5 Ways to Improve Your Public Speaking Skills

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Public Speaking is a scary thing for many people. Your anxiety levels may rise when you have to speak up at a meeting. When speaking in public or in meetings, prepare yourself by reading these five tips.

1. Capture Their Attention

The best way to do this is by starting out with a joke. They may not laugh immediately because they won’t be sure if you’re trying to be funny or not. If they’re not sure, tell another joke right away. If your audience still thinks you’re trying to be serious and not laughing, just say “rough crowd”, then they’ll understand and you will have won them over.

2. Focus on The Audience

When speaking in public, we tend to go into protective mode because we’re nervous and want to focus more on ourselves than the audience. Break out of this by getting the audience engaged. You can get the audience engaged by simply by asking a question. The way you speak and the content in your speech should all be about the audience.

3. Add Emotion

When we listen to people talk, our brains turn words into images and emotion. Our memories are associated with emotion, so your speeches should be built around the emotion you want your audience to feel.

4. Preparation

Prepare for your speech with bullet points. Then build your content and stories for each bullet point. Creating bullet points is like building an outline for what you want to talk about and get across to your audience. Be sure to involve your audience or their attention will begin to wonder. Pause now and then for a few seconds to give your audience time to process what you’ve said.

5. Avoid Saying “Um”

When we get nervous or our brains need time to process words we tend to say the word “um” a lot. Saying the word “um” repeatedly makes you sound uncreditable on the topic. Teach yourself to say nothing or pause when you would normally use the “um”.

 

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