Do you want to learn public speaking in just 4 hours online?
Learn from Tom Hendrick, an award-winning public speaking coach, who has coached hundreds of executives and entrepreneurs to nail their next speaking event.
FREE PUBLIC SPEAKING TRAINING
Free online courses, explanation materials, templates, and AI Roleplay practice activities.
Free Fear to Fearless Course
Helping you manage public speaking nerves. Activities to speak confidently under pressure.
Coming Soon: content and certificates of completion
Free Speech Writing Course
Helping you learn to write great speeches in less time using communication theory and practice activities.
Coming Soon: content and certificates of completion
Free Voice and Body Presentation Course
Helping you gain control of your voice and body so you can present with more impact
Coming Soon: content and certificates o completion
Free Answering Questions Course
Helping you answer questions without notes, which is great for podcasts, content creation, and interviews.
Coming Soon: content and certificates of completion
How does Tom Hendrick help you improve your public speaking skills in 4 hours?
To measure and guarantee your improvement as a speaker, Tom Hendrick applies the Fitts and Posner Model of Skill Acquisition .
In your first free session (1 hour), Tom Hendrick will provide you with his award-winning materials on Audience-Centric Communication. His materials include:
A 30+ page booklet (with lots of diagrams) that explains key concepts and includes activities you can do at home and anytime you present or have a conversation.
Access to an AI Roleplay Software that measures your progress and is trained to give you feedback based on my content and your specific goals.
A guarantee that in four sessions (4 hours total) of Tom’s coaching you will reach the Autonomous Stage of effortless professional communication.
Tom will also help you to understand how you can use the free courses to teach yourself public speaking skills.
In your four sessions (4 hours total), Tom Hendrick will:
Help you climb the skill acquisition curve all the way to the Autonomous Stage, where speaking professionally becomes a permanent lifelong ability.
Provide you with lots of demonstrations, AI Roleplays and activities to improve your skills, including showing you how to use the free courses.
Provide you with professional and recorded feedback.
Increase the difficulty of each activity to match your progress.
How does Tom Hendrick guarantee your speaking skills will improve?
Tom Hendrick can guarantee that you will significantly improve your public speaking skills in 4 hours because:
Your first session is free (so there is no risk in trying before buying anything).
You can track your improvement by measuring it.
Tom Hendrick’s unique approach to communication training is about measuring what confidence and good communication looks like, not guessing.
Your ability to speak well against increasingly difficult AI Personas will be measured. You will be exposed to realistic scenarios that will get your heart beating fast so you can adapt to pressure.
Your rate of speaking will be measured. This lets you see how and when bad habits happen, so you can self-correct during the speech (not after).
Your word choice will be measured. This lets you see if you’re using the audience-centric skills correctly, and what you need to specifically work on.
All of these metrics and more are tested in your first free session, and you can also test them yourself in your own time and in the free courses.
You can pay for 4 sessions (4 hours total) of coaching, or do those sessions for free using the free public speaking courses.
ABOUT TOM HENDRICK
Tom Hendrick is an award-winning public speaking coach who has helped executives and entrepreneurs successfully pitch for millions of dollars in funding.
Tom helped a team of 40 engineers to pitch their new technologies at a Digital Transformation Showcase. They received over $100 million in funding to launch an innovation department to create more new technologies.
Tom coached a senior manager of a publicly listed energy firm to win a series of presentations to stakeholders, executives and the Board of Directors. Eight (8) projects, each valued over $100 million, have been approved.
Tom lectures at a Top 100 World-wide University and coaches 500+ students, PhDs and engineers to win pitch competitions, like the 3 Minute Thesis (3MT), and significant funding from investors.
Tom coached a team of inventors to successfully pitch next generation battery technologies for over $2 million in funding to a publicly listed company.
Tom helps people who have an important presentation or conversation soon. He helps people identify what they need to do to speak successfully, and develop the presentation skills they need quickly.
Tom has helped people successfully apply for TEDx Talks, win their dream job interview, pitch their product for funding, successfully propose new ideas to their boss, present well on podcasts, and speak at conferences.
