Tag: Don’t Fear the Pause
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.
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Put Some Snap Into It
This kind of public speaking can be dangerous and more than a little scary to learn to do. But because you had fun and our audience had fun, that presentation is full of “snap” and is 100% more successful. And that makes it worth taking the risks to learn this kind of public speaking.
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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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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.
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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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If you Like Them, They Will Like You
The secret really isn’t very complicated at all. You just have to learn to like the audience. That may seem simple but buried in that idea is a powerful principle of psychology. When you step in front of a crowd and you have trained yourself to like them, it comes out in every aspect of your posture and the way you behave.
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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.
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Give Them a Bit of You
Don’t be intimidated by putting some of your own heart and life into your public speaking. The investment of giving people a little more of you will result in a higher level of concentration and responses to your call to action. And the audience will emotionally bond to you in such a way that you will almost certainly be asked back to speak again and again.
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Effectively Using PowerPoint
It is far better not to have the text information on the slide but just a series of bullet items that are sticklers for the presentation you are giving. This approach assures that PowerPoint remains a tool that you are using not a tool that is using you. And that makes you the boss of PowerPoint which is the way it should be.
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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.
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