How to Improve Your Public Speaking Skill
Feeling nervous or anxious during a live presentation is a normal and natural experience. Since we’re all feeling some amount of social anxiety when speaking in public, that may often be a problem when we’re on a podium. How often have you watched someone and wondered how they could have an air of confidence about themselves and their speaking skills, but later, you find out they were nervous and uncertain before they stepped on stage? There are ways you can improve your odds and your skills.
Here are Some Ways How to Improve Your Public Speaking Skill
Begin in Advance
Your presentation doesn’t exactly start the moment you step on stage, as it needs days, weeks, or even months of preparation before you do. It would be best if you prepared to clear some time to prepare notes, slides, and information on your topic. What will you discuss, the core message and your presentation tools? All of those need to be prepared well beforehand.
Know the Audience
This is important but often ignored part of successful presentations. Before planning your presentation, keep that in mind, ensuring you won’t bore your audience. What people will be attending, and what do they know already? What do they want to know? It would be best if you considered this and whether the audience understands all the jargon you plan on using. Survey the audience in advance and collect information on who will be visiting, so you can fine-tune your presentation.
Know Your Tech
Presentation in front of your audience means having more than a side deck and a script; you will need to understand how to set up online or hybrid presentations. If you are going for an online presentation, you need to prepare your tech ahead of time, even do a test run just in case to ensure everything runs smoothly and sounds great. Preparation is important to handle the worries you may be having when you speak in front of an audience. If you feel anxious before you go on stage, at least you would have done everything possible to prepare for the task ahead.
Engage Your Audience
Engaging the audience is an important part of successful presentations, so you need to ask yourself how you can involve your audience as much as you can. This is important in many ways, as maintaining a high level of engagement means your audience is far more likely to pay attention and retain the information you’re delivering.
Interact Often
A good way to start your presentation early is to drop an icebreaker. That may be a serious question of the open-ended variety, a pill relevant to the topic, or even a joke. Start the presentation with that type of attention grabber that helps the audience relax, and then build upon that by delivering your message.
The Importance of Pacing and Timing
Finding the right pacing when it comes to your speech is a challenge. You may feel relaxed and calm during the presentation if you speak fast enough. That may cause people’s attention to waver, so you must ensure you vary the speed and cadence of your presentation as you go forward. If you want to grab your audience’s attention and wake them up, speak a bit faster. To deliver information, you should start at a comfortable pace. Vary the speed of your presentation, and it will become more dynamic and interesting, helping maintain your audience’s engagement and concentration on the topic.
