Tips Guides

When you see experienced public speakers, sometimes it seems they can cast a spell on an audience.You as an audience member know what that spell feels like. And one of the first evidences that this public speaker was going to keep this audience in the palm of his hand is that you almost instinctively liked him or her.

And the interesting thing about that “spell” is that once you genuinely like this speaker, you naturally are open to his presentation, you listen more attentively and you are more open to suggestion if the speaker is driving to a point.

So as you prepare to begin doing some public speaking, its natural to want to know how to make that spell work for you. We all have a natural feeling of insecurity or inferiority and we worry that the audience will not like us and our presentation will go badly.

So you wonder if that speaker just naturally more likeable than you or did he use some public speaking magic to make the audience like him.

The answer is twofold. First, no, that public speaker is not more likeable than you. That is just your insecurity talking to you and you need to tell that insecurity to take a hike because it is not going to do you a bit of good becoming a better public speaker.

And secondly, yes there is something that public speaker knows to make his or her audience like them but no, it isn’t magic at all. It is something anyone who stands in front of a crowd can use and it will work every time.

The secret really isn’t very complicated at all. You just have to learn to like the audience. That may seem simple but buried in that idea is a powerful principle of psychology. When you step in front of a crowd and you have trained yourself to like them, it comes out in every aspect of your posture and the way you behave.

You will smile more, make eye contact and actually find yourself wanting to interact with them during the course of your presentation.

Now don’t be concerned if your speech or presentation is not interactive in a dialog sort of way. But if you have spoken to a small group before, you know that there is a lot of interaction going on even during a one way speech.

That speaker who charmed you that day with that “magic” knows that interaction goes on all the time. As you speak, you get feedback in the form of body language and facial expressions that let you know how you are doing.

And by starting out with a fundamental warmth and affectionate relationship with an audience, that feedback is warm and affectionate as well and that only makes the presentation more of a success.

The trick to learning to like your audience lies in looking for good reasons to like them. We use the word “trick” for a good reason.’ Any reason to like them will do.

You don’t have to like every individual in the audience. You might like the clothing they are wearing or the faces of individuals in the audience. You might like certain ones you know or a few you met and found a chemistry with early on.

You can even like a crowd just because you find a few in that group attractive. By focusing on the ones you like, your warmth toward them will spread to the rest of the audience as you speak.

Before long you will have that crowd in the palm of your hand and using that magic spell to make your presentation a success. Then you will remember this little “trick”. And you will use it often for public speaking success every time.

1000s of Education,Training,Scholarship & Children Services.Click Here -
WorldEducationPages.com,
WorldTrainingPages.com,
WorldScholarshipPages.comand
WorldChildrenPages.com

There is a good reason that public speaking is a superior method of presenting material to a group than just faxing your text over and letting them read it. Yes, part of that reason is that by stepping through the talk, you can make sure they “get it”.

But the most important reason has to do not with the subject, not with the presentation style and not even with how good the donuts were before talk. The reason public speaking is so effective is that the audience gets the material presented in a very personal way by the one person who can do that - you.

When people walk away from your talk, they will remember one thing as their primary memory and another level as secondary. The secondary memory will be your subject matter. But the most potent memory they will carry with them will be that of you as a speaker.

Public speaking is actually a very personal thing to your audience. That is because while to you, you are speaking one to many, to each audience member, you are talking to him or her directly. That bond is unspoken but strong. And it is even stronger when you address the same crowd regularly.

This may seem like an awesome responsibility but buried in this little fact about public speaking is a secret to make your presentations more effective. Instead of shying away from the fact that people will feel like they know you after you address them in a public, embrace that fact of life about speaking in public and use it to your advantage.

The way to grab a hold on this powerful psychological principle is simply to give them more of you in every aspect of your talk.

You can start with your introduction. Its easy to tell some joke you heard on the late night talk shows and then go right into your talk. But if you take a moment and speak to them person to person, you will create a stronger bond with them which will result in better results from your presentation.

Take some time and reveal a little bit about yourself to this group. Public speaking can be a very cathartic event because when you open up to a group of people about your feelings and your past, they embrace you emotionally and that presentation becomes personal to them.

