Speak to Win

Speak to Win

*Brian Tracy*

The first time Brian Tracy stood up to give a real speech, he nearly blacked out. Not from illness. From terror. He was somewhere in his mid-twenties, a commission-only salesman who had dropped out of high school at eighteen, worked laboring jobs on ships and in fields, and talked his way into a sales role because he had no other marketable skill. He could sell one-on-one. But standing in front of a group of strangers, with all their eyes on him, his mind went blank. His hands went cold. He opened his mouth and the words barely came.

He was not unusual. In surveys going back to the 1970s, researchers consistently found that more Americans fear public speaking than fear death. Seventy-five percent of the population -- more than two hundred million people -- report meaningful anxiety at the prospect of standing in front of an audience. Jerry Seinfeld turned this into one of his most quoted observations: at a funeral, most people would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy. The fear is real, physiological, and nearly universal. And yet it is also, Tracy argues, almost entirely optional. Not in the sense that you can simply will it away. But in the sense that it is a learned response -- and learned responses can be unlearned, retrained, and replaced. He knows, because he did it himself. Slowly. Deliberately. Speech by speech, over years.

By the time Tracy published "Speak to Win" in 2008, through AMACOM, he had delivered more than five thousand talks in dozens of countries. He had trained hundreds of thousands of salespeople, executives, and aspiring leaders. He had written more than seventy books. His thesis was not that public speaking is easy, or that fear disappears with practice, or that charisma is something you are born with. His thesis was simpler and more democratic than all of that: speaking well is a learnable skill, it follows a set of specific, teachable principles, and the rewards it unlocks -- in income, influence, and impact -- are disproportionately large compared to the effort required to develop it.