Public Speaking Superpowers of the Neurodivergent Mind

Mike Ganino: Hey there, I’m Mike Ganino and we’re going to talk about public speaking with a neurodiverse brain. I work with speakers all over the world on public speaking, on storytelling, on how to take the stage or take the screen and be an effective communicator because public speaking is one of those unfair advantages.

When you’re good at it, it can really change things for your business, whether that’s introducing your ideas to new audiences or selling your programs or simply just getting paid to speak on stages, getting invited to be part of summits and events like this. Public speaking is an unfair advantage for so many folks. For people with neurodiverse brains, it can be an interesting thing to get better at because so much of the advice out there actually doesn’t really work for us. People chalk it up to you’re just feeling anxious and nervous, so you need these ideas. We’re going to talk more about that soon.

Here’s the plan. We’re going to talk about public speaking in general and why it’s beneficial and why it’s difficult with neurodiverse folks to follow the normal rules that people follow and how it’s different for us. Then I’m going to give you some strategies on how this could actually work. Now, I have ADHD, I have inattentive ADHD specifically, and so there’s a bunch of things that work for me that may not work for you. I’m going to share a bunch of the ideas I’ve also learned working with lots of people, people with autism, people with different types of ADHD, and people with different types of anxiety concerns. Lots of these things are going to be helpful regardless.

Just pay attention and see what might work for you. Grab a couple of things here and there, and bring that to the next time you have to get on camera and give a webinar or you take a stage and give a speech. I’m curious, maybe pop in the chat, and share some of the bad advice you’ve been given about public speaking for neurodiverse folks. What are some of the things you’ve heard out there? I’m always curious to hear these things. Hop into the chat and share those ideas with us. I want to see what is the bad advice you’ve been given before.

When I was researching for a talk a few months ago, where I was sharing ideas for public speaking and presentation skills for people, for neurodiverse folks, I found so much bad advice out there that just didn’t work. I found people giving people the standard advice for public speaking, oh, it’s a good idea to practice and everyone’s nervous, just get over it, sare at people in the eyes and make great eye contact, which is really difficult for people with certain types of autism.

One of the things we have to do is really understand what’s going on. What are we trying to do with public speaking? What are we trying to do with storytelling on stages and screens? How can we do it more effectively? That’s what we’re going to break down today. I want to see in the chat some of the bad idea, the things that you’ve been told that just do not work. Maybe they’re going to be some of the ones I’m going to present here today as well.

Now, so much of the advice for people with public speaking doesn’t work for a lot of folks who are neurodivergent because it wasn’t made for our brains, much like many things in this world. You might hear things like, “Oh, you should just write down word for word what you’re going to say and memorize it,” which could be helpful, but it also could be really difficult. For me with inattentive ADHD, I would never do that. I would end up winging it all the time.

We hear things. In fact, actually, that was part of my, part of my journey was way back in the day when I was an actor in my early 20s, I struggled to memorize lines all the time. A lot of times, it was memorizing lines for things I wasn’t inherently interested in, which is also a difficult thing for a lot of folks with ADHD like me. I would struggle to memorize lines and I thought, “Maybe I’m just not meant to be an actor,” which is what led me to improv performing and comedy in that way and live storytelling. That advice for just sit down and memorize, stare at your lines didn’t work for me as an actor. It didn’t work for me as a public speaker as well.

When I started in 2014, the idea of sitting down and writing word for word, everything I was going to say stripped me of a lot of my creativity, a lot of my ability to be in the moment. It also just didn’t happen. I would find myself the night before really big gigs, figuring out what I was going to say, putting some slides together, mapping out my stories on a paper, and going with that. Over time, I realized that was actually a really helpful way.

