Surveys have shown that speaking in front of an audience is one of the most common fears among people from all walks of life. In talking to many people over the years who harbor this fear, I have often heard them say, “I’m just not a good speaker.” Those words imply that they believe the ability to speak in front of an audience is determined at birth.

As with almost any skill, that’s largely true. Natural ability is always useful. But natural ability is not what carries the day.

One of the best speakers I’ve heard in a long time is Michael Cloud, who is also a top notch speechwriter. A couple of weeks after I heard him speak, Michael sent me a great article he wrote titled “The 7 Deadly Sins of Public Speaking…and How to Avoid Them.”

I don’t have space to review all seven sins here, but I can tell you that the first deadly sin he lists is lack of proper practice. He says that many speakers simply don’t practice enough. Others practice arrogantly and haphazardly, just going through the motions. And, incredible as it may seem, some speakers don’t practice at all.

Cloud goes on to say that many speakers are just trying to “wing it.” His attitude is: “Good enough is good enough.” During a subsequent phone conversation, he expanded on this point by telling me something that most people will find hard to believe: that the best natural speakers are often the worst performers.

How can this be? Because naturally gifted speakers often feel relaxed and in control in front of an audience. Which in turn makes many of them believe that they don’t need to practice.

I identify with this, because I fell into the trap of overconfidence early in my career. From a very young age, I recognized that I had the gift of gab and mistakenly believed that this ability was all it took to be a great orator.

The end of this ridiculous miscalculation came during a performance in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. At that time, my second book, Looking for #1had just risen to number 1 in The New York Times bestseller list, and I was drunk on the wine of adulation. I was scheduled to speak to an audience of 3,000 people, all of whom I assumed were disciples of Robert Ringer.

After a performance that would have made Johnny Carson envious, I walked up on stage and started babbling. I was all over the lot… every sentence inundated with “uhs”… endlessly repeating myself… and improvising “jokes” that only drew blank stares from the audience.

Being the perceptive young man that he was, after about 10 minutes I felt like I was in big trouble. When raw eggs and tomatoes are flying at you from all directions, you begin to suspect that the audience isn’t really impressed with either your message or your delivery.

And when practically everyone in the room starts coughing nervously, it’s all you can do to resist yelling, “Mom! Come get me, quick!” (I will never forgive her for not coming to my rescue when I needed her the most.)

Since that embarrassing fiasco, I have witnessed many high-profile people give speeches that ranged from mediocre to abysmal. In all cases, it has been obvious to me that the speaker was improvising out of arrogance and/or ignorance.

With that being said, here’s the painful truth about one of the best-kept secrets of great public speakers: They orchestrate their speeches down to the last detail. What I’m talking about here is tireless and ongoing practice of not just every word, but also precise body language, facial expressions, voice inflection, and more.

In this regard, Zig Ziglar comes to mind. When Zig takes the stage, it’s like watching a great actor perform. othello. Years ago, I attended two speeches by Zig Ziglar in the span of about six months, and not only were every word and sentence exactly the same, and delivered in exactly the same way, but he even took one knee at precisely the same moment. It was more dramatic than watching Larry Parks sing “Mammy” in Johnson’s Story.

So it’s no mystery why Zig Ziglar’s speeches have captivated audiences for decades. Clearly, he is a master craftsman who has orchestrated his performances to perfection.

Tony Robbins is another excellent example of high level orchestration. Love him or hate him, he is possibly the most dynamic and passionate speaker on the planet. When you look at Robbins, you get the feeling that words flow spontaneously from his mouth as fast as he can think, and that his thinking mechanism is always in fast forward.

But I noticed something interesting during a Robbins speech I attended in Hawaii a few years ago. He was explaining how important it is to show a high level of energy. To prove his point, he ran down the center aisle to the back of the hall and then began to walk very slowly towards the stage.

