Hints and Tips for Effective Public Speaking

Here are just a few hints, public speaking tips and techniques to help you develop your skills and become far more effective as a public speaker.

Mistakes

Mistakes are all right.
Recovering from mistakes makes you appear more human.
Good recovery puts your audience at ease - they identify with you more.

Humour

Tell jokes if you're good at telling jokes.
If you aren't good, best to leave the jokes behind.
Gentle humour is good in place of jokes.

Tell stories

Stories make you a real person not just a deliverer of information.
Use personal experiences to bring your material to life.
No matter how dry your material is, you can always find a way to humanise it.

How to use the public speaking environment

Try not to get stuck in one place.
Move around.
One way to do this is to leave your notes in one place and move to another.
If your space is confined use stronger body language to convey your message.

Technology

Speak to your audience not your slides.
Your slides are there to support you not the other way around.
Ideally, slides should be graphics and not words (people read faster than they hear and will be impatient for you to get to the next point).
If all the technology on offer fails, it's still you they've come to hear.

You can learn to enjoy public speaking and become far more effective at standing in front of a group of people and delivering a potent message.