Art Of Great Speaking

Whether you’re speaking to a large group in an auditorium, or a small group in a conference room, your voice is your most important tool as a speaker. To use your voice for maximum impact and make yourself heard, follow these simple public speaking tips.

Pointer 1: Vary your pitch, tone, volume and pace

The pitch of your voice is its “highness” or “lowness.” Varying your pitch is a way to add color, excitement, and emphasis to your speech. Nervous speakers sometimes have tension in their vocal chords, resulting in an unintentionally higher pitch. Relaxation and breathing exercises can help with this (see below).

The tone or quality of your voice says a lot to your audience that words can never convey. Does your voice sound warm or cold? Does it sound conversational or formal? Do you sound friendly, happy, angry, or nervous?

You’ve heard the word “monotone,” right? That’s what you sound like when you don’t vary the tone of your voice. When you adjust your tone to match the ideas and emotions in your presentation, your audience receives a deeper level of understanding as well as a deeper connection with you.

Volume is the loudness of your voice. Use varying volume for emphasis, and remember to adjust your volume to the size of the venue you’re speaking in.

One way to really grab your audience’s attention is to drop the volume when you want to make an important point. Lowering your volume forces the audience to give extra concentration to what you’re saying.

Use silence and pauses to maximize your message and to create drama. Silence gives you and your audience a nice break – it allows them to process what you’ve been saying, because it’s hard for our brains to hold too much information at one time. It also gives them a break from your voice. A pause can be used to emphasize a point, to really let something sink in.

One more thing to mention about volume: keep your sentences strong from start to finish. Some people’s voices fade out at the end of a sentence or idea, leaving the audience grasping to hear the final few words. Make sure to punch the beginnings and endings of sentences so they don’t disappear and leave your audience in confusion. Pace is the speed at which you speak. You can speed up or slow down for emphasis. Sometimes nervous speakers will race through their talk, finishing too early, and leaving the audience out of breath and lost, because they missed half of what was said. Breathing and relaxation can help you control and moderate your pace. Slow down your pace when you have something particularly important to say – you don’t want to race through your critical points.

Pointer 2: Practice relaxation and breathing

Have I mentioned relaxation and breathing enough times? Relaxation and proper breathing allow oxygen to circulate and your muscles to relax, rather than building tension around the shoulders and chest, which can compress your lungs and make your voice sound weak from lack of breath support. Take some deep breaths before your presentation. Practice breathing deeply using your diaphragm; you know you’re doing it right when your stomach puffs out but your shoulders do not rise. Search the Web for articles and books about “diaphragmatic breathing” or “belly breathing.”

Do some warm-ups and stretches beforehand, especially stretches that involve your face, jaw, neck, chest, and upper body. And don’t forget to breathe during the presentation. Pausing to breathe while you’re speaking keeps you from speeding through the presentation – and the audience doesn’t even notice.

Pointer 3: Repeat back questions so your audience can also be heard

In a large room, repeat back your audience’s questions. Unless there is someone in the auditorium delivering a microphone to audience members, it’s likely that some people in the audience won’t hear the questions posed to you. Repeating back the questions keeps everyone on the same page and keeps the audience from feeling left out.

One way to practice the tips in this article is to read aloud from a book or newspaper. Even better: read aloud from a children’s book! Children’s books are meant to be read with a variety of vocal inflections, and this will allow you to try out all of the tips mentioned above.

Your voice is your most powerful public speaking tool. When your voice matches the emotion and concepts in your presentation, you deliver to your audience deeper understanding of and connection with your message.

Lisa Braithwaite works with individuals to uncover their challenges and build their strengths in presenting themselves confidently as speakers. Find your voice with public speaking coaching! Sign up for my newsletter and find out about my free consultation by visiting www.coachlisab.com.

I’m sure you know that the fear of public speaking is one of the strongest fears that people have. The truth is that it’s not the speaking that is the source of the fear, people speak everyday. The fear comes from the perception that the audience is judging the speaker. The true fear is the fear of a bad audience response.

You can ensure that you will get a good audience response every time by following a simple five step formula.

Step 1: Visualize a Successful Audience Response

A large percentage of your behavior is under the control of your subconscious mind. You subconscious mind is strongly influenced by your expectations. For this reason you should spend some time imagining a hearty applause at the end of your talk. You could also visualize happy, interested faces throughout the talk. This is the best way to set that expectation in your favor.

Step 2: Be Yourself

You can always tell a speaker who has been trained by one of the (unnamed) speaking groups. They have a rigid formula. They start their talk with a joke and so on. It is stiff and mechanical and rarely works well.