But don’t stop adding the personal touch with the introduction. Continue to look for ways to make the presentation personal throughout the talk. You no doubt know the power of illustrations, stories and humor in any presentation. Well instead of using abstract or canned stories or jokes, personalize this aspect of your talk.

Don’t just “tell a joke”. Instead think of a personal story that has a humorous component to it and use that to illustrate the point. By using humor that makes fun of you, not only will the laughter be more genuine, it will ingratiate you to the crowd and create that connection between the personal speaker/audience bond to your subject matter.

The same is true of illustrations. Now there have been cases where speakers made up a personal story to fit the talk so that is done. And because it has the same effect, you could put that under the category of “acting” and not feel to badly about it. But if you use a real story from your own life, your childhood or your love life, that will ring true during your talk and be more believable to your audience.

Don’t be intimidated by putting some of your own heart and life into your public speaking. The investment of giving people a little more of you will result in a higher level of concentration and responses to your call to action. And the audience will emotionally bond to you in such a way that you will almost certainly be asked back to speak again and again.

1000s of Education,Training,Scholarship & Children Services.Click Here -
WorldEducationPages.com,
WorldTrainingPages.com,
WorldScholarshipPages.comand
WorldChildrenPages.com

If you listen to experienced speakers, it’s easy to see some real differences in how they step through their presentation than maybe how you go about giving a talk when you are called upon to speak in public.

But it is a good exercise to use every opportunity to listen to different public speakers and learn from them. From speakers who are not effective, study why they are and learn how to correct those problems in your presentation.

For speakers who are very good, learn what they do that works and copy their methods without shame. It’s all part of learning from each other.

One thing that jumps out when an experienced public speaker is holding an audience in the palm of his hand is that he is totally relaxed up there. That is a calculated relaxation.

In fact most of the methods he uses such as his use of hands, the vocal range of his voice, where he looks and how he moves are all carefully planned and part of that presentation and who that speaker is. And all of those things come with time and practice.

So if you need a few times in front of a group, or a few dozen times before you can begin to get that relaxed, be generous with yourself and allow that public speaking is the kind of thing that you can read about all day long but you don’t get good at it until you get good at it.

One thing that very often jumps out in a speaker who is at ease with his style is that for most of us the idea of a pause is terrifying. But notice smooth speakers often will pause and allow that moment of quiet in a presentation to just hang there.

When that pause happens for that other speaker, you may have felt as terrified as if it was happening to you. But not to worry.

As you noticed, that skilled speaker uses pauses to create interest and isn’t afraid to let his presentation stop for a moment either intentionally or to check notes or make some other adjustment.

The pause is actually a very powerful communications tool that if you can master it, you can use it to make points, add drama or just wake up an audience that may have begun to doze off on you.

That is because as you speak along, if your presentation is somewhat long, it is easy for people to be lulled into an unintentional trance of sorts.

The mind can wander and that is the condition people get into when they doze off as you speak. They track to the continuous sound of your voice and the melodic tempo that you naturally fall into when you speak in public.

When you begin to use pauses and changes to the tempo of your presentation, you break that natural rhythm of your talk. The pause will jar the audience back to you and they will suddenly be attentive with that “what did I miss” look on their faces.

That is a real tool to you to help your audience stay focused and to use particularly when you are approaching a point that is an important part of what you have to say.

Most of us when we are just starting out in public speaking fear the pause in our presentation in the worst way. That moment when you are not speaking and that audience is looking at you and nothing is happening can feel like you are falling to your death.

But in truth, all you have done is focus the concentration of the group on you and on your talk. So don’t fear the pause. If used with caution and sparingly, it can be a powerful communications tool to help you make your point.

1000s of Education,Training,Scholarship & Children Services.Click Here -
WorldEducationPages.com,
WorldTrainingPages.com,
WorldScholarshipPages.comand
WorldChildrenPages.com

Many times local civic organizations look for experts from various businesses to come and give a presentation about your area of skill. The Elks, Rotary and Kiwanis are just a few who are always on the look for good public speakers to address their groups.

So if you get a chance to speak to these groups, its easy to see these as tremendous business opportunities for marketing.

The problem is that these groups restrict you to only address your field of expertise and do not allow marketing of any kind when you come to speak to their membership. This could be a pretty frustrating situation.