It’s one of the tips I’m going to share with you in a minute. Maybe for you, writing it down word for word is helpful because you have that backup there. It keeps you focused. Maybe it isn’t, but as a one-size-fits-all solution that is normally offered out there when you go to look up public speaking advice, it doesn’t work for all people with neurodiverse thinking. The other thing that’s very difficult is sometimes it’s difficult to figure out how to read the room. For me, as an inattentive ADHD-er, I can struggle with speaking way too fast and getting way too excited in the moment. I also know anxiety is just an extra thing. The normal amount of anxiety someone feels with public speaking, how so many people are scared of public speaking, is also just higher for a lot of people, especially people with ADHD where anxiety is a comorbidity. The idea of just tell yourself you’re not nervous, you’re not anxious, and just say you’re excited, it doesn’t work for a lot of us either.

We also hear advice around making eye contact, that we should be making deep eye contact with different people in the room. Great, for me, with the type of ADHD I have, not a problem, but I know that a lot of people with autism, that is a very difficult ask and could throw you off of being able to actually deliver the ideas you came to deliver. I got some tips for you as well. We hear things also about public speaking and the tips we should follow around being thoughtful around the–

One of the other things we hear a lot is to read the room, to actually get a vibe. How’s everyone feeling? Do they like this joke? Should you change something? If you’re somebody with certain types of autism or other types of neurodiverse thinking, it doesn’t work. The ability to read the room isn’t something that’s going to work as a strategy on stage in that moment, which is where a specific rehearsal could be more helpful. There’s a whole bunch of these things that just don’t work for folks like us.

The ability to stay on topic [chuckles] can sometimes be difficult for someone with ADHD like me. I’m thinking and my brain is thinking faster than the words are coming out of my mouth and I’ve got an idea over here and I look up and I realize, oh shoot, I’ve just lost the audience because I went over here in this like rabbit hole and started telling about this other story and now I’ve completely lost them and they don’t know where I was. In fact, sometimes I don’t know where I am if I haven’t done my work. We hear that or we struggle with organizing the thoughts in general. Getting the ideas really clear in the first place.

This is something where the way that I’ve taught myself to workshop and rehearse has helped me to do that. In the moment of sitting down and just organizing my thoughts and making that be what I end up saying on stage didn’t work as a strategy. We would, I would hear things like that you should rehearse, but again, I wasn’t writing it out word for word.

Then rehearsing felt really difficult and I would go all the way to the event and be winging it way back in 2014 when I started because the idea of rehearsal seemed so awkward, seemed so boring to me as well. Without that fire [chuckles] of a real live audience, I just wasn’t ever going to do it. I had to come up with strategies to help myself do that as well. For some folks, the presence of stemming can be something that’s awkward on stage and confusing for an audience. I have had to learn how to wiggle my toes, how to do different strategies because stemming is part of my ADHD habit.

The other thing that we struggle with a lot of times is impulsivity. For me with ADHD, impulsivity is really high. That means in the moment I might decide I want to go over here or I want to change this or I want to do something with that. If I hadn’t rehearsed because rehearsing was really difficult for me, then in the moment, I could completely lose the room.

We already talked about how public speaking can be such a game changer, such an unfair advantage for people who are able to do it well, that when you get on a stage, when you give a TEDx talk, when you give a stellar virtual presentation, you can really change the way that people see you. You can change the way they think about your ideas, whether they buy your books, whether they buy your programs, whether they hire you to come speak at their events. All of those stakes are pretty high, which is why it’s important for us to figure out how do we become more effective public speakers.

Before we go into some of the strategies to help you be a more effective public speaker with a neurodiverse thinking, I also want to talk about some of the things that make us really good at this. For folks with neurodivergent thinking, neurodivergent means we’re often more creative. We can see patterns and ideas and we can see connections between something, which makes us often really great storytellers.

I know it’s one of the superpowers for me with ADHD that my clients come to me for is that I am really able to think creatively about how they could express an idea, about how a story of something that happened to them at a chicken farm is related to company culture and leadership.

That neurodivergence is actually a really helpful thing in coming up with creative ways to express our ideas. It’s superpower. Now, a lot of us are also really good at recognizing patterns, at seeing how things are connected. Not just in being creative and having neurodivergent thinking around how ideas could come together, but also how things are connected, which is really helpful as a public speaker to start to recognize the patterns and the things that are going on.