You don’t need a rigid formula like that. Just be yourself. If you are a funny person then a joke will pop out at an appropriate time and it will be funny. If that is not your nature then you don’t need to tell a joke. If you just be yourself then you don’t have to remember any mechanical formula because you have already been yourself for years.

Make sure that your talk contains no more than five key points and if the talk is a long one then you can further break those points down into no more than five sub-points per key point. You put those points down on a card (or five cards in the case of the long talk) and then you talk off the top of your head on each point. If you have prepared your topic well then you will know the material and it will flow naturally.

Step 3: Engage The Audience By Speaking To Them.

Treat the talk like a one on one conversation with a bunch of different individuals. Make eye contact with the most positive looking people in the audience and make sure that you do this with people in various parts of the room. As more people become interested make eye contact with them as well. They then feel like you are speaking to them.

Step 4: Use Everyday Words and Everyday Examples.

Use everyday words and everyday experiences to explain your points and the audience will follow you more easily.

If I am going to give a talk on a topic I haven’t spoken on before then I practice the talk while I’m driving around in the car. I do exactly as outlined in this article and talk off the top of my head on each point but I am listening to myself to make sure that the language I use is simple and easy to follow. I will do this as often as I can before I actually have to give the talk so that when I am on the platform the talk flows easily and the right words automatically come out.

Step 5: Be Friendly.

If you were having a social chat with your friends then you would have a friendly demeanor and you would naturally smile from time to time. Treat your audience as if they are your friends and you will find that you will naturally act in a friendly way toward them. When you smile people are more likely to smile at you. Friendliness attracts friendliness.

Try this simple five point system at your next talk and you will find that the audience will love you.

James Delrojo would like to help you by giving you his ebook “Unleash the Success Power of Your Mind” (valued at $27) completely FREE. Go to http://www.YourSuccessMind.com

James Delrojo would like to help you by giving you his ebook “Unleash the Success Power of Your Mind” (valued at $27) completely FREE. Go to http://www.YourSuccessMind.com

he fear of public speaking is one of the worst phobias to suffer at the hands of – if not the worst! Sufferers can be almost paralyzed with the fear in some cases. In my clinic and via my products, I help hundreds of people over each and every year to control their fear and actually begin to enjoy the art of public speaking.

I use Hypnosis, Emotional Freedom Technique and Neuro-Linguistic Programming to achieve the client’s desired results. If you are currently battling a phobia of public speaking then I would really encourage you to get some professional help, either from a practitioner of the three mentioned therapies or from one of the many successful products available on the internet for instant download.

To get you off to a flying start though I have included a few tips that I give to my clients that you maybe able to use to alleviate your fear somewhat. Here they are:

1. Understand that up to 90% of the nerves that you feel don’t actually show! You will always feel worse than you look and there is a very good reason for this. When you feel nervous it is because you body/brain is trying to tell you that maybe this is not such a good idea. In most cases you will be the only one actually picking up on this.

2. Try to pause and breathe regularly. We do this naturally in conversation and doing it while speaking publicly will help you to remain calm and stop you from talking too fast.

3. Never memorize a talk word for word – this will only confuse you more if you lose your place. Instead have notes and pointers that you have memorized. Have these with you so that you can refer back if you get lost.

4. Always speak on things that you are an expert on. This way you will nearly always know more about the subject than your audience. This is a real confidence boost.

5. In the days that are leading up to your talk – When you feel nervous – spend some time feeling positive. You see, it is actually the lead up to a presentation that makes most people nervous. By concentrating hard on the positives as well as the negatives it allows those bad thoughts running through your head to have another more positive outcome. This is in fact the most important as if you can change that dread to positively then you at 90% of the way to success.

So there you have it – my top tips! Remember that once you get up there you notice that it is not as bad as you thought it would be. And once you get a little bit of belief in your abilities then you will soon be on the track to success.

Richard MacKenzie in an expert in Hypnosis. He is also the best-selling author of Self-Change Hypnosis.

The experts on our fears and stresses consistently tell us that the fear of public speaking is the greatest fear that most people have. When I first started public speaking I would have happily agreed with them, but now I love it and I earn a large amount of money whenever I speak. Here are a couple of tips that may help you love it too.

The first tip is that the audience is not your enemy (unless you are a politician) and that they are actually on your side.

Imagine the following situation. You are sitting in the audience with a few hundred people, waiting for the speaker to arrive on stage. The speaker is introduced and as he steps onto the stage he trips over a loose cable, falls flat on his face, his notes go everywhere. As he gets up and starts picking up his notes how do you feel about his predicament?

If you are like most people you feel for him. You may well see the funny side but you also feel sympathy for his situation. When you are a speaker the audience isn’t out to get you. They have come along to hear what you have to say. Also most people realize that you are doing something that they are not brave enough to do themselves and they respect you for it.

