Public Speaking Training – How to Increase The Impact You Have On Your Audience

 Let’s face it, would you rather see a speaker deliver a talk in a monotone, rooted to the spot, with a blank facial expression, remembering his or her words perfectly?

Or would you rather see someone public speaking with an obvious love or strong interest for the topic, moving dynamically on the stage, making full use of facial expressions and body language, perhaps making a few mistakes here and there?

I know which I prefer, and I aspire to being the latter. I love speakers who are obviously passionate about the subject and I really don’t care if they make a few mistakes! In fact it makes them more human, and somehow more passionate.

This is one pitfall that people make when they’re starting to learn the art of public speaking. Training themselves to get things so perfect that they forget to be passionate. Or picking subjects that don’t interest them!

Within several seconds of standing up to speak, your audience forms an opinion of you. Your appearance, to the first sentence uttered, all these influence whether they are going to pay attention to you or daydream.

The key to good public speaking training is to relax enough to deliver with enthusiasm. Stick to topics that get you fired up. Your enthusiasm will shine through in your facial expressions, your voice, gestures and presence.
But how to incorporate all these elements into your presentation AND remember what you’re supposed to be saying?

For the moment, let’s concentrate on the use of voice to convey passion and emotion.

Your voice is one of your most powerful tools when public speaking. Training yourself to use your voice to its best potential will certainly pay dividends.

If your voice is too soft, too loud, or monotonous then you’re already lessening the effectiveness of your presentation.

Many people worry that their nervousness will show in their voice trembling. The best way to overcome this is to perform deep-breathing exercises in the few minutes before starting your presentation. You can tell that you’re breathing deeply, if your abdominal muscles are moving, not just your chest. Correct breathing will almost certainly reduce tension and nervousness in your voice. 

The current voice that you use in everyday conversations will most likely not be your optimum voice. All too often, years of bad speech habits can serve to diminish the natural strengths of your vocal range. Once you become aware of this, there are certain steps you can take to enhance your pronunciation, inflection, projection, clarity and so on.

When you speak, your voice conveys how you are feeling emotionally. It’s important to channel any nervousness you may feel into an enthusiastic, expressive, persuasive and convincing tone. This is most easily achieved by lots of practice and good public speaking training. It also helps to record your presentations so that you can see where there is room for improvement.

An optimum speaking voice is:

• natural, a true reflection of the speaker’s personality
• warm and pleasant
• dynamic, with a variety of pitch and range
• emotive, without having to be especially loud
• sincere
• heard by listeners even at the back of the room, due to adequate vocal projection and pronunciation

In the next article, we’ll look at the individual components of your voice and how to optimise each of these.