If you’re talking about business, if you’re talking about health, if you’re talking about well-being, if you’re talking about pretty much anything, being able to recognize the patterns that are going on out there and helping connect those with something, probably using that creativity, is a really helpful way for you to shed light on things for an audience. It’s another super.

Now, this is specifically something I see with my own ADHD, is that I have zero capability to hang out with anything that’s boring. That helps me look at even my own speeches and my own ideas and say, “Is this getting boring? Do we need a shift here, a change? That’s one of the other superpowers of neurodivergent thinking, is it helps us to look for the lulls when other people might be getting bored. We can see it and say, “Wait a second, this is now something I need to change in my work.”

One of my clients with autism has the best focus when it comes to getting his ideas down on paper, getting his ideas ready to share, and the ability to say,”I am going to actually work on this, focus on it, make sure it’s great,” is something that a lot of people who are not neurodivergent struggle with. If I’m being honest, with ADHD, it is something I would struggle with. For folks with autism or types of neurodivergent thinking that allow them to focus, that has a huge superpower when it comes to public speaking.

Also, the ability, his ability, he has the ability with the type of autism that he has, to be able to memorize huge chunks of his work. He can actually work on and get transcription for himself or write word-for-word the speech that he hopes to deliver, the script that he hopes to deliver. Then he’s able to memorize that in this really effective way, something that, as I told you, I struggle with. I struggle with as an actor and I would struggle with today as well if I didn’t have another method.

There are all of these things that make neurodivergent people really creative and really effective public speakers. It’s just not probably going to be by following the advice that doesn’t work for us. Let’s talk about some of the things you can do to have a more successful hit rate as a public speaker and storyteller on stages and screens. Let’s start off by talking about how you put together your ideas into a speech.

Now, we don’t have time to talk about a whole, the whole mapping. I teach something called the transformational narrative, which came to me through my own ADHD and not being able to sit through things that didn’t make sense to me or sit through things that were boring or lacked logic. I started studying film and theater, Broadway, even fiction novels and said, “What is the journey that someone goes on?” Because essentially all speeches are meant to be transformational. They’re meant to take someone from one place to another. Can we mimic that in the way we put the content together? That is something I teach my clients called the transformational narrative.

Now, how that presents itself, and that’s a whole nine-part thing, by the way. There’s three boxes in Act One, three boxes in Act Two, and three boxes in Act Three. Now, how that presents itself is into this storyboard. When I’m working on a talk, I usually start with my storyboard. I say, “Let me start up here and think through how am I going to start? Where do I go next? How do I end that? Thinking through the speech you want to give, not as a list, even an outline yet, but just thinking of what is the place I need to take the audience through? What are the key pieces I need to show them so I can guide them through this journey?

For me, with ADHD, that has allowed me to then work on and rehearse those sections in chunks by recording it and then transcribing that recording so I have an actual script. Because, for me, sitting down and typing out a speech is never going to happen. Doing it that way has allowed me to, one, storyboard the idea so I can get clear on what goes where. It also makes it modular. I can move things around. It’s also given me a chance to have a somewhat of a script. If you heard me deliver my couple of keynotes that I’ve done over the years, you would say it sounds scripted because it feels like you’re doing the same story.

The stories feel the same if you had watched it a couple of times. That’s because I workshopped it. I rehearsed it in these storyboard ways, recorded it, and then watched back and said, “Where am I getting bored? Where is this getting confusing?” Then I would rework it and rework it until I had something that felt right. All of that, by the way, helped me memorize it without ever having to stare at a script and try to memorize it.

The first step for you in letting your neurodivergence shine as a public speaker is to storyboard out your ideas, to build out the sequencing of your ideas. You don’t have to outline it and script it yet but just think through the storyboard of it all. What would that look like? When I say storyboard, you could Google that and see how Hollywood does it but they’re using images. I just write words in there of like, open with the story about your fourth-grade teacher. Then talk about the time you ran into a celebrity at an event. Then talk about why do we all get so embarrassed.

