Major political figures who mispronounce common words.

Media pundits who love to increase their pundancy by saying “very, very” when one simple “very” serves the purpose perfectly well. If they further transgress and utter “very unique”, they slide off my personal list of educated persons. (I’m sure you know that the word unique cannot be modified in any way; the thing being described as “unique” either is one-of-a-kind or it is merely “very unusual”.)

The urge to lengthen words, phases, sentences seems to overwhelm our society, some of which appear to feel that worth of content equals length of content.

The prevalence of poor spoken and written English does not mitigate the fact that it has an adverse effect, which needs to be considered by those who speak to others in order to get a positive effect.

People differ in their awareness of word usage and speech patterns. What drives some people batty may leave another person completely untouched–or at least undisturbed. However, there are many listeners who, when they have heard particular grammar errors or awkward syntax, downgrade the value of the message itself.

It’s worth spending some time and energy to learn correct grammar and correct pronunciation. Dictionaries are readily available in print and on line. There are several excellent, easy to read books on English grammar; one of my favorites being,”Between You and I: a little book of bad english”, by James Cochrane.

It’s worth knowing how to avoid using language that is an affront to educated listeners and which turns them off to the strength of your message. To be considered a successful speaker, you must be adept at capturing the attention of your audience, persuading them to a certain point of view, or rousing them to action.

To achieve your goal, they must take you seriously.

 

Myth Number 1 declares that performance nerves are to be expected; everyone has them. Further, that they are necessary. They are what gives a speaker the energy to be exciting or interesting.

Let’s take a hard look at these assumptions. What happens to you, personally, when you have an attack of Performance Jitters? A case of Rollicking Stage Fright?

Your predominant emotion is that of dread. You want nothing so devoutly as to Get Out of Here!

You get tight around the chest and diaphragm. Your breathing–if any–becomes shallow and your energy wanes.

You sweat. (Icky!)

Your mouth dries up and you can scarcely swallow.

Your hands shake.

Your knees knock and are in danger of collapsing.

our mind goes blank; did I have a speech in there somewhere? Gone!

In other words, your body tries to shut down! Now why would such unpleasant body symptoms serve you? Do they really make you an exciting and interesting speaker?

It’s important to separate stage fright and the deep fear of speaking in public from excitement. Think of excitement, not as dread, but as pleasant anticipation. When you’re looking forward with pleasure to an activity your body does not try to shut down. It perks up. Your brain goes into high gear. What is about to take place feels good, fulfilling, gratifying, perhaps fun.

You may indeed be one of those people who has some of the good feelings, but still suffers from several of the nasty ones.

5 Tips that will stop your Stage Fright suffering:

1. Think about your responses to having to speak. Separate the actual fear-symptoms from the excitement feelings.

2. See how many of the negative responses you can shift to the excitement category.

3. Learn and use deep breathing in your daily life and certainly use it in your speaking life!

4. Check out your Self Talk. If it’s full of “I’m going to be a failure”, consciously change it to “I’m an excellent speaker and I enjoy speaking in public.” Never mind if that’s a screaming lie at this moment. Your subconscious mind, which has diligently followed your instructions to make you feel like a failure can change its tactics and, over time, alter your belief so that you do indeed enjoy speaking in public and you become very good at it. However, it takes considerable discipline to continually remind yourself to cancel your negative Self Talk and replace it with healthy thoughts. It’s worth it!

5. Various energy techniques and hypnosis can be very powerful in developing and fulfilling positive, healthy expectations.

During my thirty-some years as therapist and public speaking coach I’ve observed that these techniques work very well for many people. If, however, a person has underlying and deep feelings of insufficiency, counseling may be helpful in clearing out the personal debris to free up a person to be–and to feel–truly successful.

 

Carole McMichaels http://getridofpublicspeakingfears.com

 

Most people have a fear of speaking to a large group. This is a totally normal apprehension. People may visualise the audience laughing at them, or shouting out. This is an extremely rare occurrence, unless you are a politician.

Most people listening to you are aware of the pressures you are under and would never change places with you.

These guidelines will help you to overcome your fears.

1. Know your subject. Read through your presentation beforehand. Read around the subject, so that you are confident that you know more than your audience, even after you have spoken. If you know your subject then you will come across in an interesting way and keep the attention of your audience.

2. Expect to do well. Your expectations are obvious in your body language. If your audience sees that you expect to do badly, you will do badly. Expectation is vital.

3. Look at your audience. Eye contact is vital if you are to judge their understanding so that you can change the pace of your delivery if necessary.