Tom is based in Adelaide, South Australia, but coaches all over the world online. He provides regular communication professional development workshops to PhDs at Adelaide University, procurement and supply officers with PASA, and lawyers with the Law Society of South Australia.
Some of Tom’s helpful workshops on public speaking for professionals include: Get TEDx Ready, Pitch Like a Pro, Audience-Centric Communication, Answering Questions Under Pressure, Legal Communication Essential Skills Masterclass, Storytelling Your Research, Networking For Introverts, and Science Communication Bootcamp.
Tom is the author of the Audience-centric Communication Booklet.
Tom’s mission is to ensure that a good idea does not fail for a lack of communication or courage.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
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Yes. If we use the Fitts and Posner Model of Skill Acquisition as a reference, online training can help you pass through the cognitive phase (information gathering), associative phase (practice and self-correction), and autonomous phase (performing to a high standard, with low effort, without thinking).
Tom Hendrick’s free online courses help you learn public speaking skills and frameworks. The coaching activities and AI Roleplays help you practice and self correct in response to feedback. Continuing this process for four sessions (4 hours total) should get you into the autonomous phase, where professional communication is low effort, high quality and automatic.
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Pitch, pace, pause, projection and passion. These are covered in Tom Hendrick’s free course on Voice and Body presentation. We know that the human ear is designed to detect changes in sound and alert the brain. The ears are also designed to reduce the brain’s awareness of the same sound played at length to conserve attention and energy. The same is true of the eyes and movement. We notice a moving person or object. However, you are always looking at your nose, but your eyes have reduced your awareness of your nose to conserve attention and energy. When we can control our pitch, pace, pause, projection and passion, we can tap into the sound change and sight change alert systems in our audience. This can increase engagement and enjoyment of presentations when done correctly, and also ruin otherwise great speeches when done poorly.
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Tomhendrick.com is an online platform that has all the free materials you need to learn public speaking skills in 4 hours. The platform uses AI Roleplaying activities to give you realistic presentation and conversation scenarios, where you can control the success criteria, the type of audience you are speaking to, and how hard the scenario is. You can also collect data from your own speaking performance to help you track your improvement. The platform measures word choice, word efficiency, delivery, and body language. The platform also can gauge how compliant your performance was with the principles of Audience-centric communication.
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Warren Buffett famously refers to Toastmasters International as his first step into public speaking training. Tom Hendrick was also an active member of multiple Toastmasters clubs, and managed 5 clubs in Adelaide City as an Area Director (as it was called then). However, Tom realised that the Toastmasters model had two major drawbacks: (1) you don’t speak often enough; (2) you don’t get professional feedback. Imagine joining a tennis club to become a professional tennis player, but you could only practice for 1 to 5 minutes every 2 weeks, and there was no tennis pro to give feedback. Under the Fitts and Posner Model of Skill Acquisition, skills come and go very quickly in the early stages of learning. So doing short, non-intense speaking practice every 2 weeks without professional feedback means a lot of skill reversibility is included in your practice time. Instead, Tom Hendrick developed a way of getting better at public speaking skills in 4 sessions, which could be done between 4 days or 4 weeks. With this training method, Tom has trained people from zero confidence and experience to being able to speak confidently and charismatically at a conference, in just 4 hours.
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Tom Hendrick’s mission is to ensure that a good idea does not fail for a lack of communication or courage. Imagine if a person discovered the cure for cancer, but couldn’t talk about it. The world is a worse place when common sense doesn’t prevail; when bad ideas outspeak good ideas; when fear stops us from speaking the truth or enjoying our lives. I am privileged to work on high profile presentations and conversations for my clients, but I believe these services should be made available to everyone.
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Yes. You will be emailed a certificate of completion when you successfully pass one of Tome Hendrick’s free online public speaking courses. In order to pass, you must complete both a quiz and a series of AI Roleplay scenarios to prove your theoretical knowledge and practical speaking skills. The certificate will describe what you learnt and accomplished so that potential employers or collaborators can appreciate the work you put in to achieve the certificate. However, these courses are not part of a registered training organisation, so they cannot be used as credit towards qualification or accreditation. Stay tuned.