For me, that would be Act One. In your storyboarding, regardless of what structure you use, regardless of who’s webinar framework or speech framework you use, use storyboards to map out your ideas so that you can have a little bit of room there to think through them, to outline them further. If you’re like me and executive functioning is something that is difficult for you, then that also helps with it because then I’ve got my storyboard and I can talk through my talk.

I can talk through it with client, with co-workers, with people on my team. I can talk through it with my husband. I can even go on an Instagram live and just share my idea. I don’t have to say I’m practicing a speech here, but I can then talk it out because for me talking out my ideas actually helps my executive function get clearer on my ideas. That’s an added bonus of approaching it from that perspective.

Now, when it comes to the taking the storyboard and turning it into a speech or a script, it’s going to be through talking it through, working through it. Maybe you are someone who wants to then write a fat outline where you’re putting all of the details that you’re going to say. Maybe you’re someone who wants to have a script word for word.

Now, I would advice if you are, if you have inattentive ADHD or other types of neurodivergence, then the fat outline is going to be really helpful to keep you focused. It’s in fact what I have in front of me here today so I can stay focused and go where I want to go and not take little road trips all over the place. That is something that really helps me. Now, if you’re somebody who says no, then memorizing it word for word is going to help me be in the moment more, then do that. Figure out which one works best for you.

My next piece of advice then is to record it. To go into a room, to go outside and record yourself doing it either on your computer or a phone so that you have something to look back at. This will help you notice if you are thinking about how am I going to deliver this in the moment? How am I going to make sure that if I do struggle with reading the room, that I know where it’s funny, that I know where it’s serious, that I know where it might be droning on too long because, in the moment, you’re not going to be able to read the room. Record it and watch it back looking for those specific things.

If you are someone with ADHD like me, then recording it is going to be helpful because then you can take that recording and you can turn that into a transcript for yourself and you could say, “Cool, let me watch and see where did I get bored. I think maybe I can change this story around or I can move things around here or maybe I don’t need to say that there.” For me, a lot of times I come up because of that executive function working so much better when I’m talking out my ideas. I sometimes come up with really brilliant ways to say something that I would have lost if I wasn’t recording it.

Now, if you’re looking at that you say, “I am also never going to do that because of the whole there’s no pressure,” then invite people. Invite someone to that recording. Invite someone in your community. Invite a spouse. Invite a neighbor. Invite a friend and say, “All I need you to do is just be a body in the room so I could talk to but do not let me cancel. It’s two o’clock on Thursday. Show up.” That has changed my life as an ADHD speaker and so many of my clients who are neurodivergent as well, of having that looming deadline way before the actual deadline of your actual speech will help you to get the reps in that are going to support you when you’re giving the high-stakes speech on that real stage.

In the same way, thinking through that rehearsal, thinking through those sessions if you are someone with autism, it allows you to plan the scenario. You can think through what is this going to look like? How is this going to feel? How is this moment? Where might I move on stage? Where might I walk over to? It allows you to plan out the scenario so you can feel more comfortable on the day of that you are delivering the speech that you intended to deliver.

This next piece of advice is advice that I would give anybody and in fact a lot of this has been advice I give all of my clients even the non neurodivergent folks and it is that stories are going to really change the game for you. When it comes to delivering better speeches on stage, when it comes to being able to remember where you wanted to go, to rely on your ability to say something funny, to say something that really connects with them, storytelling is going to help you because you don’t have to remember as much blocks of text. You’re remembering how the story went.

When you’re thinking of stories and I’ve got a great resource for you, by the way, called StoryCraft, which you’ll be able to grab right here or go to mikeganino.com/storycraft, it’s the five stories that entrepreneurs, coaches, business leaders must be able to tell. There’s a bunch of prompts to help you think through how you might get creative, get neurodivergent in coming up with the stories to bring those situations to life. You can grab that to help yourself as well with all kinds of little ideas there.

