Public Speaking

Becoming Larger Than Life
To say that there is no ego in a person who does public speaking regularly or for a living would be clearly a false statement. But for those of us who only speak from time to time, when you see a speaker who can walk out in a room of 30 people or a auditorium of 3000 and literally "own the room", it really is an amazing transformation. To imagine how you could ever be that much larger than life is mind boggling.
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Create A Problem And Then Solve It
How well your presentation goes the next time you step up to a podium depends on several factors. But one factor you can control completely is your script. The way you organize your content and how you present the material to that crowd can either totally captivate them and drive them step by step to conclusion or it can bore them to sleep. Its all in how you construct your presentation and how you present what you want them to know throughout the talk.
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Deer In The Headlights
People who make their living researching what frightens people the most have made a pretty amazing discovery. Consistently when people list the top five things they are afraid of in life, they have are some pretty intimidating terrors. But you would think that death would rank number one on that list. But death doesn’t take number one, it has to settle for number two. Amazingly, the number one thing that terrifies most people is not death, it is public speaking. A popular comedian once said that this means that people would rather be the guy in the casket at a funeral than the guy giving the eulogy.
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Don't Fear The Pause
If you listen to experienced speakers, it's easy to see some real differences in how they step through their presentation than maybe how you go about giving a talk when you are called upon to speak in public. But it is a good exercise to use every opportunity to listen to different public speakers and learn from them. From speakers who are not effective, study why they are and learn how to correct those problems in your presentation. For speakers who are very good, learn what they do that works and copy their methods without shame. It's all part of learning from each other.
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Effectively Using Powerpoint
The software application PowerPoint has been a revolution in public speaking particularly in the business world. PowerPoint is easy to use, available with almost every implementation of the Microsoft Office suite and it's reliable. If you can use Microsoft Word, you probably have the skills to put together an effective presentation using PowerPoint.
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Give Them A Bit Of You
There is a good reason that public speaking is a superior method of presenting material to a group than just faxing your text over and letting them read it. Yes, part of that reason is that by stepping through the talk, you can make sure they "get it". But the most important reason has to do not with the subject, not with the presentation style and not even with how good the donuts were before talk. The reason public speaking is so effective is that the audience gets the material presented in a very personal way by the one person who can do that - you.
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How To Write A Speech
You cannot excel at public speaking without a good speech. If you are asked to give a speech or its required for work or school, you know that when you stand up there to give that presentation, you are going to have to have a well organized outline and content to get through it and impress those listening. Sometimes the fear of an upcoming speaking engagement comes from that writers block that happens when you have to write a good speech.
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If You Like Them, They Will Like You
When you see experienced public speakers, sometimes it seems they can cast a spell on an audience. You as an audience member know what that spell feels like. And one of the first evidences that this public speaker was going to keep this audience in the palm of his hand is that you almost instinctively liked him or her. And the interesting thing about that "spell" is that once you genuinely like this speaker, you naturally are open to his presentation, you listen more attentively and you are more open to suggestion if the speaker is driving to a point.
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Illustrate, Illustrate Illustrate
When a speaker loses an audience, too often it is a mystery to him. But for the audience, it is not a mystery. The simple fact is that many speeches we listen to spend a lot of time in some theory or idea. And we as humans have trouble focusing on an abstract idea for very long before losing interest. This is one of many reasons one of the central rules of public speaking is to use lots of stories and illustrations to make sure you hold the audience's attention.
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It's All In The Voice
Maybe one of the most common occurrences that happens in a public speaking situation is to see someone in the audience go to sleep on you. When you are the one going to sleep, you just hope the speaker doesn’t notice. But when you are the speaker, you know that you do notice and you wonder what you are doing wrong. You worked hard on your speech and you thought it was pretty interesting stuff. So why do they doze off?
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Maintaining Focus In Public Speaking
A public speaking situation can be intimidating for even the most seasoned of public speaking professionals. That is because when speaking to a live audience, you really never know what is going to happen. Never mind the freak occurrences of problems with the audience and the room, you as a human being could be subject to momentary memory halts that often come as the result of nervousness or just looking up and seeing all those eyes looking at you.
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Make Them Laugh
In the delightful Broadway musical "Singing in the Rain", there is a song called "Make em Laugh" which is based on this idea that the best way for any stage performer to build a bond with an audience is to use humor to bring a smile, or a laugh, to that audience. Well, that idea is not just valid for stage performers. It's just as true when you begin to develop your style as a public speaker.
