5 Effective Ways To Improve Your Public Speaking Skills

Public Speaking. Everyone reacts or feels differently to it based on how one relates to it. Some feel energized, and they are ready to do public speaking anytime. Some want to do it but lack the courage or the learning before they get good at it. And of course, some people don't like it, they never want to do it, and that's all right.

Let's say you are someone who is looking to get better at public speaking. How could you go about it?

The purpose of this article is to throw light on five effective ways to build your confidence, courage, learning so you can do public speaking powerfully.

Let's get started.

1. Start Improving Your Presentation Skills

Everything in the journey can start in small ways. Be it Warren Buffet in Investing or be it Michael Jordan in Basketball, they all started at ground zero, and today billions of people look to them as an inspiration.

To be a great public speaker, one can start with good presentation skills. There are a lot of fundamental skills one you could pick up by starting as a good presenter in small forums to become a great public speaker. Communicating your ideas through the effective use of three key elements (Verbal, Vocal, and Visual) can be practiced well through powerful presentations.

2. Lead or Participate in Initiatives

Wherever you are, You always have a happening around you that can give you opportunities to practice public speaking. Public speaking need not be always in a big hall with a microphone and audience sitting in front of you. It could be just about you talking to a group of people about an idea, a message, a concept, or even an activity. It's about how comfortable you feel when you are talking to a large set of people.

For example, it could just be a community activity in your society such as tree sapling planting, cleaning or painting a school, etc.

If you are working in Corporates, you always have lots of initiatives you could participate, to take advantage of the presentation opportunities, be it with a team of employees or a leadership team.

3. Contribute to Training Opportunities

Offering training is a great way to practice presentation skills and public speaking. If you have learnt something that you believe you can teach others, get onto it. Over the years, we all acquire skills and become good at them.

When we teach others, we become more powerful in our understanding of the subject, and in turn, it enables us to deliver the message more clearly over time. The other good thing about teaching is, You could always learn from the learner's curious questions.

4. Go Deep into a Niche

Going deep into a niche is absolutely essential to be a powerful public speaker. As Brian Tracy (American Canadian Motivational Speaker) beautifully puts it.

When you speak about something you passionately care about, you will be more comfortable and feel more confident in your element

When we go deep into a niche, a skill or a subject, we become masters at it over time. And we become more close to it, we care about it, and it becomes part of us. When we have more conviction with what we know and believe, delivering a message becomes much natural, easy, and impactful.

5. Sign-up in Meetup Groups

Meetup group is a beautiful thing that's happening across the world these days. For all topics, you have a group of people meeting informally or formally through forums to discuss, share and learn.

For example, www.meetup.com offers plenty of groups across the globe to meet in person or online on many subjects that are of interest to you.

All you need to do is, join any of the groups based on your interest and start showing up to listen to and learn from various speakers. As the opportunity arises, you can start presenting your ideas or knowledge to people at these forums.

Another great example or platform for practicing public speaking could be the ToastMasters community. It is a great forum to be part of and present to a small or large group of people to develop public speaking skills.

Wrap:

As with anything else, I always ask everyone to think of "Why?". Why do you want to be a great public speaker? Answering that for yourself will open up the underlying emotional reasons. And would feed as motivation for you once you start to act on the above ideas.

There are many more ways to pick and act on, to keep getting better at a public speaking skill. It's a journey. But always remember, the "action" part is very critical. The more times you stand on a podium or be with a group of people to deliver a message, the more courageous you would feel with public speaking skills.

All the best!