Many times these men’s groups are fraternities of the most successful business people in your area. And because these groups meet monthly they are always on the look out for good public speakers like you. If you are confident in your public speaking ability, you can easily see yourself getting return invitations to address these groups.

But maybe by looking at these speaking opportunities differently, you can leave that frustration behind and find a way to market to these people by not marketing. You can use the natural functions of the public speaking forum to advertise your business in a way that never has a marketing feel to it at all.

And these methods are not forbidden and your sponsors will applaud your presentation as you quietly milk these speaking engagements for all the marketing value you can get.

First of all, you are allowed to introduce yourself and talk about your specialized training and experience. Let’s face it, while that is a section of your presentation to help your audience understand your area of expertise, it is also nothing short of a job interview.

By discussing your training and talents in the context of background, you cement in the mind of that audience why you would be a good person to think about when they need your kind of talent as part of what they do.

But the introduction is not the only way you can market by not marketing. By speaking with energy and passion about your work, that excitement sends a message about who you are to those potential customers out there.

The one thing a client wants to see is that are always on a quest to increase your knowledge of your field. This is especially true if you are in an industry that goes through a lot of changes every year. Your clients want a partner who can keep up on those changes so they don’t have to.

By demonstrating that this is a big part of who you are as a subject matter expert in your area, you will become a very attractive prospect as a business partner for those future.

You will want to make sure your presentation is packed with very useful information to your clients. But don’t tell them so much that they can live without you. A good approach is to discuss the problem area in business that your specialization is very good at addressing.

By using your time to detail the problem, you create need in your audience. The solution section of your talk simply describes the perfect solution in enough detail so your future clients know you know what you are doing but not enough so they can take on the problem themselves.

Once again, this creates the desire in the members of that fraternal organization to come to you when that very well described need comes up in their businesses.

Be sure to use the time before and after your presentation for networking. You may be invited to join the group for a meal and if you have already had a chance to speak, this is an ideal time to make some personal connections, answer questions about your talk and even make appointments to come and speak to individual business owners about how you can be of help to them.

You are usually allowed to have your business card with you and for members of the club to take them after your talk.

So if you done a good job of marketing by not marketing, those business cards will fly into the hands of those interested audience members and you will see a nice return on your investment of time just using public speaking to harvest contacts that can turn into more business for you.

1000s of Education,Training,Scholarship & Children Services.Click Here -
WorldEducationPages.com,
WorldTrainingPages.com,
WorldScholarshipPages.comand
WorldChildrenPages.com

Public speaking is counterintuitive. That is to say what your intuition tells you is a good thing is not always the truth. And what your instincts say not to do is often the best thing to do. Your natural inner voice when you find out you have to do a public presentation is to write it all out and read it to the audience word for word.

That way, so your inner voice thinks, there is no way you have to depend on memory and you won’t ever get stuck and have that sinking feeling up there when your brain empties out and you have nothing to say.

But even if you don’t use the method of writing your entire speech out, there are situations where reading to an audience is called for. You may have a passage from a part of your research that is key to what you need for them to know.

Or there may be quotations that are too long to just quote and you need to read them. The situations are varied where reading to a group of people is called for. So to be prepared for that becoming part of your presentation, you should practice it and have some technique down before the situation comes up. Then pausing to read a segment of your presentation is not going to be so disruptive.

The biggest problem of reading to an audience is eye contact. Maintaining a continuous eye contact with your audience should be the first commandment of good public speaking. The more you can look at your audience, catch their eye and maintain that relationship, the stronger your presentation will be.

So if you take a minute or two or three to look down and read to an audience, you lose all of that contact with them and momentum. Like children, when you are not looking at them, they will naturally begin to fidget and drift from what you are doing.

The simple truth is that people don’t like to be read to. Add to that the problem that when you look down to read, your voice is no longer projecting out to the audience but down to the page. You lose at least half of the force of your diaphragm because you are looking down so the power of your talk is vastly reduced by that simple interruption.

By the time you look up again, you may have no idea that you have lost of their attention and the forward motion of your talk is damaged.

One way to lesson the disruption of reading a passage is to had out the passage to the audience before hand and then direct them to it as you need to in the body of your talk. This gives them somewhere to look while you read.