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Making A Living As A Public Speaker
The wonderful dearly departed comic Chris Farley had a character that was a professional motivational speaker. That character was Matt Foley and he was an absolute mess. His speaking style was painful and destructive and he lived (say it with me) in a van down by the river. Well, as hilarious as that routine was, that characterization of professional speakers is obviously for comedy purposes only. If you have been given the gift of public speaking, there is every reason to believe that you can make a very good living doing it for a living.
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Marketing By Not Marketing
Many times local civic organizations look for experts from various businesses to come and give a presentation about your area of skill. The Elks, Rotary and Kiwanis are just a few who are always on the look for good public speakers to address their groups. So if you get a chance to speak to these groups, its easy to see these as tremendous business opportunities for marketing.
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Public Speaking Means Never Saying "i'm Sorry"
In the romantic movie, "Love Story", a phrase about love was introduced that went, "Love means never having to say your sorry". And while anyone who is married knows how untrue that is, we could easily adapt that concept to the world of public speaking. While you may from time to time have occasion that you feel you should express regret to your audience, it’s a hard and fast rule of public speaking to never apologize to your audience.
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Public Speaking Quirks
We all have our little vocal style that makes us unique. How often have you heard someone make a remark about how interesting it is the way you phrase things? We learn the way we speak from our parents and our mentors growing up. So if you ever listened to yourself speak, you would recognize the expressions you learned from your childhood.
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Put Some Snap Into It.
The difference between a public speaking presentation that bores you to tears and one that leaves you with a smile on your face and thinking about that presentation is often not the content but the style of the speaker. You can take the same exact written talk and give it to two speakers and one will turn that script into an exciting live event for his audience and the other will leave that crowd cold.
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Reading To An Audience
Public speaking is counterintuitive. That is to say what your intuition tells you is a good thing is not always the truth. And what your instincts say not to do is often the best thing to do. Your natural inner voice when you find out you have to do a public presentation is to write it all out and read it to the audience word for word. That way, so your inner voice thinks, there is no way you have to depend on memory and you won't ever get stuck and have that sinking feeling up there when your brain empties out and you have nothing to say.
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Shooting From The Hip
There is a style of public speaking that absolutely terrifies a lot of people. But when you see a public speaker speak extemporaneously, it is one of the most relaxed and easy to digest forms of public presentation it is. Now, to drop the fifty cent word, to speak extemporaneously means to speak without notes. In other words, pure extemporaneous speaking is done entirely without preparation and is done completely "from the hip" so to speak.
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Speak With More Than Your Voice
There is a bit of a misperception about the phrase "public speaking". The misperception that the technique of becoming good at public speaking is all in how you speak. The truth is that your voice is only part of what you need to be successful in giving a presentation to a group of people. To be an effective public "speaker", you should use every resource you have including your body language, your arms and your legs to capture the attention of the crowd and hold it.
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Tell Them Something They Don't Know
When an author is trying to come up with a topic for his next story or novel, the old pros in the writing came will always give him the same advice. "Write about what you know." That is because if you speak from your own area of expertise, you will speak with authority and passion. And authority and passion not only make for a great story or novel, they make for a really good public speaking event as well.
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The Greatest Public Speaking Secret Of Them All
Any guide to success in an endeavor will tell you that there is no magic formula to success. But in a lot of fields of endeavor, there seem to be "insider secrets". And taking on the challenge of becoming a truly great public speaker is a noble ambition. But if you could learn the insider secret that makes the difference between good public speakers and great ones, that would help you make that transition.
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What's Your Problem?
How you approach that moment when you stand up to give a speech depends a lot on why you are giving the presentation. Now we are not talking about the fact that you have to give the speech to pass your general education speech class in junior college or that your boss is making you give the speech because he is to darn lazy to do it. Instead to really give a good speech, you must know that the speech is designed to do. By identifying what the goal of the speech is and what you want the audience to experience from your presentation, that will give you a lot of information both on what kind of content to use but on your attitude and "approach" when you actually get ready to give the talk.
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When Things Don't Go As Planned
One of the greatest fears we face when speak in front of a crowd is also one of it's greatest rewards. Public speaking is a totally live event. And that means that anything can happen and just about anything could happen in the middle of your presentation. So to change your fear of the unexpected to another talent you have to handling interruptions, think ahead what you will do if things come up and how you will get the crowd back on track with your outline to take them to the conclusion you want them to reach.
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Where To Look When You Speak
When you are giving a presentation or speech, your body language and how you hold yourself in front of a crowd speaks to them as much as your words do. And part of not begin nervous in front of people when you are doing public speaking is not "acting" nervous. If you have complete control over your body, your face and your hands, you can perform relaxation in front of people and you will actually accept the idea that you are relaxed and begin to feel more at ease as you do your speech.
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