Competitive Public Speaking Support –
For Coaches and Competitors
Competitive Public Speaking Support – For Coaches and Competitors
Your Secret Weapon Before the Big Day
Get world-class training and support for your next major speech competition.
Are you…
- A speech and debate coach looking to help your students get breakthrough results?
- Looking to win your next big speech competition?
- Interested in massively upgrading your speech writing and delivery skills – to wow audiences and judges?
If you answered YES, then I’d love to help you achieve your goals.
The process begins with a discovery call, to get to know you, your challenges, your goals, and your audience.
From there, we can explore what the journey will look like – to take you from where you are, to where you need to be.
We have a wide range of potential solutions to cater to your needs and budget. Options can extend from providing extensive training material (over 400 pages of available content), covering every aspect of speech writing, content, and delivery, to providing one-on-one and / or group feedback.
Before making any decision, I am happy to provide as many examples or references as you’d like, in order to make an informed and fully confident decision.
Please note that we cannot write speeches that will be delivered in public speaking competitions, but we can offer to review and provide feedback on existing presentations upon request.
We’ll be focusing on:
- A.C.E.R. Speeches: Audience Centric Emotionally Resonant presentations win more competitions – period. Too often, speeches fail to generate strong enough emotional reactions from an audience for them to stand out from the competition. We provide complete deep dives into literally every aspect of how to create emotional rollercoasters for your audience, from choice of topics, to structure, to content, to word choice, to delivery, and more.
- Rhetoric: One of the most intimidating and overlooked aspects of public speaking training is rhetoric – but understanding it well can offer a speaker an enormous advantage in a competitive speaking environment. We focus on breaking down “rhetorical techniques” into simple, easy-to-apply steps and exercises. In making rhetoric accessible and understandable, we give speakers the tools to reverse engineer great speeches and understand exactly how to integrate some of history’s greatest speaking techniques into their own presentations.
- Storytelling: How to create and sharpen stories that capture an audience’s imagination, and connect with them on deep emotional levels – speaking to the audience’s core wants and needs to command their absolute attention. The journey covers every aspect of story creation, refinement, and delivery.
My Six Core Principles:
- 1) Your opening 30 seconds needs to grab my attention and engage me emotionally. Make me FEEL something, whether it’s suspense, laughter, anxiety, anger, or curiosity.
- 2) A huge part of resonating with an audience is authenticity, and the key to authenticity is congruency. Your body language, vocals and content should always be in alignment, if you want to avoid looking like you’re “performing” instead of “connecting.”
- 3) Storytelling is key. A single well-told story is more memorable and more persuasive than any fact, figure, or PowerPoint slide.
- 4) A great speech isn’t just a great essay spoken out loud. Some of the sentence structures and rhetorical techniques that are most effective in public speaking go against nearly every lesson your English teacher has ever taught you.
- 5) Have a clear through-line. Having a metaphor or a story that weaves throughout your presentation can be an incredibly powerful way to make it feel more focused and easy to follow.
- 6) Record yourself repeatedly when you practice. It can feel awkward to watch yourself on camera for many of us, but it’s absolutely the fastest way to review, analyze, and improve your performance.
Are we a good fit?
I am my school's speech and debate coach. Can you please elaborate on how you would help me to improve my students' presentations?
Certainly! In most cases, our goal here is to focus on a “train the trainer” approach – to give you all of the tools and resources you need to offer your students a much more robust and enriched curriculum than is likely being offered elsewhere. We are also happy to organize one-on-one and group sessions with public speaking coaches to host deep dives into a variety of aspects of public speaking and speech prep. Additionally, we are also available for a coach to request a session to review a particular presentation, speech, etc. as well as any other pressing topic of interest.
I'm training to compete in an upcoming speech competition. What would our journey together look like?
The process will begin with a discovery call, in which we will discuss your background, objectives, concerns, audience, and more. We will also review any existing content you may have prepared. From there, we will put together a custom roadmap based on your needs and goals, which can be followed with ongoing weekly feedback, training, reviews, and more.
What sort of supplementary material do you provide?
The cornerstone of the training will be “The Art (and Science) of Public Speaking,” a 400-page compendium covering virtually every aspect of a competitor’s public speaking journey. The book approaches speech instruction from a highly structuralist perspective – for example, providing dozens of options and variations for speech openings, extensive breakdowns of individual techniques, and a segment-by-segment examination of every key aspect related to speech’s topic, structure, content, rhetoric, delivery, and more. In addition to this, video tutorials further breaking down key principles and providing step-by-step examples and explanations for key ideas will also be available as a learning aid. For those wanting to enrich their content further, bespoke solutions can be arranged to provide speech or competition-specific preparation material tailored to the needs of the individual speaker or speakers.
Do you provide any guarantees of success?
Typically no, given the amount of variables that are outside of our control, like the amount of practice and prep time a competitor chooses to put in. However, bespoke packages can be discussed which create win-win incentive structures based on competition success.
What is your experience ?
In addition to winning a world championship in impromptu public speaking, and publishing a book on content, rhetoric, and delivery, I have also spent nearly two decades teaching public speaking and offering 1-on-1 coaching to students, business professionals, coaches, media personalities, and more.
Ready to Schedule a FREE Consultation?
The sooner we get in touch, the more time you’ll have before the big day to learn from our resources, upskill your knowledge of public speaking, and work towards the outcomes you want to achieve.