4. Use notes. You should never, never read your speech from a sheet.

5. Slow your speech down. This makes you appear more confident and enables your audience to take it in more easily. If you are talking slower, it is easier for your audience to maintain their attention, and momentary lapses in their concentration mean that they miss less.

6. Vary the tone and level of your voice. This maintains interest. You should speak clearly and project your voice, rather than shouting. Talking quietly in key segments means that your listeners will need to actively listen to those parts of your presentation.

7. Avoid excessive body movements and gestures. Hand gestures can be used for emphasis only.

8. Keep your hands and thumbs visible. Holding your hands out, with the thumbs uppermost is a very powerful dominance gesture. Watch politicians speaking, they all use this gesture.

9. Rejoice in the endorphin high that you will feel when it goes well.

A survey of America revealed that people are more frightened of speaking in public than of dying!

How incredible is that? To be more frightened of talking to a few people than of having your life ended.

It’s particularly surprising when you realise just how easily you can overcome your fear of public speaking. Using a program such as Unlimited Confidence can teach you tools to overcome this fear and be able to speak out when you need to.

When you talk about public speaking, people instantly think of standing on a stage in front of a huge audience presenting a lecture. However, public speaking is much more than just that. It could giving a speech at a wedding, doing a presentation at work, speaking out in a meeting, or for a club or society you belong to.

Being able to speak in public will help you to feel better about yourself and can help you get ahead in your career too. If you think about it, as you get higher up the ladder in your career, so you find you have to talk to more people and present; so this level of confidence becomes even more important.

This fear manifests physically before having to speak. It starts off as an anxiety, and then becomes a dry mouth, trembling muscles, rapid breathing, and a need to run to the bathroom. In worst cases it can involve sheer panic and the desire to run away.

So how can you get rid of this fear and feel more comfortable with speaking in front of people?

Firstly, you can practise. The more you do something the more confidence and comfortable you become doing it. You can join a group such as Toastmasters International which allows you to develop your communication and leadership skills. You can also volunteer to speak in front of any group of people too.

The Unlimited Confidence course teaches you some valuable tools to help you become more confident not only speaking in public, but in any situation. You will learn how to

* Instantly boost your confidence in seconds without anyone knowing what you are doing * Learn how to use body language to convey confidence * Discover how you can attach confidence to absolutely anything * And many more practical and effective techniques

You will also learn in this course how to use mental rehearsal to program yourself for more confidence, and this can be applied very easily to public speaking. You probably currently run a mental movie of you falling on your face and embarrassing yourself when you speak in front of a group. If instead of running that movie you saw yourself speaking really well, the audience enjoying it and you get applauded at the end, what do you think would happen?

Of course, I am sure you could think of a number of different areas of your life you could apply this technique to, couldn’t you?

Speaking in front of people is actually extremely easy with just a few small changes to the way you think – and you never know, you might even enjoy it!

Public Speaking Tips: How to Learn to Articulate Clearly

You have a raging passion for your subject. Or you have a strong financial motive to speak on your subject. Or maybe you simply want everybody to like you!

Whatever your Cause, people must be able to understand your speech–your physical speech–before they are able to give you the response you’re working for.

Consonants and vowels are the building blocks of intelligible speech. It’s the breath that supports and carries these consonants and vowels to our listeners. If we focus on these three elements of speech–consonants, vowels, breath–we’ll have an excellent basis for making clear, understandable presentations.

Here are some pointers: Consonants must be well-articulated and crisp. To achieve this, say each of the words below by itself, slowly. Use your tongue and lips to shape each consonant clearly. Exaggerate! Speak every syllable.

 

• wash
• washing
• Washington
• definitely

(all 4 syllables)

• accessible (ak sess i buhl)
• Antarctic (ant ark tik)
• residing (Make the “s” a definite “Z” sound.)
• treatise
• not
• non-native

Now speak the sentence below, breaking it up into smaller segments, if you like, until you can say the entire sentence very clearly at a normal pace.

“The treatise on the Antarctic was definitely not accessible to the non-native speakers residing in Washington.”

You may notice that you run out of breath before you can get the whole sentence said. If not, congratulations! If so, mark a place or two where you can sneak a breath without interrupting the flow. Try this:

“The treatise on the Antarctic (breath) was definitely not accessible to the non-native speakers (breath) residing in Washington.” Vowels should be given the true vowel sounds. We Americans are becoming increasingly lax in differentiating between the vowel sounds–so much so that “uh” has become the vowel of choice for A, E, I, O and U! I believe it’s a blend of pure laziness and a cultural deficit of actual listening to sounds. We’re so cruelly bombarded with noise of all sorts that we take refuge in turning off our active hearing.

