Just hear from Conor Neil that one can improve a lot of their speak skill just by doing a 3-minute recording every day, watching it back and then auto feedback. So let’s try it out!
One of those skills I want to develop is speaking. I realized early that most people I admire are fantastic at communicating, and almost every one is an excellent speaker. So that’s a clear path right there, I need to get excellent at both communicating my ideas (until now, I’ve been a mess at it) and improve my public speaking. Thankfully, as I mentioned before, I’ve been exposed to people and doing public speaking and preaching (can you imagine?). Furthermore, I’ve been teaching for the last 10 years, so, believe me, I have practice.
Anyway, before going by the branches, I do recognize that being doing something for a while doesn’t dictate that you get good at it. For instance, my speaking. I feel like I have been the same at this for a long time, and I’m far away from the ‘excellence’ level. So, why not to get better, right?
3 Minutes a day for 10 days can have huge impact
This is how it starts, I was doing a research when I found a 14 or so years old video from Conor Neil’s YouTube channel where he is breaking down 4 steps to improve one’s speak. I found it interesting so, watched it like 3 or 4 times to really interiorize it. I told myself, “that’s not even a fraction of how difficult I was expecting it to be” and decided to make an experiment, and this is it.
According to Conor, explained in other video, by the way, the best thing you can do to improve your speaking in the next 10 days is to simply record yourself speaking for 3 minutes. Sounds too easy, or not? Well, chances are I’m underestimating or maybe misunderstanding the assignment. This is my breakdown of the assignment (this is how I clarify what I am supposed to do when something gets hard to understand):
- Record a 3-minute video of yourself speaking
- Watch the video you just recorded
- Feedback yourself
I don’t know, Oto, it sounds fake
Maybe it is, but, I guess someone have to test it out for confirmation, and that’s basically what I plan to do. This is the part 1 of this journey and is intended to be my motivation. I’m trying to follow Dan Martell advice about committing to others to create external motivation so the internal gets improved. A no-brainer win-win for me.
But before we dive in, there’s another important thing to rescue from the video I mentioned before. The first step to improve at speaking is to live a life (yes, I know, it is really hard now to have a life of our own, but I’ll write down something about that later). That’s kind of stunning, but, of course, what are you going to speak about if you have no experience on any subject? The answer is nothing, for sure. That’s why this is going to be interesting times two, because this is what I’m going to use to force myself to go outside and live a new experience every single day for the next 10 days.
The challenge structure
Just for convenience, and getting shit done fast, the easy way, I’m going to structure this challenge with 2 procedures and 4 rules, and here they are:
- Living a life 🙂
- Everyday try something new or talk to someone I haven’t talked to, or about something we haven’t talked about before.
- Write down or record notes about the performed activity and the outcome it had.
- Record a 3-minute video
- Record a 3-minute video talking to the camera about my product, my business or an experience. No script, one shot.
- Write down review notes as detailed as possible. Look for areas to improve and aspects to maintain.
I’ll keep you up-to-date publishing my progress here, once a week, and, by the end of the challenge, I’ll publish a video on my YouTube channel, and the final part of this series.
For now, thanks for reading and, see you next time.