Hey  Todayers,

In 17 days I am giving 15 speeches here in China! We are already off to a great start at our first stop in Beijing!

Speaker Leader Champion will be released in China in May 2015 and McGraw-Hill put on an event while we were there to about 200+ students at the University of Foreign Languages! It was awesome to see so many young people interested in public speaking!

I wanted to make it a point to start every speech with a couple sentences of Chinese. It has been a combination of a lot of practice, asking several friends to listen to my pronunciation (which apparently sounds like I am from Japan) and me being scared I am saying a completely different word because of their focus on tones.

Here is one of the venues from yesterday. We also spoke at Motorola for HR managers and during the D85 Toastmasters event! Thank you to D85 and D89 for bringing us out here and for McGraw-Hill in China for coordinating this event!

If you want to know how to start a speech when speaking in China, I would highly recommend you learn some Chinese.

This catches the audience’s attention, shows that you care and lets them know you are interested in being there! It worked for me during all three of my speeches yesterday. Here is what you can say:

1) Hi Everyone!
2) How are you doing today?
3) My name is (BLANK)
4) I am happy to be with you!
5) This is my first time speaking in China!
6) I have already enjoyed great food!
7) I am having a great time here!

8) I don’t speak Chinese (So I will speak in English now)
END: Thank you everyone!

We are off to the Great Wall today! I will post an “adventures of public speaking” video this Friday and I look forward to sharing more with you soon! Enjoy the rest of your week and as always…

Dream BIG,
Ryan

p.s. We can not access Facebook, Twitter or Instagram in China so we will not be able to share this on our social media accounts or communicate via social media.