Breath! Ah, the breath!–the fundament for all speaking. This is not the place to give you exercises to strengthen and lengthen your breath; that must go in other articles. However, this will help:

Think of your breath as being released on a steady, constant stream. That stream continues steadily during the tiny silences between words, smoothly connecting one word to the following word. Think On-going and Easy.

Avoid giving a little burst of breath for a few words, then letting the breath drop before the next little explosion of breath. You lose a great deal of breath by breathing too frequently and too shallowly.

THINK: CONSONANTS. VOWELS. BREATH.
THINK: MY BREATH IS ON-GOING AND EASY.

During presentations, it is the question and answer part that serves as a good occasion to know how much the audience understood or how much they did not understand from all of that speaking you did. It is also the best opportunity to be able to show your sense of humor, if you have one. Also, the question and answer portion is a good means to get your audience to participate.

The most used way, if not the most boring one, to open up the question and answer portion is: are there any questions? Or, “Now let’s take in questions.”

To make the presentation more fun for them as well as for you, as the presenter, to appear you are enjoying your time and are also having fun, why don’t you try saying this as a way to open up the session on question and answer: “The last presentation I had, the first question I received was, `Aren’t you tired yet?’ and `Do you have the time?’”

In order for you to continually captivate your audience, you should as much as possible try to do something different from the regular presentations people do. It is also a good idea if you prepare for the question and answer part. Try to spend time thinking of the possible questions some people in your audience may ask after your presentation. Now that you have a fairly good idea, create some good natured humor to go along with your answers. Use these before you provide the answer that is serious and real.

The audience will think best of you if you provide them with a witty remark that in their opinion seems spontaneous and does not appear rehearsed, even if it is.

But what if no one dares ask the first question? This problem will be automatically solved by planting – this time – rehearsed questions on some members of the audience.

What you could do is to select some people from the audience and ask them ever so politely to assist you with your post-presentation session. You may ask them as you are researching for the profile of the audience you will be presenting to or while you are warming up to them prior to the program. If in case they agree to being your accomplice, request that they raise their hand when you open up the session on question and answer. This is the time that they will be asking you that pseudo-question.

The question you will ask them to ask serves two purposes: to break the ice through humor and encourage others to ask their own serious questions, or that they should be amused enough to stay still and listen until the end of your presentation.

A great comparison of two well known public speaking courses by James Masterson.

As everybody will certainly agree that having the confidence to speak publicly is a valuable skill, there is much debate as to which technique of public speaking is the most effective.

Currently, the most recognized public speaking associations are Toastmasters International and the Dale Carnegie Course.

Toastmasters International is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion of the principles of communication, public speaking and leadership skills. It achieves this by promoting a “learning-by-doing” program in which members move up by making presentations in the presence of certified examiners.

The Dale Carnegie course is a program for self-improvement in which the emphasis is to be able to get the message across to the audience utilizing the speaker’s naturalness. There are fewer rules and lots of practice sessions. The course consists of twelve evening sessions; all participants are required to present a short speech.

Toastmasters Pros

Toastmasters certainly makes everything clear-cut when it comes to passing the exams. Each member is provided with a Communication and Leadership Manual containing ten speech projects the member has to fulfill. Members will then be evaluated and his speech criticized according to a set of rules.

When the member completes these projects, he is recognized to have achieved a level of competence. Advanced projects are also available after the “basics” are done to move the member up some more.

Members are encouraged to frequently attend meetings and enjoy a sense of camaraderie with fellow members.

Toastmasters Cons

The Toastmasters system seems to not be suited for people who wish to speak well but would like to retain their informality as speakers. For example: Fillers, the areas in a speech when a speaker pauses and makes an involuntary sound like “uhm” and “ah”, is a very human habit and is considered an area for improvement in Toastmasters.

The ranking system, though effective to show where the members stand, can also deter people from joining due to the perceived “elitist” nature of the ranking system.

Carnegie Pros

The course encourages the participant to use what works for him to an extent. The rules are few but fundamental. Fillers are acceptable as long as they do not distract the audience from the speech.

There are facilitators but there is no certified examiner. All participants in the session are asked to give their opinion about the speech in their terms. Some would consider Carnegie a course to understand the target audience whether it is laymen or intellectuals.

Carnegie has a positive perception with many businesses.

Carnegie Cons

The Carnegie system has been criticized by some that the time spent in particularly large classes is wasted waiting for others to finish their speeches. Some feel that this time would be better spent having two or three speeches in one night instead.

This goes to show that there are many systems to choose from but only one goal in public speaking. That is to get the message across in a manner that does not hinder the speaker.