourself better so that you get funding, allies, and recognition. Not only will you get speaking tips, but you will also learn about all the aspects of live communication that affect how you are perceived: leadership, visibility, presentation challenges, and much, much more!

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Welcome To Speakers Who Get Results!

This show is for those of you who make presentations, who do live communication and are interested in learning more about the craft of it. Learning more about how you can use speaking as a way to promote yourself, to improve your career and to make more money in your business. Speaking is a tool. It is how we communicate. There are ways of doing it well. I know we’ve all seen the ones who are boring or the speakers who talk too fast. They talk too fast that you can never hear what they have to say. This show is where we’re going to interview experts for you. The problem is many people make a presentation, but they wing it. They go in and they start talking without thinking about who’s listening, what you need to know and what your listeners need. How do you need to phrase something so that your listeners can hear it well? You see people who’ve gotten some training and they think they know everything and they stop. I’ve been presenting for years and you’re always learning things.

This is for those of you who maybe want to solve some challenges, maybe want to use speaking to show up as a leader, so that you get promoted or you help your business or basically make more money. It’s about the craft of live communication is so rich. One of the things I know from all my years in the performing arts is that theater is all about this. Opera is all about this. How do you get people to listen and do what you want them to do? The good thing is that we have 3,000 years of techniques to learn from the Greeks, from Aristotle, from Aristophanes and all of them. Through the centuries to the experts who are using speaking to position themselves, using speaking to inspire and using speaking to teach. My hope is that you can use presentation skills to get funding allies and recognition.

By funding I mean, those of us who speak to make a sale, speak to promote our company or speak to raise money. Maybe you’re raising money for your nonprofit. Presenting to get allies is to get people to help you. It might be a one-on-one conversation. It might be finding referral partners. It might be giving a general speech and inspiring your listeners to say, “I’m going to do what she says. I’m going to follow her. She’s someone who’s got something interesting to say.” Recognition, being the person who’s doing the presentation automatically gives you credibility and positions you as an expert. Why not get out there and do a great presentation and people will say, “I want to know more about her?”

People make buying decisions on an emotional level. If people think well of you and are impressed by you and see you as a leader and your visibility, then that will help you no matter what your career is. For recognition, some of the people I most love to work with are those who sit in a conference and they look up at the podium and they think, “I’m twice as smart as that person who’s up there. Why isn’t that me up there?” Getting out there and learning to present, and reading this blog will be part of it.

I learned about public speaking and about presenting from the theater. I’ve been dedicated to the art of great communications since I was five years old. I first walked on stage and my mother said that I was the best bunny rabbit whoever graced the stage of the Hillside School. I was hooked. I went through acting to directing and directing opera singers. Now, what I do is I help people in business present themselves well so that they get the results that they want. I’ve learned from the masters. I learned the art of public speaking to get a result when I founded an opera company, an international opera training program.

I knew how to teach young singers from all over the world how to be better. What I didn’t know was how to raise the money. I knew how to tell stories, but I didn’t know how to tell stories that would get people to open their wallets. At first, I was terrified to look somebody in the eye and say, “Please write a check for my program. I know I haven’t done it yet and I don’t have the results to offer you.” I was terrified. When I first started, I was terrible.

Speakers Who Get Results: The skills you need to sell a song are not all that different from the skills you need to sell an idea, a service, or a product. It’s all presentation skills, the only difference is the vocabulary.

What saved me was finding a mentor. A speaker trainer, who came to one of my fundraisers and saw the pathetic results I was getting, called me up the next day and she said, “There are some things that you could do to get better results.” She told me that there was this whole craft of presentation and public speaking that I had no idea about. She told me that I wasn’t wrong, I wasn’t stupid, I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. I hired that trainer. I didn’t know how I was going to afford it. She wasn’t cheap, but I knew that my commitment to the people who needed my help had to be greater than my fear. I found the money. I made it happen and working with her was the best investment I’d ever made because my opera company became a reality.

I’ll never forget the first time I asked somebody for $100 and they wrote me a check for $3,000. It worked. We ran for eleven years and we truly changed lives. Now, I’m using those skills to help people in business because it turns out that the skills you need to sell a song are not all that different from the skills you need to sell an idea in a meeting, to sell your services or sell a product. It’s all presentation skills, the only difference is the vocabulary. We have a lot of exciting things set up for this show. I’ve been interviewing experts for the last few months. I’ve got so many great people. We are talking about presentation skills. I’ve got some fellow speaker trainers out here who are going to give you their expertise, technical things and speaker geek moment things that help people have a better voice, better presence and better script. I will also be teaching a lot of that. How to use what you know and use the techniques of public speaking to get the results that you want.

Also, since speaking is a tool to promote your career or promote your company, we’re going to talk about the things behind that, leadership. How do you show up as a leader? How you present yourself? You can have the best speaking tools in the world, but if you don’t show up as a leader, if you don’t know how to be a leader, you don’t know how to live it, no one’s going to believe you. Also, we’re talking about visibility. Make sure that people know that you’re smart. Too many people hide behind their desks, hide behind their computers and they wait to be noticed. We’re also talking about some of the challenges of communication.

Rule number one in speaking is to make it about your listeners. It’s all about them. The challenge is the people that we’re talking to these days are very much are not us. They are somebody else, especially in this world, which is more international. We’re going to talk about how do you approach people who think differently? How do you communicate with an international team? How do you communicate when you’re the foreigner? We’re going to talk about speaking English because it is the international language of business. Chances are most of the people in your audience did not grow up with English as the first language. Maybe English is your second or third or fourth language. We’re going to talk about those communications and cross-cultural differences.

We’re going to talk about the differences that are subject to us all as humans. How people of different gender listen to you. The gender differences and gender miscommunication, how age differences, how diversity, how the way you look and where you come from will affect what people are perceiving about you? Albert Mehrabian said in the 1960s that only 7% of what people perceive about you comes from your words. The other 93% is how you deliver them and how you look and who you are in the room. How do you present yourselves? I’m sure we’ll be doing many more as the year goes on. There will be many more themes that we can follow and talk about business. How do we handle and present ourselves in order to get a result? I am so excited to welcome you to the show. Be sure to look for the next episode.