Then when you do read the material, don’t put it on the podium and look down at it. Hold it up to just below face level. That way you can read it and still maintain the force of your diaphragm and your eye contact over the top of the book or page.

Don’t let yourself fall into the trap of thinking that because you are going to read some or all of your presentation, that reduces your preparations. If anything, you should prepare more. Be sure you are very familiar with the text so you are not so much reading it as reciting it with notes.

By giving them the text, you are not so concerned with having to read it word for word correctly and because people read faster than they listen, they will be a step ahead of you and understand the text better.

Practice reading the passage. Resist the urge to read monotone like you was reading the phone book. Learn to read the passage with inflection, with emphasis and even with emotion. Work the passage into the flow of your presentation so you come right out of the reading and make the points from the reading that you need to make right away.

These techniques overcome the major problems reading to a crowd create in a presentation. Using them you will find success because the reading you need to have will flow naturally in the other parts of your speech.

And when you can do that and you don’t lose your audience, you will have made a step forward in your public speaking evolution.

1000s of Education,Training,Scholarship & Children Services.Click Here -
WorldEducationPages.com,
WorldTrainingPages.com,
WorldScholarshipPages.comand
WorldChildrenPages.com

In the delightful Broadway musical “Singing in the Rain”, there is a song called “Make em Laugh” which is based on this idea that the best way for any stage performer to build a bond with an audience is to use humor to bring a smile, or a laugh, to that audience.

Well, that idea is not just valid for stage performers. It’s just as true when you begin to develop your style as a public speaker.

If you pick up any self help guide to how to be effective as a public speaker, one of the golden rules is to open with a joke. But guess what? That is not actually a hard and fast rule. Humor is the type of thing that works just as well about a minute into your presentation, halfway through or just about anywhere that you feel you are losing your audience.

Audience psychology is a funny thing but not in the “laughter” sense. The truth is that when you first begin to speak to an audience, they are probably listening to you. Most people are at least curious about you and what you have to say and will take interest in you if for no other reason than you are a new person up there in front of them.

While there is certainly not a bad idea to open with humor, the time your audience needs a joke is when you have launched into your discussion and you look out to nodding heads or drifting eyes and you know that you are talking but nobody is listening. That is when humor brings the audience back to you and hooks them back into your presentation.

The biggest problem with a lot of public speaking situations is that you may be presenting ideas to the crowd. While an idea is a good thing, people have trouble staying focused on pure concepts for very long. That is why most good public speakers use illustrations, stories and humor to keep the audience focused on what you are talking about. And that is where a generous use of humor will help your public speaking style as well.

Humor has a certain effect on the human psychology that causes the listener to bond with the speaker in a unique way. To put that more simply, using humor in your presentation makes people like you. And when they like you, they want to hear what you have to say.

There is just no getting around the fact that people will listen to, accept, understand and make their own ideas presented with humor far more readily than if your talk is dry presentation of material, even if it is important material.

But what if you don’t know how to use humor? Of course you can always just tell a joke. But canned jokes are just that, attempts to use someone else’s humor. They do work, (if it’s a good joke) but if the humor is not relevant to what you are talking about or to you as a speaker, it often is not as effective as it should be.

The best humor is actually self-deprecating remarks as you speak. These are easy to come up with by simply using yourself as the subject of an illustration. For example, if this topic was part of your speech, you might say

“You know it’s easy to get tongue tied and bumble around up here trying to use humor. But you folks won’t make a mess of it like I am doing.”

That isn’t even a very good joke. But because it is highly relevant, it is self deprecating and it’s a light moment in the presentation, it will probably get a chuckle. A chuckle is really all you are looking for. You are not trying to become a stand up comic up there.

Humor that is too wild and designed to bring hearty laughter actually is distracting. You just want little asides that are of a humorous nature to bring your audience back to listening to you.

Listen to good speakers you admire and take note of how they seem to slip and out of humor easily and effortlessly and how quickly that build rapport with the audience. It will take some practice to get good at using humor as you speak. But it will improve your presentation style tremendously. And that’s the whole idea, isn’t it?

1000s of Education,Training,Scholarship & Children Services.Click Here -
WorldEducationPages.com,
WorldTrainingPages.com,
WorldScholarshipPages.comand
WorldChildrenPages.com