Storytelling in a speech, in a video, is going to help you so much because you will have to remember a bunch of bullet points or ideas as much. You’ll be shaping the audience through the story you’re telling. When it comes to storytelling, the biggest piece of advice I have for you is to really think of how you’re going to start the story. There’s a lot of bad advice out there that says, “Oh, you should start at the beginning.” The beginning of what? The beginning of my life? The beginning of what? What I see happen is that people start way too far back. Then it starts to get boring. [chuckles]

If you are someone with ADHD like me, then that boring part, you start to say, “Oh, let me go over here, let me change it.” Now you’ve completely lost the story and possibly the audience. The biggest thing I can give you is in that storyboard, as you know, I want to tell a story to open about the time that I forgot my lines when I was an actor and I was on stage, I forgot my lines. Then write down the first words out of your mouth, write down the first two sentences of that story, what you’re going to tell. After that, you generally are going your way or write the whole story out, map the whole thing out.

The starting place is so important. We don’t need as much exposition, which is all of that background story. As we think we can start closer to the moment something happened. In this scenario of me not being able to memorize my lines, I might start that story with I’m standing here on the stage and I’m looking at her eyes and my brain is blank. Now, if you were in the audience, you say, “What’s going on? Why is he on stage? Who is he staring at? Why is his mind blank?” I’m giving them a location and specific action. My mind is going blank as I’m staring at her eyes. I’m doing something on a stage.

Now, the audience says, “Oh, unpack it for us. Help us understand it.” If I need to go backwards and say, “Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you that I had been studying for 20 years and that’s why it mattered,” or whatever, but we often need less backstory than we think. If you are neurodivergent, then backstory can be a place where we can get lost a little bit sometimes. Start thinking of how you can bring stories to work and specifically how you’re going to start the story and how far into the story can you push it because you can always go back and explain more afterwards if we’re lost.

The next chunk of advice I have for you is about physicality. For me, physicality is a great thing on stage because I’ve all this energy, all this movement that wants to come out. When I’m going through and doing my storyboarding into rehearsal, into the workshopping the stories, videotaping it, getting it all down, and writing it word for word in the script, if that’s something that you need to do, then I’m also thinking about, what am I doing physically?

Now, the storytelling can help with that because then you could say, “Oh, cool, I’m going to tell this part of the story and I’m actually going to act it out a little bit. I’m going to deliver it like I would if I was in that moment or I’m going to always place my mom’s house on the left side of the stage. When I’m at school, I’m going to go to the right side of the stage.” Now you have something physical to do with your body so that you’re not just up there with all of this energy running through you and nowhere to put it.

I know, for me, that increases the likelihood that I am going to tap into heightened anxiety and that I’m going to tap into impulsive behaviors on stage. Maybe for you that would tap into the stemming. I know for me in the past it has when I don’t have something physical to do with my body. As you’re looking at your speech, as you’re planning it out, as you’re storyboarding it, rehearsing it, getting it on video, think, “What can I do here? What can I move? Could I use a prop? Could I bring something on stage? Could I hop off stage and go talk to them for a minute?” How can you use physicality more intentionally?

Because otherwise, what happens is, and this happens to everybody, not just us neurodivergent folk, is that they start to wander around and it’s like, “I’m going to go talk to them over here for a little bit and then I’ll go over here versus the movement and the physicality having real intention behind it. Build that in, build those ideas into your rehearsal and workshopping, build it into the videos that you’re recording. You could see how does that look? Does that pull it off? Would it be helpful?

I tell a story in one of my keynotes at the end where I am, I’ve introduced the idea that I’m a dad throughout. Then at the end, I’m telling the story about my daughter, Viviana’s birth. She was born, three months early at 28 weeks in August of 2020 in the middle of COVID. We had a surrogate, she was born in a foreign country. There’s a lot of things going on. I tell that story and I talk about being in the NICU.

She was in the NICU for six weeks and being there and her tiny little fingers. Then I put a picture up of the tiny little fingers holding on to mine. Then I kneel down as if I’m next to the incubator. I put my hand up, I kneel down on stage, on that stage I kneel down. I put my little hand in there and I say, and I would tell her every night, I would say, “Viviana, I will never leave you daddy issues.” Because that’s what happened to me. I say that to her. Then I look up and I say–And last night I stand back up now. I was kneeled down with my finger in the incubator.

