Public speaking tips: 8 ways to practice public speaking and overcome your fears
Public speaking is one of those skills that everyone will need to take part in at some point in their lives. Whether you’re giving a speech at school, presenting at work, or getting to know someone on a date, public speaking can play quite a big part in our daily lives.
School of Connection was born after our founder, Mike, struggled with public speaking. He spent many years attending various courses before he found the most effective solution - be comfortable being vulnerable and be yourself.
In this article, we’ll share top tips from Mike and our team. All tips have been practised time and time again and helped us, and our students, overcome nervousness and anxiety in certain situations. It’s these proven methods that are used in our public speaking training courses today.
So, let’s get started - here are eight ways to practise public speaking and overcome your fears.
1. Make your content personal
Most professional-based presentations require us to work on our own content, slides or deck - whatever you like to call it. You may already have your content in place, which is great. However, if you don’t, or want to make sure your content will hit the mark, take a look at our checklist below for creating a speech that will resonate with your audience, keep them engaged, and make them walk away fondly-remembering what you said.
Content tip 1: Structure
Every presentation needs a narrative that the audience can follow. To help you achieve this make sure your content includes:
An introduction, middle and an end
Address points and explain your points using examples
Talk about problems and then talk about solutions
Ask yourself - what do you want your audience to know, why do you want your audience to know it, and how are you going to explain this to your audience
Content tip 2: Personalisation
Once you have your structure in place, the next thing to do is sprinkle your presentation with personal experiences. People love hearing personal stories because they can relate to them. So tell stories throughout your presentation using real-life feelings and emotions. Your audience will connect to these emotions and this is what they’ll remember.
Content tip 3: Detail, detail, detail
Details are what allow an audience to paint a picture in their head and imagine a scenario. They also evoke emotions in people. Take time in your presentation to describe situations using specific details that enable your audience to come on the journey with you, from the beginning, all the way to the end.
Content tip 4: Ask questions
Questions keep an audience engaged by bringing their minds back into the room (if they start wandering). You can either ask your audience questions and get them to interact with you, or you can use open-ended questions that encourage your audience to think about the answers. Finishing your presentation with a rhetorical question is also a technique many professional speakers use to make sure their speech is remembered. You’ll find the audience leaves with your final question lingering in their minds.
2. Learn how to breathe effectively
When nervousness and stage fright kicks in our hearts beat faster, blood pressure rises and breathing quickens. These feelings can then impact how you speak - especially in pressurised situations.
This is why we always teach our students to use their breathing to control their anxiety, and in turn control their delivery.
A deep breathing technique called Diaphragmatic Breathing is the best method to use in public speaking scenarios. Breathing using your diaphragm will make your voice steadier, allow you to project, and also help you stay in control when speaking for long periods of time.
Breathing using your diaphragm also helps activate your parasympathetic nervous system. Activating this system turns off another system called the sympathetic nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system makes our ‘fight or flight’ response kick in. So, by turning on the parasympathetic nervous system (by using our diaphragms) we are in fact minimising the risks of anxiety taking over our presentations. Genius, right?
Learn how to breathe using the Diaphragmatic Breathing technique by watching this video here.
3. Be comfortable being uncomfortable
Anxiety and nervousness is often a reaction to feeling uncomfortable in a situation. Which is why a coping method that’s incredibly important to learn - not just in public speaking, but in everyday life - is to feel comfortable being uncomfortable.
When we are vulnerable many of us see this as a weakness. However, this vulnerability can in fact be used to our advantage to connect with people and conjure up emotions within them.
Brene Brown is well-known for giving a TED talk on The Power of Vulnerability and how by allowing ourselves to be in this state we are in fact being true and authentic to who we really are. In turn, this attracts people to you, and they like you a whole lot more.
That’s why we encourage our students to put themselves in situations where they feel uncomfortable to help them learn how to accept this feeling and feel more relaxed with it. The more you do this, the more you’ll realise that being vulnerable is okay - plus by telling people you feel vulnerable you’ll be creating a bigger bond with them. Clever!
4. Think about your body language
Body language is an extension of our thoughts and feelings, and a good speaker will resemble what they are saying through their actions. Everything will be aligned.
Speakers start looking nervous when their body’s become rigid and their actions become awkward. This tends to happen when you worry about how you look and feel threatened by looking silly or embarrassing yourself.
To get a natural, confident body language that mirrors what you’re saying you need to give yourself the freedom to express yourself with no inhibitions. To help you do this focus instead on what you’re saying and the feelings that come with saying these words; forget about how you look. When you ‘let go’ and start tapping into your emotions you’ll find your words and actions start to become more aligned.
There are five tips we offer our students when it comes to body language, these are:
Symmetry - make sure you are symmetrically positioned to your audience.
Eye contact - make direct eye contact with your audience, and spread this out evenly across the room.
Hands or no hands - if you can, use your hands to help articulate what you’re saying. If you struggle with this, then you can leave them by your side.
Move or don’t move - again, if you feel you can move, do. But, if you find this challenging, sit on a chair or stand in one place, just try to move other parts of your body to express yourself.
45 degrees angle - make sure you don’t turn your body further than 45 degrees away from your audience.
5. Tap into your emotions
Emotions are a great tool to use to affect the way your audience feels. Emotions can also add tonal variety and melody to our voices.
In order to trigger your own emotions ahead of your presentation first ask yourself:
What do you want the audience to feel?
What’s your objective when speaking?
For example, if you want your audience to feel elated and happy, try and tap into an experience when you felt that emotion. Is there a story you could tell to make your audience feel this too?
Remember, an audience won’t necessarily remember what you said, but they will remember how you made them feel.
6. Project your voice, speak slowly and clearly
A good, accomplished speaker projects their voice so everyone in the audience can hear them. They also speak at a slower pace so every word they say is clear and understood.
It can be very easy to stumble over your words when you’re feeling nervous, which in turn makes it difficult for you to be heard.
Here’s a bit of biology for you: The voice consists of two things, breath and resonance. Resonance is the quality of our breath, which we want to be full and rich when public speaking. You can add more resonance to your voice by warming it up ahead of a presentation.
We recommend using a humming technique for warming up your voice. Learn how to do this by watching this video here.
And when it comes to pace? The rule of thumb is generally to speak at a rate of 110-160 words per minute. So, work out how many words your presentation will roughly have, and then work out how long your presentation should take you. You can then time yourself when you’re next practising to see if you’re speaking at a pace that will be understood by your audience.
7. Practise, practise, practise
This brings us nicely onto…practise, practise, practise. We’ve all heard the saying “practise makes perfect” and when it comes to public speaking this is very true.
The more you practise your presentation, the more your speech will go into your long-term memory and you’ll start to relax. It also means when you come to the actual presentation it will be second nature so you’ll feel confident which will show in your delivery.
Plenty of practise in front of a mirror is a good place to start. Or why not try practising in front of colleagues, friends or a family member?
H2: 8. Try public speaking classes
Finally, if you really want to overcome your public speaking fears or triumph in that next presentation, why not come along to one of our public speaking classes? We hold them in-person, online, or we can come to your offices and carry out a group session.
Either way, all our students walk away feeling much more confident with their new-found public speaking skills and our sessions help with social anxiety too.
Get in touch here to find out more.