Model Agency 411

Many people would rather jump out of an airplane or tackle Mount Everest than stand up in front of a group of people and give a speech! Yikes! But nervousness is natural. Even a very experienced professional speaker will get butterflies before an engagement.

A lot of what you feel in this situation is simply the adrenaline of excitement. Still, the last thing you want is to be visibly trembling in front of your audience.

There are very specific ways to calm yourself down and keep your nerves in check. Deep breathing and relaxation exercises are wonderful. But there is absolutely nothing that will calm your nerves faster than being prepared!

You need to know your material so well that you can speak about it off the top of your head sideways and upside down. In fact, it’s great if you know the material well enough to recite it, as long as you don’t actually recite it. Just know it well enough that it’s completely ingrained in your mind. You’ll feel so confident that you’ll sound absolutely natural. You’ll be able handle anything unexpected that comes your way, and you’ll be able to answer any questions and speak to you audience as if they’re old friends.

Practice In Front of Others

Preparation isn’t limited to your knowledge of your subject, however. You need to feel just as confident about the way you present yourself. This means practice, practice, and more practice - and not just in the shower or in front of the mirror.

Practicing in front of a mirror can be helpful to start, but it gives you no idea how you’ll feel when someone else is in the room. Start out by practicing for your spouse or a friend. Then, get a group of people together, and make a video of your performance. Ask your friends to bring their friends, and give your speech a try with some strangers present.

Ask your guests to tell you what they think of your abilities, and ask them to be honest. Most importantly, ask them to tell you how they felt while you were speaking. Did they stay interested? If not, when did their minds wander? Did you inspire them? If it’s more comfortable for everyone, you can ask your guests to write down their thoughts anonymously.

Watch the videotape, and make whatever adjustments you need in order to improve your performance. Better yet, hire a professional coach to give you public speaking training. You don’t have to be perfect, but a true professional speaker never stops making improvements.

Follow These Public Speaking Tips

In the meantime, here are some very helpful public speaking tips that every good public speaker knows!

1. Check out the room ahead of time to make sure you know where everything is located, how the microphone works, and how loud you will need to speak to be heard in the back of the room.

2. Keep a timer of some kind available so that you will know when your time is up. Whatever you do, don’t look at your watch. Your audience will think you’d rather be somewhere else!

3. If you make an error, don’t make a big deal of it. Just keep going. Your audience will feel relieved to know you’re just as human as they are.

4. A great way to alleviate nerves is to make eye contact with specific people in the audience. If one person gives you a blank stare, move on to someone more receptive.

5. Wear appropriate clothes that show your personality, and most importantly, that feel comfortable! Nothing is worse than discomfort due to tight or scratchy clothes. And if your shoes will show beneath a podium, wear nice ones! For women, it may be best to wear a pantsuit. Bare legs can be a distraction.

Public speaking can be very rewarding. If you want to do it, all you need to do is learn the ropes and believe in yourself!

Matt Bacak became “#1 Best Selling Author” in just a few short hours.
Recent Entrepreneur Magazine’s e-Biz radio show host is
turning Authors, Speakers, and Experts into Overnight Success Stories.
Discover The Secrets To Unleash The Powerful Promoter In You! Sign up
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So it’s your dream to write novels? Be a freelance writer and make a living off of your articles? Or maybe you nurture an ambition to write and sell enough short fiction to put bread on the table, like those writers of the golden age of the pulps?

Well, those are all noble dreams to have. I’m smitten by the writer’s glamour myself. Also I’m grateful for the others who were, those authors whom I love to read and return to time and again. I’m grateful that they possessed not only their artistic vision, but also the sheer stubbornness and will to persevere and see their dreams become reality.

So we’ve settled on the fact that we want to be writers, and that no other dream will do. Now let’s take a look at what this is likely to mean in terms of the sacrifices we’ll have to make along the way.

1. Misunderstanding.

Make no doubts about it - even those closest to us may not understand or even sympathize with our dream. Young authors still in school or living at home should prepare themselves for the advice of well-meaning but frightened parents; which typically will be encouragement in ANOTHER direction. With all that time spent on the computer, you could build a career as a typist. How about data entry? Web design? They have a lot of great courses at the college for that.

