RealTime Speaking is a way of public speaking based on authenticity, integrity, and connection. It’s about getting real. It’s about speaking from the heart, but please don’t confuse “heart” with sentimentality or weakness. RealTime Speaking is pragmatic and powerful, practical and passionate. RealTime Speaking absolutely requires your authentic presence. You’ve got to really show up in a way that even the most suspicious wild animal would believe you. Authenticity and integrity, presence and transparency, these are not limp ideologies. They are actions and behaviors. They are earth and rock; and they are mist and moonlight.

It’s important to clarify public speaking. I define public speaking as “speaking with anyone other than yourself, regardless of numbers, venue, or purpose.” Do not confuse public speaking with lecturing or giving keynotes. Those are two types of public speaking. We are all public speakers.

Moreover, speaking itself is more than the words that come out of our mouth and more than the nonverbal signals of meaning and intent we transmit. Speaking is how we move in and through life. Our speaking tells the true story of who we are and how we live. If we are to live a true life, a vibrant and vivid life, than our speaking will reveal, rather than conceal, our heart — the truth of who we are, what we are doing, and what we stand for. RTS is about getting real, about speaking with authenticity and integrity, courage and confidence. It is about big and fearless living, from the inside out, and about expressing all this in unique and wondrous ways.

The French novelist Emile Zola said, “If you ask me why I came to this Earth, I will tell you. I came to live out loud!” And so have I. And so have the people in this book. And so have we all, don’t you think?

Living out loud means to manifest the full beauty and strength of our expressive powers. You’ve got to feel the poetry in Zola’s words. Don’t take them too literally, or you’ll miss his meaning altogether. Take these simple words, I came to live out loud, into your very depths where creation is still at work, 15 billion years after it started, still working within you to bring forth yet another masterpiece.

Living out loud through public speaking is my great love. Karl Wallenda, the famous patriarch of the aerialist family The Flying Wallendas, once said, “Life is walking the high wire with no net; everything else is just waiting around.” Public speaking is my high wire.

Although it took me longer than I care to admit, I finally figured out that my life-long search for wholeness, for meaning and purpose — for self-realization — was really an insistent need to live and to speak from the most authentic place of creative and expressive power within me. It turns out that I was not after understanding, or experience, or insight. I was after authentic self-expression!

Public speaking, as my primary means of self-expression, calls to me like the high wire called to Karl Wallenda. Stepping onto the wire, I come to my greatest alertness and aliveness. I enter such an intensity of being present that each talk takes me to some place where I feel immortal and invincible. And yet I also experience a kind of death, for even a few minutes in this strange and familiar place timelessness and presence, of living out loud, of speaking my way across a high wire with no net, of entering the fierce presence of life here and now … even a few seconds of speaking in and from this place does something to me. This speaking changes me, and my history, and my future — each time. I call this way of speaking, of living out loud, RealTime Speaking.

So what’s different about RealTime Speaking’s philosophy, principles, and practices? What distinguishes RealTime Speaking from common and conventional presentation and communication skills workshops? Here are three signposts, telling comments from evaluation surveys of participants in corporate workshops:

“You can do a 1,000 presentation workshops and learn the same techniques, but if you’re not aware of the underlying reason you hate to speak, then how helpful will they ultimately be?”

“It was great how Robert had us look at the psychological, emotional, and spiritual levels of speaking, not just the how. I think that traditional speaking techniques are okay to help you get around fears, but Robert looked more at what those fears were and why they are there. I think his slant on public speaking is one that I always thought was missing in other workshops.”

“Only one week after class and I still feel that the impediments, fears, and beliefs of which I wrote about at the start of that class are no longer an issue. I think they are gone forever.”

RealTime Speaking is about public speaking in its truest meaning; it is about living out loud, about liberating the full measure of our creative power and expressive potential. If we do not first free our birds from their cages, we will never find our song, and all our speaking will remain shallow and flat. Our words will be a charade, a cheap and dirty trick. But if we reclaim our power of speaking with authenticity, confidence, and connection, then something huge and wonderful happens, magically and mysteriously, almost inevitably. We begin to live out loud!

What’s in it for you to speak this way? Everything. You become fully present and available. RealTime Speaking energizes your whole life, like floodlights screaming into all the dark rooms of your vast house, lighting them up as if on fire. From profound self-knowledge, to intimacy with another, to personal credibility, to leadership believability, to professional impeccability — its all there. It’s all in your speaking, in your living out loud.

In my “YOU are the Message” workshop, I teach people to speak publicly with credibility, courage, and confidence; and how to make an authentic connection with an audience as a prerequisite for real communication. In “The Five Ps” workshop, I teach people to use the simple and wildly effective clarifying and organizing tool I developed, the RTS Flight Plan. Using this process, people can create clear, concise, compelling content for all kinds of presentations.

In these workshops and in personal coaching sessions, I have worked with all kinds of people, from all walks of life — including politicians and corporate executives, non-profit managers and musicians, educators and entrepreneurs, professional speakers and business coaches, holistic healers and spiritual teachers.

I look forward to seeing you soon!