In today's world, few things are as essential as good soft skills. With everyone becoming so connected through the internet and the world moving towards a speak-centric sense of communication, employers are desperate to find people who are able to work with others and stay cool in situations where they may suddenly find themselves leaders. Possibly the most crucial of these skills is public speaking. While the rest of the world may be quickly eradicating the dreaded stage fright, some of us still might find that we just can not speak to large groups no matter how hard we try. To try to help those who find themselves falling into this category, here are three absolutely essential and simple tips to be a better public speaker.
1. Loud Speaking/Yelling
Being able to speak loud probably seems like a no-brainer. Yet, people struggle so hard at being able to reliably speak loud when public speaking. The problem stems from the fact that people can not differentiate between yelling, where you raise both your pitch and volume to basically scream, and speaking loudly where the only thing that changes is volume, not your pitch. Yelling may get people's attention, but it also looks unprofessional and can come across as threatening. Mastering the ability to raise your voice's volume without changing how you sound will guarantee you are the one all eyes are on when you speak.
2. Sing What You Speak
This is a skill that took me a long time to learn and for a long time held me back from speaking as well as others. We all have the occasional stutter as we speak, or we mispronounce a word or we think faster than we talk and words jumble or any other matter of flubs in our vocabulary that only become more likely to happen when we are speaking to a crowd. For people who have mouth augmentations such as braces that can cause unintentional slurs the problem is even worst. So what is the solution? This may sound crazy, but before you start to speak anything sing it in your head and as you say it. You will not sing it aloud but you will also not flub the line you are thinking. This can take some practice but once mastered will kill off any word hiccups.
3. Eye. Contact. Matters.
I can not preach this enough! Making eye contact can be hard, especially for those who are introverted or shy, but it can also be the difference between life and death when public speaking. People have a tendency to doze off or lose interest if they do not feel that something happening is aimed towards them. So how you can make a singular person in a crowd feel like they are the one being directed at? Just look them in the eyes. All it takes is one minor glance and the Deer-In-The-Headlights effect will kick in. That person will be glued to you. So as you speak make sure to glance around and try to make your eyes cross the paths of others who might be losing interest. This will keep listening both on an indiviudal level and as a group since people are way more likely to pay attention if they see everyone around them doing so.
