How to improve your public speaking skills

One of the greatest hurdles that a person, who wants to become a successful public speaker has to overcome, is stage fear. While some people overcome stage fear by repeated public speaking and gaining experience and confidence, some people tend to shy away from public speaking, just because they are not confident enough to fight and win the stage fear.

It is a nature’s irony that many of those who are endowed with good ideas, clean thought flow, expressiveness and a sense of humor may be good talkers amidst their friends, but they may not fare really well on stage, because of a couple of reasons and the prime among them will be stage fear. On the other hand, there are certain extremely confident and loud mouthed persons with no stage fear at all, who can grab the mike and talk endless nonsense to the utter dismay of the listeners!

Only rarely people with good knowledge, linguistic and communicative skills, endowed with a good voice become successful public speakers. Those endowed with the right pre-qualifications, but lack the essential skills to become a success on stage have to consciously strive to develop the public speaking skills. Here are the tips:

1) Write the whole stuff first

Before you become a master of public speaking when you can talk off the cuff on any topic given to you, it is essential that you are fully equipped with the total stuff that you plan to deliver on stage, in writing . It should be written more as a talk and less as a written article; read it aloud several times at your home in your privacy, keeping an eye on your watch. Does it fit to the time period given to you for the talk? You should add or delete necessary portions of your speech based on this time factor.

Make sure that this written content has a beginning, a body, and a conclusion. Spruce it up with lively quotations. Add a bit of humor here and there. Enliven it with some interesting personal anecdotes. A good written stuff meticulously prepared will help you considerably in delivering a lively lecture.

As you gain more and more confidence by experience, it is enough for you in future if you write only hints and notes to outline your overall lecture content. Use the hints to mentally do a talk within yourself to get the whole stuff well formed.

2) Practice in front of a mirror

Once you are happy with the lecture matter and its length, and have taken-in the content to your heart (no, not memorizing it verbatim), keep your paper (either the full manuscript or the brief notes) with you and deliver your lecture in front of a mirror with a good body language, facial expressions, moderate gestures with hands, voice modulation etc. Whenever you are struck, consult your paper. Rehearse it again and again.

3) Deliver the lecture in front of a confidant

When you are new to public speaking, it is better that your next stage of delivering your address, after the mirror, is your close friend, a spouse, parent or any other person who has the capacity to grasp what is good and what is bad in your exercise and provide a supportive feedback. Make necessary corrections in your content, style, voice and bodily expressions.

4) Watch your speed of delivery

You may be very good in communicating within your small circle of friends with lots of excitement where your speed of expressiveness may be like an express train! In other words, the speed at which your mind supplies words to your mouth may exceed what your mouth delivers! This will result in garbled sentences, mispronunciation and swallowed verbs. What is acceptable in a small group of friends is not alright for public speaking. You should consciously slow down your speed of delivery to an optimum level where the flow is neat and sustenance of interest is not affected.

On the other extreme, some people tend to deliver lectures at too low a speed; it could be because they may think that their “pregnant words” should be given time to sink into the minds of listeners; or they may be groping for ideas and words that fail to come out! But delivering a lecture too slowly, with long pauses between sentences is a definite no-no. Listeners will soon start yawning at such lectures.

5) Avoid over emphasis and excessive repetition

“I tell you, please think deeply about it; meditate on it; analyze it deep in your minds; brood over it; these ideas should be constantly reviewed at your minds; do not simply ignore these ideas. They are great ones; noble ones; they are golden words; to be cherished forever. I repeatedly request you. Please think deeply about it”. Speaking sentences like these can only help you to fill up the given time with inadequate matter. But such over-emphasis and shallow repetition of words will only produce negative result. People will start sensing that you are hopelessly devoid of ideas.

6) Watch your volume

A good public speaker does not shout, nor does he mumble words inaudibly. Correct mike consciousness has to be developed and it should be cultivated. Coming too close to the mike or turning your face too far away on account of bursting emotions should be avoided.

7) Be time conscious

In successful public speaking, time is one of the essential elements. Your lecture should stop just before the listeners’ interest starts waning. When people are really receptive to getting a little more from you, your lecture should have stopped. Avoid over-stretching your time, just because you think you have so much of worthy stuff to communicate. Listeners may not always think that way.

8) Be sensitive, but not over sensitive

A good public speaker must be sensitive enough to gauge the mood of the listeners; he should be conscious enough to notice when the listeners feel enthused and when they seem to get bored. But for a beginner in public speaking, over-sensitiveness will prove to be counter-productive. Over-sensitiveness is the root cause of stage fear. Some amount of thick-skinned behavior is rather preferable at the early stages of public speaking, until one gets freed of stage fear!

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Related reading: How to be ready for the unexpected troubles in public speaking.