Mental Leverage

7 Ways to Enhance Your Next Speech and Get Your Brain Moving

Posted on14. May, 2010 by admin2.

When you stretch your brain and your thinking, you actually create new pathways and build your brain power. This will increase your brilliance. Learn how to be brilliant with these 7 easy techniques.

First, I want you to remember that just as you learned to read, mastered math facts, and learned how to function as an adult – you can learn new skills, at any age. Your brain is a magnificent machine.

Here are 7 tips and techniques you can use to improve your brain. You can be more creative, solve problems more easily, be organized, feel confident, stay focused, stay committed to follow through, and be more relaxed.

• Double Doodle –begin by bringing your arms out in the middle of the air and start mirroring each other.  Then take a pen in each hand and begin mirroring while writing on paper.  Once you get the hang of it, start writing your name and drawing pictures.

Benefits: Stimulates both hemispheres of your brain at the same time. Your creative side and your logical analytical side. This is a great exercise to do while you’re preparing your speech. It helps you to have a fun, witty, creative speech that also has a clear message.

• Cross Crawl – bring your left hand to your nose and your right hand to your ear.  Any movement that crosses your mid-line, left to right and right to left.  You can bring your right elbow to your left knee, etc.

Benefits: This gets your left and right brain communicating by stimulating your corpus colostrum which connects your two brains. Once again this is a great exercise to do while preparing for your speech.

• Thinking Cap – Rub your ears.

Benefits: Improves focus and concentration by improving hearing and listening abilities and helps to cut out distracting sounds.This also stimulates over 400 acupressure points and improves circulation throughout your body.  This is a great activity to do every day before any event.

• Calf Stretch – while seated bring your right ankle to your left knee. Focus on stretching and massaging the tendon in the back of your calf.

Benefits: This helps to move ones ideas and thoughts into spoken word.  If one has a hard time getting their message across then this is a great exercise to do.This is great for everyone in leadership, as a great leader, one must be able to complete ones projects.  In Toastmasters we are all working on our Leadership skills.

• Deep Breathe/ 3 Part Breath -Begin with your hands on your belly and as you breathe in, expand, as you breath out, release.  Then move one hand onto your solar plexus (the space between the bottom of your ribs), breathe in from your belly up to your solar plexus.  Then with one hand on your heart, breathe in from your belly, to your solar plexus and up to your heart.  Exhale from the top, middle, down.

Benefits: Oxygen is needed to live. By breathing in more fully we have the ability to think clearly, focus and concentration. This will also slow down a racing heart so if you find that your heart is racing, pumping and your body is uncomfortable, this will physically slow it down and return it to a normal breath where you will feel more comfortable, calm and relaxed within. Great all day long and especially before a speech.

• Use your body for Confidence –here we did a great demonstration on how to use your body to appear and then feel more confident by sitting taller, with your shoulders rolled back and your chin forward.

Benefits: By taking on the posture of confidence your thoughts will soon follow.  A way to enhance this is by noticing how your body feels when you are confident and when you are less confident.  Notice and become aware of your thoughts during these times, too.  By identifying your thoughts and feelings when you are confident, then you can bring them to your awareness when you need the confidence the most. Use this before, during and after your presentation.  You want to project confidence throughout the meeting.

• Your thoughts –The Mind/Body Connection –Your thoughts affect your body.  Imagine eating a lemon where ones mouth begins to water and one truly experiences this principle of learning how powerful ones thoughts are.

Benefits: You will have control over your thoughts.  You can have the choice to worry, stress and think you’re going to do poorly during a presentation or you can utilize the power of your thoughts to improve your confidence to feel good and have fun.

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