As he walked, his shoulders slumped and he spoke very slowly in an effort to comically demonstrate what a person with low energy looks and sounds like. In perfect sync with his Step’n Fetchit imitation, a sound akin to the pounding of a horse’s hooves on a cobbled street could be heard throughout the room.

I looked around to see where the sound was coming from, and lo and behold, the audio guy was providing the special effects. I later found out that Robbins brings his own sound engineer with him to all speech gigs, which is about as far as one can go from improvising. Again, there’s no mystery why he’s a world-class speaker: amazingly detailed orchestration.

By contrast, I remember a famous NFL quarterback telling me years ago, when he was in the national spotlight, that he did a lot of public speaking in the off-season. I asked him how much time he spent practicing and he replied, “Geez, I don’t practice. I don’t believe in giving canned speeches. I look better when I’m spontaneous. I just get up and talk about whatever’s on my mind.”

There is a term to describe this type of attitude: arrogance of the ignorant. As you may have guessed, after he finished his run, this guy completely disappeared from the speaker circuit. So much for just getting up and talking about whatever is on your mind.

But orchestration is not limited to public speaking. On the contrary, it is one of the keys to success in all professions.

In the early eighties, I saw Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme perform at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. At the time, they were at the top of the entertainment ladder and put on quite a show. What I enjoyed the most about their act was their humorous improvisations and off-the-cuff banter with each other. They were muting lines, clowning around and laughing out loud on stage.

In fact, I enjoyed her performance so much that I went back the next night to watch it again. Surprise! Every line she had thought was spontaneous was repeated verbatim the second time, right down to their facial expressions, the way they laughed, their body language, and their timing. They silenced the exact same lines and went off in precisely the same way and at the same times as the night before.

There was no spontaneity at all. Zippo. The entire act was orchestrated from start to finish. It was truly perfected to the nth degree.

I later told a good friend of mine who had been a producer for Bob Hope for many years what I had witnessed in Las Vegas. His response: “Welcome to the world.”

My friend assured me that in show business everything is orchestrated, especially the lines that you perceive as improvised. He went on to explain, “You know those spontaneous moments on variety shows when the performers are cracking up in front of the audience? It’s all orchestrated: every laugh, every grimace, every fall.” She stressed that professionals do not go in front of the cameras until they have every word and every gesture well recorded.

That brings me to my latest example of orchestration, Tom Brady. You may recall that I wrote an earlier article about the star New England Patriots quarterback, based on his interview with Steve Croft in 60 minutes. At one point, Brady was talking about how many hours he spends each day studying game movies, prompting Croft to rhetorically ask him, “So is everything orchestrated?”

To which Brady responded, “It’s all orchestrated. You don’t just go out there and improvise it.” So sports, public speaking, show business, just about any profession you can think of, have at least one thing in common: orchestration is a major key to greatness.

So why don’t more people invest a great deal of time and effort in orchestration? Other than laziness, I think one of the main reasons is that they believe orchestration is somehow dishonest. Pure nonsense, of course. The person who arranges everything in advance simply cares enough about her job to strive for perfection. Orchestration is nothing more than precisely practicing what you’re going to do or say… and that’s a good thing.

The same applies to “reality” shows like The newbie. When big bad Donald Trump says to the soon-to-be executive, “You’re fired!” and he brings her to the brink of tears, the hapless viewers want to believe that this corporate version of professional wrestling is real. They love to share the “pain” of the future executive.

And when the teary-eyed object of Trump’s cruelty appears on Oprah to tell the world how the other actors (eh, the job hopefuls) beat her from behind to get the Donald job, it’s enough to make a sober adult becomes physically ill. .

But then unless you think Survivor and The Bachelor They’re real, I guess you get it The newbie It’s a great orchestration. Rest assured, every one of the dozen hairs on Trump’s head snaps perfectly into place before the cameras start rolling.

What’s good enough for DT is good enough for you and me. To parody the words of a now-deceased legal wizard who managed to free OJ through shameless diversion tactics and a dose of grade school poetry, “If you yearn to be great, you must orchestrate.”