That tip was given to me, by a very successful public speaker, shortly after I started public speaking. Whenever I was about to get on stage I reminded myself that the audience had come to listen to me and were on my side. I always found that thinking in this way helped me get into a positive, confident state of mind.

The second tip was also given to me by the same experienced speaker and this is something that I do in every talk I give, even to the present day.

When I take the stage and begin speaking I look around the audience for interested faces. I then spend more time looking at those people than I spend looking at others. I imagine that I am having a one to one conversation with those interested people. This helps the flow of the talk and soon I am seeing more interested faces.

This technique helps me build a rapport with the audience and before long almost everyone is listening with an interested, involved look on their face.

Occasionally as I am scanning the faces I see someone who doesn’t want to be there. Perhaps they have been dragged along by a partner and have no interest in what I am saying. When I see that uninterested face I immediately turn to one of the key, very interested faces that that I have been using to build the rapport. In this way the uninterested face doesn’t distract me from my momentum.

I have also learned over the years that sometimes people who appear disinterested are in fact very interested in what you are saying; they just don’t have a face that shows it.

I was once giving a talk where a gentleman in the front row fell asleep a few minutes after my talk began. He went so deeply into sleep that a couple of times he almost fell out of his chair (fortunately he didn’t snore). At the end of the talk I opened the floor to questions and this guy woke up and proceeded to ask me very specific and interesting questions about things I had said. I don’t know how he did it but I learned never to assume that someone isn’t listening.

I hope that these two tips will help you in the next talk that you give. Remember that the audience is on your side and remember to build rapport by talking to those interested faces.

James Delrojo would like to help you by giving you his ebook “Unleash the Success Power of Your Mind” (valued at $27) completely FREE. Go to http://www.YourSuccessMind.com

James Delrojo would like to help you by giving you his ebook “Unleash the Success Power of Your Mind” (valued at $27) completely FREE. Go to http://www.YourSuccessMind.com

Speaking to others is a natural, human experience. When we speak to one another, or one person speaks to a group, what we are doing is really communicating. Communicating involves getting the point of the spoken idea across to your listeners so they understand your topic or subject matter. In the basic sense, communication is essential for survival, since we have to communicate properly to get the things we want and need in life. Therefore, good communication skills are necessary.

Today, there are many people that work in a public setting that involves communication among peers. Many employers like banks, schools, sales and marketing companies and the like may have certain requirements for you to be considered for employment. In an office setting that you may find at employers like these is an environment where humans are supposed to interact, relate and communicate with one another to complete a task or to convey an idea or a series of ideas.

This is where public speaking comes into play. Although you can take a speaking course in high school and college, public speaking skills are best developed by speaking to others at an office meeting or presentation where you, as the speaker, communicate your ideas to the extent your listeners understand them. More often than not however, is that most people feel uncomfortable speaking in front of 20 or so people or co-workers. Some end up speaking with a lack of self confidence, thus hindering the communication effectiveness and also how you are perceived professionally in the workplace environment.

So, how do you develop the skills required to speak publicly and to speak with confidence? It is a very important skill to have after all, since a good speech with effective communication delivered with confidence can carry the day. What follows are some tactics and techniques that you can employ to help optimize your public speaking and to hone your skills.

If you work at an employer or in an environment where you may have to give a speech or speak publicly, you should thoroughly research what you are going to be discussing. The research should be done at such a level, that when you have completed it, you know the subject matter backwards and forwards, inside and out. This will give you confidence when your speech is delivered. Writing your speech out on paper is good a good idea too as this helps you learn and memorize specific things you may want to point out when you deliver your speech.

It is also a good idea to do a dry run of your speech to family members or friends so that they can give you some constructive criticism for improvement. When they give you suggestions for improvement, implement them in your speech material if you think they are sound and will actually improve your speech. Ask your dry run listeners to ask questions about the subject you are presenting so you can get feedback on the level of confidence you have in your answers and explanations. Also, remember to present your dry run speech using the tools and resources you will have available when you deliver your actual speech.

If you are speaking to children make sure to work on the tone of your voice. Children are more likely to pay attention to your speech if you sound enthused and knowledgeable. Try to involve your young listeners in your speech by asking their opinions of things you are discussing with them. When speaking to children or teens, make sure you dress casually and make your eye contact to show your interest in how they think and feel about your subject. It is also a good idea to make small jokes to fill a pause or to break your speech up a little. This also shows them that you are relaxed and comfortable speaking to them.

Public speaking is a very important skill you must have to achieve your goals, especially in a working environment that caters to well developed communication skills. It is necessary for survival in obtaining employment, encouraging others and social interaction and development. Public speaking is best perfected with practice and as you get better, your peers will motivate you to even higher levels of achievement.

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