Last night, I was talking to her when she was in her bath. I placed the bath, down here low, like the incubator would be. I was talking to her on FaceTime and she said, “Poppy, where are you? Poppy, where are you? What are you doing?” I said, “Oh, I’m at work.” Because I’m here at this event. Usually, I’m doing this as a keynote in person. Then I go into why is this important, the stories we tell, yada, yada, what I hope she learns from this work.

That physicality, that I do twice, I do it another time when I talk to her in the bathtub, then when I’m in the incubator, that physicality of moving gives me something to do with my body. It gives me some expression to to use my actual energy so that I don’t tap into the heightened anxiety to the impulsivity. I think it also helps me organize my thoughts and my story because I have something to do with my physical body. That’s somatic work is actually helpful for me to memorize my stories and also to have things to do on stage so that I’m not just nervous up there. Try to think through the physicality of it for you as well.

If you are someone who stemming is a concern for you, then I would recommend really getting comfortable wiggling your feet. As you rehearse, wiggle your toes. No one’s going to see it the way that they might if there was another type of stemming that you do that could be distracting and then you get nervous, they get nervous, everyone’s nervous up there. Practice in rehearsal wiggling your toes. In fact, do it [chuckles] right now while you’re sitting here.

It’s one of the things I say all the time to clients, neurodivergent or not, when I’m working with them is, and they seem anxious or nervous, I say, “Can you feel your feet?” Often we can’t. We get so disconnected from our bodies because we’re talking and we get so disconnected from doing any movement in our speeches or on these videos. We get so disconnected from our body that we forget we have one and we’re just this head that’s talking.

My advice to you is to, as you’re working through your speech is wiggle your toes during rehearsal so that in the moment when you’re on stage of stemming is something that could be a risk for you or just heightened anxiety and needing to do something with it, then wiggle your toes inside of your shoes, wiggle your toes, wiggle your toes, practice.

Feel the ground under you. It reconnects us a little bit and helps us remember that we are incarnate, that we are these bodies here and not just floating ideas that you are struggling to pull back in if that’s the case. Wiggle your feet, wiggle your toes. They’ll never notice it and it will really help you reconnect to where you are and what you’re doing. Then tap into the rest of the physical work that you’ve decided to give yourself on stage.

Then the other thing that is a piece of advice that we give public speakers all the time that doesn’t work for a lot of neurodivergent people is to make eye contact with the audience. Now, for some folks, it’s no concern. For other folks, having to make eye contact for an hour of a keynote and to mask that long is a really big ask and really difficult. In fact, in the moment, I know my client and I talked to him about this presentation as well. He knows that I’m sharing these things with you.

My client who has autism, the part about eye contact he would struggle with because he would make the eye contact, and then in making eye contact, completely get lost in what he rehearsed, which he had memorized. He had nailed it. He had the whole speech memorized. It’s one of his superpowers. In that moment of making the eye contact, having to mask for an hour in that way was really difficult for him to pull back and think about, “Wait, where am I going next?”

Here’s my piece of advice. When I was a theater actor, we would go out on stage and we would have the lights. We couldn’t see most people’s faces. Maybe a couple of people in the front row but beyond that, when we would look out and talk to them, when you go to a concert and you see Taylor Swift or Beyoncé or whoever your favorite person is and they’re in that big, huge stadium and they look out and it looks like they’re looking right at you. You’re like, “I think Beyoncé is singing Halo to me.” In fact, it feels so much like Beyoncé singing Halo to you that you reach up and you’re like, do I feel my halo too? Because it looks as if she’s looking at you. She isn’t. It’s just lights in her eyes.

The way that we can handle this, if making eye contact is distracting or causing difficulty on stage is to, one, hope you’re on a big stage with lights. Two is just stare at their foreheads, stare at the place where their hair and their forehead meet. This is a little trick that will get you from having to make eye contact, possibly throw yourself off, overwork yourself in that way but will still feel like you’re looking at them.