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The free public speaking courses are suitable for people of all skill levels. My clients include students all the way to CEO’s of publicly listed companies, and all of my clients benefit from learning these Audience-centric skills from beginning to end. For instance, when learning the Repeat Count skill for answering questions, a beginner can learn this skill and use it in podcasts to tell engaging sand insightful stories after practicing for 4 sessions. However, an advanced speaker will be able to combine Repeat Count with other audience-centric skills like Sound Change, Analogies, Pattern Communication, and Syllogistic Structures to give very engaging and insightful answers to questions. These are skills that don’t take long to learn, but you can enjoy small incremental improvements for a lifetime.
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Yes, adults will get more benefit from the free public speaking courses and coaching than persons under the age of 18. However, the content of the free public speaking courses and coaching are suitable for everyone.
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Yes. My main clients are people who already speak professionally for a living. I have worked with keynote speakers, professional comedians, authors, and leaders of large organisations to improve their skills further and prepare for particularly important public speaking opportunities like podcasts, conferences and TEDx events.
Key Aspects of Public Speaking
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Traditionally, public speaking primarily referred to speaking to a group of people from a stage. But in more modern times, it can also include being alone and speaking to a camera with the intent to publish your content publicly or to a private online community.
In Tom Hendrick’s Audience-centric Model of Communication, there are 3x Outcomes that might be sought by a public speaker: Decisions, Restatements, and Liking.
Outcomes are things audiences can do when the presentation has finished.
Decisions refer to an audience member accepting an invitation proposed by the speaker in their presentation: for example “would you like to invest in my idea?“
Restatements refer to the things an audience member can say having listened to the speaker’s presentation. In marketing, this is might be referred to as branding - where marketing is what the business says to its customers, but branding is what the customers say about the business.
Liking refers to the audience’s perceived value in the speaker having heard their presentation. This can look like the audience providing a positive testimonial, or preferring the speaker over other speakers. Liking is a crucial element when the speaker’s success is determined by post survey responses or outspeaking other competing speakers.
In Tom Hendrick’s Audience-centric model, the speaker makes word choices and voice choices in their presentation that are productive to achieving the desired Outcomes.
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In Tom Hendrick’s Audience-Centric Model of Communication, the key public speaking skills are: ability to identify relevant Outcomes, ability to predict whether word choices or voice choices will get the desired Reactions from the audience, and the ability to make content comply with the Audience-centric choices.
Some of the Audience-centric choices include: Analogies (ensuring information familiar to the audience comes before information unfamiliar to the audience), Pattern Communication (giving 2 or more examples that together establish a pattern the audience can continue), Syllogistic Structures (ensuring a logical chain of reasoning between claims and conclusion), Sound Change (ability to control the timing and delivery of one’s voice), Sight Change (ability to control the timing and delivery of one’s body language), Say What You See (ability to choose visually descriptive words over abstract words to help audiences generate an image in their heads), Repeat Count (ability to answer questions while leverage Word Association and using the above skills).
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Under the Fitts and Posner Model of Skill Acquisition, one needs to avoid the following pitfalls: going long periods of time (usually more than a week) between practice sessions, not receiving enough objective feedback during the self-correction phase, not adjusting performance for “short-fall factor” when attempting a new skill, not practicing increasingly realistic or difficult scenarios. Practicing frequently, particularly in the early phases of a new skill, is important because the reversibility of skills tends to be very rapid in the early stages. To pass through the self-correction phase, it is vital that the student change their performance correctly - or else their brain will not have sufficient stimulus to adapt to the new skill. The “short-fall factor” refers to the phenomenon that new students tend to under-perform new skills, rather than over-perform them - and therefore they are at risk of not trying hard enough to provide sufficient adaptive stimulus to improve. Failing to practice increasingly realistic or difficult scenarios means the student will not have a surplus of ability needed when they are faced with a difficult and highly pressurized speaking scenario in real life.
Practical tips for improvement include: using a coach, friend, or recording device to provide objective feedback during or soon after each practice performance; using AI Roleplay scenarios found on yoodli.ai to increase the realism and difficulty of public speaking scenarios; dividing up practice time into short (20 minute to 60 minute) sessions every day or every week to avoid skill reversibility.