Public Speaking Skills
How a Lack of Confidence Can Stop a Good Public Speaker From Being Great
Skilled speakers exude confidence, right?Not necessarily. Many reasonably good speakers suffer from intense self-doubt, which ruins the experience of speaking for them and holds them back from becoming great speakers. If you are an anxious speaker, you have probably decided you are rubbish at it...
How I Am Using Yoodli — A New AI Tool — To Support My Public Speaking Coaching
Yoodli is an exciting new AI public speaking tool that I am using in my coaching.A lot of my work is with people who have extreme public speaking anxiety that holds them back from achieving their career and life goals. In my experience, there...
Giving a Good Presentation Is One Thing – But Having Impact Is Another
Recently someone approach me for private coaching. She was nervous about an upcoming presentation. Before she ran through her presentation, she told me that her topic was important to her audience and she really wanted to have impact. Then she practiced her presentation by sharing...
Why Reading Your Speech is Like Riding a Bike with Training Wheels
Remember learning to ride a bike? You probably started with training wheels. What happened when your parents removed the training wheels? Perhaps you went, wobble, wobble, wobble, splat. The next time the wobble lasted a little longer before the splat, and then maybe by the...
No Good at Public Speaking? Six Reasons Why Improving Is Just Like Learning to Play a New Sport (Or Any Other Complex Skill)
I recently heard someone describe the three phases he goes through when learning a new skill. The first stage is fear. The second stage is grit – the hard work that goes into getting good at anything. Thirdly, there is mastery – the feeling of...
How to Share Something Personal With an Audience Without Oversharing! Seven Questions That Will Help if You Are Unsure
On the first night of my public speaking course, I tell people the story of my epic public speaking fail. You can read all about it on my Medium site. The short version is that I had a panic attack in front of the senior...
Five Slightly Unusual Public Speaking Tips to Improve Your Delivery and Reduce Nervousness!
There are plenty of useful articles about public speaking, but many of them repackage similar tips. Remember to pause; practice your presentation thoroughly; maintain eye contact; focus on your audience; tell stories; and so on. Don’t get me wrong — it is all great advice! But I...
Preparing for a Presentation — Are You a Procrastinator or a Perfectionist?
Few people can engage an audience without preparing and practicing. Even presenters who look like they are speaking ‘off the cuff’, have usually prepared thoroughly— or have presented the same material many times previously.When I first started as a public speaking coach, I stressed the...
How to Be an Authentic Speaker -and What It Really Means
It is easy to recognise an “authentic” speaker but unpacking what it really means is harder. After all, public speaking is a performance – so how can you perform and be authentic at the same time?Although public speaking is a performance, it is not the...
How to Act on Your Resolution to Improve Your Public Speaking – and Three Traps to Avoid
Have you made a New Year’s resolution to ‘do something’ about your fear of public speaking? That’s fantastic! You won’t regret it. Read this article to find out how to keep this resolution!You probably felt great (even euphoric!) when you made a decision that this...
How to Look Like a Confident Public Speaker (Even When You Don’t Feel Like One!)
We all want to look confident when we are presenting. We also want to feel confident – but most people can handle feeling a bit nervous as long as they can hide it from others!This in itself is interesting and I touched on it in a...
Nine Ways to Calm Your Nerves by Connecting With Your Audience (and Imagining Your Audience Naked Is Not One of Them!)
Presenting to an audience can feel unnatural. Most people don’t like being in the spotlight. It is tempting to become less noticeable by hiding behind a PowerPoint presentation. But that is an unhelpful strategy. We need to do the opposite because connecting with the audience...
Why Practice Impromptu Speaking?
Do you find impromptu speaking difficult? Are you articulate giving prepared presentations but struggle to “think on your feet?” Many people find this hard. Even when you have plenty to say, organizing it into something coherent can be challenging with no time to prepare.In a...
When Your Topic Scares You!
When I ask a group of people if they have ever had to talk to an audience about something they didn’t understand or were not convinced about themselves I usually get a lot of nods. Then I ask them how they felt about it. They...
Does Your Audience Really Notice When You Make a Mistake in Your Speech?
Many years ago, I did a public speaking course through work. At the end of the course we each gave a speech which was filmed. We were given the video to review in our own time. I was really unhappy with my speech because at...