The session featured Mike Carr, the 2020 World Champion of Public Speaking, who stood out amongst 30,000 contestants from 146 countries. He is an economist, entrepreneur, and international speaker with a passion for leadership and communication. He launched his first business at the age of 14 and has worked with a Texas state representative, two US senators, and three global financial firms while also founding and managing several small businesses. He currently serves as a partner at FMP Wealth, a private financial firm, and is widely sought after as a keynote speaker addressing organizations worldwide on topics such as economic outlooks, leading teams through uncertainty, and building resilience for the future.

Mike began his speaking journey when he was about ten years old, part of a group similar to a Gavel Club where he enjoyed speaking so much that he talked way too long, originally given five minutes but speaking almost fifteen minutes. He discovered that he went on way too long, used too many filler words like “a’s” and “ums,” and went off on tangents. Later, someone told him about a Toastmasters club that could help him fix those areas he struggled with, so he joined and began working on his skills.

The main thing Mike wanted to share was about building confidence and preparing for contests. He explained that everything in life falls into one of two categories: things you can control and things you cannot control. Our confidence builds whenever we focus only on those things we can control and get used to being unattached to those things we cannot control. He gave the example of joining the Toastmasters contest twenty different times over eighteen years. He lost at some level many different times. In 2013, he came in second at the international semi-finals, just one place away from going to the finals. In 2015, he gave his favorite speech and did not even place, coming in first, second, or third, and he was devastated. His confidence dropped all the way to the bottom because he was focusing on something he could not control, which was whether the judges liked his speech. He realized that the judges have different things they like and dislike, and you could give the same speech to one group of judges and win, and give the same exact speech to a different group and not win because it is subjective. He decided that the only things that would mean success or failure to him were whether he prepared as well as he could, whether he tried to serve the audience as much as he could, and whether he focused on all the things he could control. After shifting his focus away from winning and losing to things he could control, his confidence soared and he won the world championship in 2020.

Mike explained that the things you can control include your preparation, your mindset of gratitude, and having a strong vision. For preparation, he suggested writing for fifteen minutes a day, every day, because that gets the creative centers of your brain constantly going and moving. Even if you cannot think about anything to write, write about that. He started writing two speeches because if he was going to go to the finals, he would need two speeches, and he started writing in September, October, and November for the contest that began in January. He wrote out his entire speech, which for him at 114 words per minute with pauses meant a seven-minute speech was 800 words. When he first wrote out his championship speech, it was 1,500 words, so he cut it back. Writing it out allowed him to know if he was going too long or too short and to play with the language and words.

Then he created a mental outline. He described walking into his house through the front door, and his introduction was something sitting right inside his front door. If he was telling a story about going to Chennai and his flight was cancelled, he would open his front door in his mind and see a plane with a flag of Germany sitting there, which was so ridiculous that he remembered it. His first point was turning to his left where his dining room table was, and he would have pictures of his supporting points seated around that table. His second point was going into his kitchen with pictures around the kitchen. When giving his speech, he would mentally walk through his house seeing these pictures, which helped him remember his outline and speak without notes, and that shot his confidence way up.

He then practiced constantly. Every morning on his commute to work, the very first thing he did was run through his speech and his second speech out loud. He would do the same thing on his drive back home in the afternoon or evening. By the time he reached the finals, he had given those speeches out loud at least five hundred times. He would purposely put himself in positions with distractions, such as walking on a downtown trail and speaking out loud while people walked by, which gave him practice handling distractions and staying confident. As he rehearsed, he would hear or read something and have a turn of phrase he liked better, so he would go back into his speech, change his mental outline, and rehearse it again.

Mike also emphasized the importance of having gratitude as a mindset. He said that after 2015, he decided he did not care if he won the world championship anymore. What he cared about was providing a speech that helped someone in his audience. Before every speech, he says a prayer of gratitude that he gets to say something that helps at least one person in the audience. This puts him in a place of gratitude where he focuses on the audience and hopefully helping someone, which gets his mind off himself and increases his confidence because he is not self-conscious but other-conscious.

He also stressed having a really strong vision but holding it lightly. He referenced Admiral Stockdale, an American admiral who was shot down during a war and put in a prison camp. When asked how he survived, Stockdale said he survived because he was not an optimist. The optimists would say they would be out by Christmas, and Christmas would come and go and they would still be there, and they died of a broken heart. Stockdale knew for certain someday he would get out back to his family, but it was not today, so he would survive and focus on today. Mike explained that you and I can certainly have a vision, whether it is to go to college, build a business, or win the world championship, but to hold it lightly, saying it would be nice but it is no big deal if it does not happen today, and to keep preparing and being grateful.

When asked what advice he would give to his younger self before his first contest, Mike said he would tell himself to lighten up and not make it a bigger deal than it is, to do his best but have fun with it, because if you go out and trip and fall flat on your face, you just created a great story.

For speaking fluently on stage, Mike recommended creating that mental outline where you walk around your house so you can think through your speech as you go, and then practicing consistently because there is no way around practice. He said that whenever you fail a number of times and see that it did not kill you, your confidence increases and you can be yourself.

For interesting openings, Mike suggested opening like a great movie that starts right in the middle of a scene where your brain immediately wonders what is going on, such as a startling statement or a question that grabs attention. He gave examples like “I walked into my class and she kissed me” or “I was just going for an easy ride on a horse but now the horse was racing toward a cliff.” He emphasized that you must very quickly tell your audience why you are telling the story.

For making speeches more impactful, Mike said to use stories rather than declarative statements, to add humor which builds rapport and causes people to remember your speech, and to constantly read and write fifteen minutes a day so you notice what makes you laugh or what moves you emotionally, which becomes great content for impactful speeches.

For speaking without notes, Mike recommended going in stages. When first starting out, having notes is fine, and the first step is to try to look at the audience more than you look at your notes. The second step is to take data and turn it into a story or analogy that people can remember. The third step is the mental outline, where you visualize numbers by picturing someone holding a poster board with those numbers written on it. Little by little, as you practice, you will have fewer notes on paper. He added that he still has numbers on a piece of paper when he needs to refer to them, and there is no other answer than practice over time.

For connecting with the audience, Mike said the best and most simple answer is eye contact, whether virtually or in person. In person, instead of scanning the audience, look at one person and speak to them for a little bit, then look at a second person, and so on. Virtually, look at the camera. He also emphasized being your authentic self and having the thought in your head that you are just having a conversation with one person. For handling questions from the audience when you do not have a solid answer, Mike said authenticity today is so much better than anything else. He recommends saying “I don’t know the answer to that, but I’d be glad to do research and come back to you,” or opening it back up to the audience and making it a group activity, which engages the audience and gives you time to think. He warned against making up an answer because the audience picks up on that and it decreases trust, whereas authenticity builds trust.

Mike shared his favorite quotes that inspire his public speaking journey. The first was that a beginner speaker focuses on himself or herself, an average speaker focuses on the speech, and an expert speaker focuses on the audience. The second was from an evaluator named Don Reynolds who told him that whenever you do not crack your chest open and share your authentic self, you waste your audience’s time, which was hard to hear but became one of the most valuable things he ever heard. The third was from a fourth-century BC Chinese philosopher named Wooin who said “Expectation is the grandfather of disappointment. The world can never own a person who wants nothing,” which may sound counterintuitive but relates to coming to a speech with gratitude and focusing on serving the audience rather than needing their esteem.