Adult writers can oftentimes expect a similar reaction from their significant others; though in this case, the motivation might be someone different. Why don’t you pursue something that there’s a FUTURE in?

People who give this sort of advice are doubtlessly well-steeped in all the lore of the suffering artist. Parents don’t want to see their children go through it; husbands and wives aren’t all that eager to see their spouses get caught up in that trap either.

But the real question here is this: are YOU ready to believe in yourself enough to persevere even in the face of this negative (though well-meant, perhaps) feedback?

2. A social life? What’s that?

To finish a novel could easily take up a thousand hours or more of your time. That means almost three hours a day if you want to get it done in a year. And this is a modest estimate. Now maybe you’re willing to give up T.V. time, leisure reading, evenings out with your sweetheart, etc. You want to be a novelist that badly. But wait! The trials don’t stop there.

Your friends and family will want explanations. WHY can’t you go over to Lucky’s and hang out tonight? Why do you never pick up the phone at night (or in the morning or whenever you write)?

Now it’s one thing to have college papers to write, or mid-terms to study for, or overtime hours at work. Those are all socially acceptable obligations. But tell your friends that you’re staying in every evening to write and probably the best reaction you can hope for is a blank stare.

Are you ready to say: “Too bad if they can’t understand”?

3. Rejection upon rejection.

Let’s say we pass the first two hurdles. We don’t listen to people’s attempts (however well-intentioned) to dissuade us, and we plug away at our stories even though it means we can’t enjoy the leisure and down time of “normal” people. We put those thousand-odd hours into our work, and when it’s all done we’re proud of it. We write query letters, mail submissions, and sit back and dream of that fat advance, the book signing tour and the movie offers.

Then the unthinkable happens. We get one return letter after another, and all of them are variations of this: “Thank you for sending us [our work]. It was indeed interesting, but not quite what we’re looking for at this time.”

This happens to everyone. It has happened to me numerous times, and if it never happens to you then you will be entered into the history books of publishing. You may reach the point where a PERSONAL rejection letter instead of a pre-printed rejection feels like an accomplishment.

Remember the dream. Remember the passion that drove you to devote all those hours to writing in the first place, at the expense of your social life and leisure. Then send your work out again, because you didn’t pass the first two tests for nothing. When and if you get feedback, see if there’s anything constructive within it and learn for next time. You’ll be another rung up the ladder to success.

We writers survive and find our way because we weren’t meant to BE anything else.

Seth Mullins is the author of “Song of an Untamed Land”. Visit his complete blog at http://www.writingup.com/blog/seth_mullins

Freelance editing opportunities are out there, you just need to know where and how to look for them. As a matter of fact, there are hundreds of companies that are waiting for you, right now, to fill their job vacancies. Each and every one of them has an exciting opportunity for someone. What are your areas of expertise? What can you do to benefit these companies? Finding freelance editing opportunities is simple when you know what you are looking for, who you are looking for, and where to find them.

Let’s begin with knowing what you are looking for. There are hundreds of jobs available in the realm of freelance. Editing opportunities can be found in many different avenues. You can work strictly with editing copy for websites, or work with developing and proofreading articles for the internet, newspapers, and even books. Knowing which way your career is going is essential. Knowing what you want to do will point you in the right direction of who to look for. Employment can come from many sources then. By knowing what you want to do, you can guide your search around the criteria for these companies. For example, you may be able to look strictly towards companies who deal with marketing or in the newspaper business.

From this point, you can tailor your search for freelance editing work towards the companies that serve your needs. You will need to know where to find them. Let us say you are dealing with internet based companies that you wish to find vacancies with. Your best bet would be to look for websites advertising for these jobs. Message boards or sites that deal directly with the field that you are working with can be an outstanding way to get the clients and employment you are looking for. These jobs are out there, it is a matter of knowing what you need, who has it, and where to find them.

About the Author

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