Soapbox Guru - Improve Your Public Speaking

As longtime members of Toastmasters ourselves, the founders of Soapbox Guru want to help Toastmasters and members of other public speaking clubs to realise their goals. Here are our suggestions.

First, tape all your speeches. Most of the best speakers in the world tape every speech they give because they can evaluate themselves over and over again. They can check their progress. They can see things that they have forgotten about but want to do again. Taping your speeches could be the best move you made after joining Toastmasters!

Second, you can tape your speeches before giving presenting them. Tape yourself in front of a blue wall, at your desk, in front of your garage, wherever, giving your speech. If you upload it to this site, you might get valuable feedback on the speech content and choice of words, or whatever criteria you specify when uploading, and let others evaluate you on those criteria. You could post the video to Facebook or your own site to tell others you would like evaluations. Then, when you go into the club meeting, you will be ready to give your greatest presentation yet.

Third, get your club on Soapbox Guru. This site already hosts videos from hundreds of other clubs–why not yours?  The more members of your club are on SBG, the more evaluations you are likely to receive. The club pages feature is undeveloped at the moment and will be an important part of this site in the near future. You can even make suggestions as to what your club would like to be able to do by emailing us at guru@soapboxguru.com. Your club can see practices by other clubs in the videos and you can help improve your club.

If you are not, and do not intend to become, a member of Toastmasters, don’t worry! In future posts we will show you how anyone who speaks in public can make use of Soapbox Guru.

Soapbox Guru works for those who film their speeches. Why would you want to take a video of yourself giving a speech?

Many of the world’s best public speakers video themselves speaking because they want to see the small quirks and mistakes they make that they could improve on.

Since no one is a perfect speaker, we can always improve. But without being able to see ourselves, we do not always remember the mistakes we make. I have often forgotten whole sections of a speech and not realised until I went home and compared the video of myself to my script.

Moreover, now that Soapbox Guru is here, others can see your video and evaluate you in the same way as you would yourself. They can tell you about any room for improvement you have, even if you don’t realise it, such as a facial tick, some hand clasping you don’t notice, some stuttering that is more distracting than you thought. And they can tell you about what you are doing well, which they should, because we should know what makes us good and unique so that we can do more of it.

So consider uploading your speeches and encouraging your club to do the same. The Gurus are doing it. You can be one too!

Welcome one and all to the beginning of the Soapbox Guru Blog! This blog will guide you through the workings of Soapbox Guru and help you improve your public speaking as well. This first post is about how to use Soapbox Guru.

Many public speakers, Toastmasters and presenters of all kinds, take videos of themselves giving speeches. Soapbox Guru is designed as a video hosting site that enables you to upload videos of presentations and then get feedback, to help you improve. How can you begin getting evaluations?

1) To start, click “Sign Up” or go to http://www.soapboxguru.com/register. Follow the instructions on the page.

2) Click “Getting Started” or go to http://www.soapboxguru.com/start. You will see more instructions on how to upload your own speeches.

3) Upload a speech and specify what you would like others to evaluate. You can choose any aspects of your speech including voice, speech content and words, movements. Add tags to make your speech searchable. The upload page is http://www.soapboxguru.com/upload.

4) Watch other speeches on the site to get ideas about how you can improve your speaking. Evaluate them and they too can improve their presentation skills. Evaluating others not only helps them, it also makes you notice your own strengths and weaknesses.

5) If you belong to Toastmasters or another public speaking club, recommend that they begin filming their speeches. Your club can create an account on Soapbox Guru too!

6) Tell the world about Soapbox Guru, whether to promote your video or to help them improve their speaking abilities.

Follow these steps and you and everyone else can become expert presenters!