Public Speaking Skills
Public Speaking Skills
Public speaking skills just like any other skills are gained and polished through determination, persistence, patience, practice, and a lot of work and experience.
To be an effective speaker, you need to posses and hone the following public speaking skills.
1. Focused. “You get what you focused on.” In public speaking, your goal is to have a successful presentation, and to attain such success you should be an effective speaker, and to be so, you need to be focused. You need to put your mind, attention, body, and spirit into your speaking task. Do not be caught up by anything that goes outside your speech, anything that may disrupt you. You may have personal problems at the moment but just like what my choir teacher taught me, “you can not do anything about it right now, so focus on what you’re supposed to do and leave all distractions aside.”
2. Fluent in the language used. The word fluent is defined as: able to speak or write smoothly, easily, or readily. The smoothness, easiness, and readiness when speaking is a must. You should have a good command of the language you are to use in public speaking. Use the language you are most comfortable with. But this still depends on the setting or of your public speaking task. If it is an English class, of course you need to present your speech in English.
3. Powerful. You should be a powerful speaker, powerful in speech and in appearance for you to be able to create an impact or good effect on your audience. A speaker with not enough force is like a physically weak carpenter banging a nail with a hammer. Your message will not sink in like the nail which failed to be drilled into concrete. Sometimes your audience could be as ‘hard” as such concrete.
4. Convictional. This public speaking skill is the twin sister of “powerful.” They should go together. Even if you are powerful and display an agreeable force or strength if your audience sees a loop hole because you are lacking something — the appearance of being convinced, you are still half effective. If you want your audience to believe in your message, you should initially evoke a sense of conviction. Among these public speaking skills, this is the most difficult to possess and enhance, because you can not fake this, unlike being powerful. In a way you can sound and look powerful without much effort.
5. Prepared. This public speaking skill should come in handy before and during your public speaking assignment. Way before your presentation, prepare. And prepare well. During your speech, you should likewise be prepared specially for unexpected circumstances. Be prepared to answer questions to be thrown at you, if it was an interactive presentation. Be prepared in handling technical disruptions. Some speakers are too caught up by this kind of interruption that it triggers nervousness. Sometimes they can even be “lost” in their speech specially if it was a memorized speech. Be prepared in instances your memory may fail you. Be prepared to adlib; and make sure your audience do not notice you were startled. It is ok to be alarmed by such untoward happening, but make sure your audience could not tell. But the best thing to do is to expect the unexpected so you will not be caught unaware. Be prepared.
(Aside from these public speaking skills, use also some public speaking tools that would better your speech delivery)
You can not just go up the stage, grab the microphone, and deliver a speech, you need to have public speaking skills. Otherwise you will most probably make a huge mess or fail to accomplish your purpose of speaking.
