Catalyze Your Next Signature Talk in the First 10 Seconds The Catalyst: Sparking Creative Transformation in Healthcare

“Just remember it’s not about you,” shares Jason Teteak, Founder of Rule The Room Public Speaking. In this week’s episode of The Catalyst, Jason Teteak and public speaking coach Paul Westfield discuss tips for physicians to improve their communication styles. 
 
Common mistakes made by physicians when public speaking are using filler words, struggling to translate technical knowledge in a way that the everyday person can understand, and focusing too much on their performance. Learning your preferred presentation style can help you to tailor a pre-speech ritual that will help shake the nerves. By focusing on engaging the audience instead of worrying about yourself, you can deliver a more impactful speech.
 
Tune into this week’s episode of The Catalyst for a conversation with host Dr. Lara Salyer and special guests Jason Teteak and Paul Westfield about how to improve your public speaking. Learn to overcome nervous behaviors and get through to your audience more effectively. 
 
Quotes
• “Health practitioners whether you’re a nurse, doctor, independent, or even employed, we can all benefit from learning simple tips to elevate our communication.” (00:57-1:08 | Host)
• “I am Jason Teteak. I am the author of Rule the Room and Founder of Rule the Room and Rule the Room Public Speaking dot com. I love helping others succeed. That’s what brought me into the field…I love to help people be great and succeed in whatever they’re doing.” (2:37-2:58 | Jason)
• “Paul Westfield is a member of the Rule the Room public speaking team. His focus is on physicians and on coaching physicians to help them be successful with their communication, with the public speaking, with getting their message across.” (3:05-3:17 | Jason)
• “Just remember it’s not about you. The reason I say this is imagine this is your opportunity to love these people, to show how much you care about these people, to meet their needs, to build rapport, to build credibility.” (7:00-7:14 | Jason)
• “I notice common mistakes that physicians make that are very similar to most executives…They’ll use a lot of filler words like so or um or uh or and or because or but. All of those words are helpful for the physicians. They’re helpful for the person speaking…but they end up causing the audience to stumble. That’s an example of focusing on themselves instead of on the audience.” (7:34-8:17 | Jason) 
• “The biggest thing is most physicians are very technically oriented in their persuasion…So communication is very much right-brain oriented. So if you take someone who is mostly left-brain functional and you put them in a right-brain environment, it doesn’t cross over always as well. There is a translation that has to occur. When they’re in a room one on one with a patient they can rely on that technical expertise, but when they’re in a room full of people that’s not available so it’s a little more challenging.” (9:34-10:20 | Paul)
• “The biggest mistake I see physicians making is the curse of knowledge. They have all this knowledge and this amazing experience and expertise and they have a hard time translating to somebody that doesn’t know what they know.” (11:14-11:25 | Jason)
• “The first things I’d say about nerves is when you make it about you and worry about how you’re going to look and you’re going to perform that ends up causing a lot of nerves. When you put the focus back on the audience and focus on them, that’s one of the ways to relieve some of those nerves. One of the best ways to do this is to actually talk to a couple of audience members before you go up on stage. Right before you go up.” (11:30-11:55 | Jason)
• “We cannot deny that our body is going to respond on its own. It’s going to do its own thing. We have to accept that That’s the part of mindfulness is acknowledging that yes I’m nervous but this is good…Take all of that nervousness and make it a positi