GENERAL INTEREST livering. The best presentations are delivered with confidence, authenticity and passion, allowing us to connect with our audi-ence. But when interference from the ego-mind activates fear, it prevents us from giving our best presentation. So, quieting that inner voice that puts up those mental roadblocks to peak performance is crucial to speakers. Here’s how you can do it. Quieting Your Inner Voice—What You Can Do to Prepare 1. Master the subject matter In order to speak with authority and confidence, the very first thing that you must do is to master the subject matter. More than 2,000 years ago, the senator, lawyer, and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote that public speaking without mastery of the subject matter was nothing more than windy verbiage. That observation still holds true. If you are giving a presentation, you owe it to yourself, and to your audience, to own it — to become an expert on whatever the topic is. If you are not secure in your own knowledge about the topic, you cannot deliver the presentation with confidence and assurance. Every presentation has a message that we want the audience to hear and receive. And almost every presenta-tion includes some element of persuasion: we want to convince our audience they should accept and believe the facts, the observations, and the conclusions we are delivering. One of the key components of persuasion is credibility. We establish credibility through demonstrating to our audience that we are an authority on the subject. If you are an authority on your topic, you can deliver the message with passion, with authen-ticity, and can be completely absorbed in delivering it with confidence. 2. Practice There is a saying in soccer: The game is the teacher. The more you play in a game, the more you learn about it and develop as a player. Players develop “muscle memory,” which is sometimes really “mind memory.” The scientific term for this is “neuro-plasticity.” We now know that the brain is a dynamic organ and continues to wire and rewire itself in response to experience. Scientists sometimes refer to neuroplasticity as “structural remodeling of the brain.” The structural remodeling can apply to us as speakers. The more we speak in public, the more the mind develops to do it well. According to psychologist Dr. Pascale Michelon, we all get better at what we do repeatedly: “The brain areas involved in language—the areas that help you talk and explain ideas more clearly—these brain areas become more activated and more efficient the more they are used. The more you speak in public, the more the actual structure of the brain changes. If you speak a lot in public, language areas of the brain become more developed.” Of course, any art or performance that involves skill re-quires practice for the specific event. Athletes practice for the game, musicians practice for the concert, and lawyers must practice an opening statement or presentation for the audience. Before a speaking engagement, I usually write out a detailed outline for my presentation to organize the structure of my talk. And the more satisfied and familiar I get with the struc-ture, the less I depend on the notes. Eventually, my script evolves into slides with minimal words on each slide or a one-page outline that only lists the topics that I plan to cover. In other words, my visual cues for the talk provide the structure of my presentation, but as I master the materials of the presen-tation, I allow myself the liberty of delivering my presentation in the way that we speak conversationally—that is with spon-taneity and feeling. Preparation allows me to converse with the audience and to improvise, while removing the fear caused by being unprepared. You are liberated from notes... and can connect with your audience in the most impactful way. In The Articulate Advocate , Brian Johnson and Marsha Hunter have coined the term structured improvisation to describe this method of speaking: you have practiced, and you know the structure of your presentation, but you improvise the words as they are actually spoken. This is a powerful way to deliver a presentation. You are liberated from notes, from read-ing, from memorizing, and can connect with your audience in the most impactful way. The use of structured improvisation as a method to deliver a presentation is consistent with artistic techniques in other fields to achieve peak performance in an activity. Athletes call it “getting in the zone;” psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it “finding flow;” Zen Master Alan Watts called it “disci-pline in spontaneity and spontaneity in discipline.” Whatever it is called, peak performance in an endeavor like public speaking can only be achieved when the ego-mind is still, and when concentration is focused on and totally absorbed in the present. Public Speaking continued on page 52 Jim Lofton spent nearly 30 years as an attorney in federal service. He spent 26 years at the U.S. Department of Justice trying and managing complex environmental cases. He continues to teach trial advocacy and public speaking at the Justice Department’s National Advocacy Center and recently taught the first class that was offered online there. This year, he was selected as a Fulbright Scholar and will teach Rule of Law and trial advocacy in North Macedonia beginning in January 2021. In 2015, he was named the Government Attorney of the Year by the ABA Section on Environment, Energy and Resources. Jim can be reached at LoftonLegallySpeaking.com. www.vsb.org GENERAL INTEREST | VOL. 69 | OCTOBER 2020 | VIRGINIA LAWYER 33