Improving Your Public Speaking Skills.

We’ll start with 9 specific tips that’ll help you improve your skills as a speaker!

 

1. Slow Down

Most inexperienced speakers talk faster on stage than they realize – and it’s completely understandable.

When you’re giving your talk, you’re nervous, anxious, and you’re trying to hold all the information you need to present in your head. All you want to do is get through your speech so you can get off the stage and go someplace where people can’t judge you.

Unfortunately, this can cause you to rush through your speech far too quickly, which make the information you’re presenting hard to understand. Some people will say, “Speak half as fast as you think you need to,” – either way, just be conscious that you probably need to slow down.

2. Pay Attention to Your Body Language

If you paid close attention to that fake TED talk, you probably also noticed that Guy Pearce’s character employs excellent body language during his speech.

Body language is important for a couple of reasons:

Non-verbal communication – of which your body language is a large part – compliments verbal communication. Your posture, the way you hold yourself, the way you move your hands… all these facets of body language can help to refine and reinforce what you’re talking about. Body language that you’re not aware of can hurt you. Most of us have little nervous tics that we do without noticing; mine was putting my hand in and out of my pocket over and over. I’d also pace around the room too much.

For reference, here’s a list of some common nervous tics you can watch out for:

1. Pacing back and forth or “wandering the stage”

2. Tapping your feet

3. Touching your face or playing with your hair

4. Fidgeting with your fingers

5. Playing with your pockets or other parts of your clothes or jewelry

6. Rubbing the back of your neck

7. Looking back at your slides too often

8. Swinging your arms back and forth

9. If you can pinpoint and eliminate the nervous tics you do unconsciously and learn to utilize intentional gestures for dramatic effect, you’ll be able to hold the audience’s attention much more effectively.

3. Make Eye Contact

When you’re speaking on stage, you’re addressing everyone in the room – each person sitting in a seat (and maybe standing if you’re really popular) is part of the audience.

Unfortunately, many inexperienced speakers get nervous and fixate on one section of the audience during their entire presentation. Don’t do this.

Instead, regularly move your gaze to different parts of the audience, making sure you move over the entire audience during your talk. Try to make eye contact with people all throughout the room.

Now, I know this can be scary. You’re already nervous enough that you’re on stage – making direct eye contact with people can add more anxiety to the equation!

These people are far back enough that they probably can’t tell if you’re making direct eye contact or not, and you can still comfortably move your head and focus on different parts of the audience.

However, even though this trick works well, I challenge you to try to make eye contact with at least a few people during your next talk. Doing this gets easier and easier with practice, and it makes you seem more human when you’re speaking.

4. Practice, Practice, Practice… Ad Infinitum

…well, maybe not that much. But you should practice your material an awful lot before stepping on stage.

When it comes to practice, you goal is not to do it until you get your speech right; your goal should be to practice until you can’t get it wrong.

Anxiety can block your brain from making connections, but mastering your material will help you avoid that adverse effect. Additionally, mastery will help you cut down on a lot of anxiety in the first place. If you know exactly what you’re going to say, you’ll feel much more confident in front of the audience.

I think there’s a distinction to be made when it comes to this piece of advice. To be sure, you shouldn’t write your entire speech out and try to memorize it word-for-word. Doing that will make you sound like you’re reading.

However, I do think you should be able to get up on stage and deliver your speech without note cards. The way I achieve this is by writing my speech out in bullet points.

Each main point, clarification, and important fact will get a bullet point in my outline. The first few times I practice, I’ll have the whole outline in my hands so I can reference it.

After a few runs, though, the general outline and most of the details start to form a concrete picture in my head. At that point, I’ll practice without the outline.

Eventually, I’ll know all the details of my speech cold. When it comes time to present, I might not say all the exact words I said in previous practice runs, but I’ll still deliver all the information in a confident, practiced manner.

Now practice doesn’t just help with the individual speech you’re working on at the moment. In general, if you want to become an all-around better speaker, practice is once again the answer.

If you’re looking for a great environment to practice your speaking skills, see if there’s a local Toastmasters group in your area. I also high recommend taking a speech class if you’re in college.

5.Film Yourself

Here’s a way to practice more efficiently: Bring a video camera with you and film your practice runs.

For every speech I had to give in college, I did this. I’d venture out onto campus at night, find an empty classroom where no one could hear me, and practice my speech over and over again.

I wouldn’t film the first few runs; during those ones, I was just trying to learn all the material. After I’d done that, though, I’d start filming each run and reviewing it immediately afterward.

By doing this, I was able to pinpoint things I didn’t even notice I was doing – looking back at the slides, pacing too much, speaking too quickly, etc.

I believe each of the people in your audience falls into one of two different categories:

Supporters – people who care about you, are invested in your topic, and want see you succeed.

Bored people – those who would rather be elsewhere. Their minds are in the clouds, and whatever you do probably won’t affect them much.

 

Notice that neither of these categories includes people who will hate you, throw rotten food at you, or summon the spirit of Hades himself and curse your family for all eternity.

There’s a key realization you should have here. Your supporters are cheering you on through the good and bad; they’ll forgive your mistakes. The bored people are… bored. That means their opinions of you don’t matter.

Don’t let the potential reactions of bored people cause you unnecessary anxiety during your speech.

After the speech is over, you can take any constructive criticism into account for future performances.

7. Focus on Your Topic, Not Your Performance

When you’re developing your speech, try to get invested in the topic and focus on the transformation you want it to have on your audience. It’s amazing just how much less scary a talk is once you focus on your audience and figure out exactly what you want to deliver to them.

Once you do that, you’re no longer thinking so much about the technical aspects of your performance – your eye contact, body language, whether or not your fly is down, etc. When you’re really invested in your topic, your speech becomes almost as easy as simply explaining something to a friend in a casual setting.