Now, obviously, if someone is like, two feet in front of you, then it might be harder. Just don’t look at that row as often. Maybe casually glance down at them, not making eye contact, and then focus on people further back but looking at the tops of their heads or looking– I think a really great place to look is where the hair would theoretically meet the forehead. Now I got a big forehead, so mine’s further up. In that general area, it’s going to help you cheat that you’re making eye contact.

Again, if there’s people two feet in front of you, just casually reference them here and there, and then go back to looking at people’s foreheads in the back of the room. It will cheat the illusion of eye contact, which is important for public speaking. People want to feel connected to us. They want to feel that there’s some societal pressure to make eye contact. If that is something that is throwing you off and making you nervous, then just stare at that spot of their heads.

I got one last piece of advice for you. Really think about the things you’re saying to yourself before you go out there. Now, this is advice that probably [chuckles] works for everybody. I have a three-year-old. She’ll be four soon. One of the things that I’ve had to learn as a parent is to watch the amount of telling her what not to do that I do. Don’t jump off the table. If you’re a parent, you’ll know the struggle is real. Don’t pour paint on the dog. Don’t slam the glass door. What happens a lot of times is the message just gets heard as slam the door, jump off the table, paint the dog. All of those scenarios we have been through.

The same thing happens for us. When we get on stage and we worry about don’t mess up, don’t screw up, don’t forget your lines, don’t be boring, we often don’t have the positive affirmation that we need to look for. Now, I’m not saying go out there and be like, “I’m Beyoncé, give me power,” yada, yada. I’m saying go out there and visualize what you want. Instead of telling yourself, don’t forget your lines, say, “I have all my lines memorized and I know exactly what to do. In the moment, I’m going to be able to think of exactly what to say next. I know exactly where we’re going. I know the stories to tell and why they’re interesting. I’ve put in the work.”

If you are worried about screwing up, forgetting things, then your body becomes obsessed with screwing up and forgetting things. Give yourself positive things to think about. Visualize, plan the scenario that you want to happen when you get out there on stage. Realize that if you’ve done the preparation work, if you’ve storyboarded, if you’ve rehearsed, if you’ve videotaped it, if you’ve then workshopped that videotaping to say, “When do I start the story? How much do I teach? How does it all fit in?” If you’ve written out your script in a fat outline or word for word, then in that moment, you really are going to be okay.

These aren’t just positive affirmations you’re telling yourself and some Instagram quote version of living your best life. It actually is setting you up for success. Because at the end of the day, public speaking is an unfair advantage. If we can be good at it, if we can get on stage and deliver messages in ways that they can’t forget, tell stories that they can remember, own our physicality so that it feels like we’re so present with them, then getting on stages, getting on screens and sharing your ideas, there’s just nothing else like it.

When someone can get up on a stage and do it effectively, they hold a special place in our mind. The gravitas that comes with it is epic. People who are neurodivergent deserve that as well. In fact, I think we have a lot to offer. Our creativity, our pattern recognition, our ability to use our physicality, our focus, the ability to memorize or not memorize, whatever the case is, those are all things that allow us to be really effective on stage. As you get ready, as you go out there, I encourage you to pull the ideas from this that help you. Maybe all of them that I shared won’t but a couple of them will. Think about how to use those.

Don’t forget, I’ve also got that StoryCraft guide for you to help you think through some of the stories that you might tell. There are five specific ones, I think, as entrepreneurs, as coaches, as leaders, that we need to be able to tell. I’m going to help you think creatively [chuckles] about where those stories might come from and how you can use them in your work. You can grab that at the link that’s shared here with you and I can’t wait to see you out there on stage.

Definitely pop in here, let me know in the questions, what questions you got, what ideas, what stood out to you? I’d love to know right now, actually, what from this is the one big idea that you can take away and use? What do you think you can just start using now, tomorrow, at your next event? What is that one big idea? I’m also curious, was there a big myth that we broke? Was there a belief that you had about speaking and storytelling with neurodivergence that we broke today or that we at least rewired a little bit? Let me know in the chat, I’m really curious. I’m here to hang out, to learn more, to share what I know, and to help you get on stages and change the world with your story. Thank you.