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When you are giving a presentation or speech, your body language and how you hold yourself in front of a crowd speaks to them as much as your words do.  And part of not begin nervous in front of people when you are doing public speaking is not “acting” nervous.  If you have complete control over your body, your face and your hands, you can perform relaxation in front of people and you will actually accept the idea that you are relaxed and begin to feel more at ease as you do your speech.

One problem that you often see in public speakers who is the use of the eyes.  It’s extremely easy as a public speaker to want to look at your outline or your written out speech throughout your presentation so you never get lost or have that terrifying feeling of not knowing what you are going to say next.  That is why many people who do not become skilled at talking in front of crowds write out their speeches word for word and just read it to the group. 

The problem with that approach is you have been asked to give a speech, not a reading.  And many adults take offense at being read to.  An audience wants to hear “from” you, not just hear you read.  If that was the only value of a public presentation, you could just hand out your speech as a white paper and let them read it and not have to get in front of people at all.  But that is not as effective as public speaking, particularly if the purpose of your speech is to convince or to sell.

So the question comes up of where to actually look as you give your speech.  Many speakers look at a spot at the back of the room because looking at the faces makes them nervous.  This is better than staring down at your papers the whole time.  For one thing, projection is a big part of getting your message out there.  And even if you are using a microphone, if you speak “out” into the crowd rather than down, your voice will be clearer and you will naturally use your diaphragm to do well at enunciating each word.

The other value of looking at the back wall is that it will help you project your voice, particularly if you are not using amplification.  The old actor’s motto of “performing to the last row” applies here because it means you consider everyone in that hall to be your audience, not just the people on the first row.  So there is some value to that approach.

However, one of the most valuable ways you can really connect with your audience and get your message across is to make eye contact with the audience.  Eye contact is commonly used by sales people to create a bond with the customer and that bond helps close the sale.  But even if your presentation is not necessarily a sales situation, eye contact will get your message across.  And that is what you got up there to do in the first place.

Eye contact makes the audience look at you.  It keeps them attentive.  To use eye contact to its maximum value, move your eyes from audience member to audience remember and speak to that individual directly.  That eye contact will actually be felt by everyone around that individual and it rivets the listener to you.  Don’t linger on one person because you don’t want to stare but by becoming skilled at using eye contact as you speak to a crowd, you are taking control of the presentation to make it do what you want it to do.  And having control is a big key to success in public speaking.

Author : Zul Affandy of (http://www.vikmall.com)

One of the greatest fears we face when speak in front of a crowd is also one of it’s greatest rewards.  Public speaking is a totally live event.  And that means that anything can happen and just about anything could happen in the middle of your presentation.  So to change your fear of the unexpected to another talent you have to handling interruptions, think ahead what you will do if things come up and how you will get the crowd back on track with your outline to take them to the conclusion you want them to reach.

Depending on how you conduct your presentation and the type of gathering, questions or objections from the audience could potentially take you off course.  This is especially true if you really didn’t plan to have an open forum type of discussion.  If you set out to do your talk as a speech, not a discussion and someone interrupts, the first thing to do is recognize the disrupter to assure the crowd you have the situation under control.  Your audience comes to your talk with a confidence that you are in control of the room and its important you maintain that control. 

Now if the disrupting speaker is being difficult and clearly wants to disrupt the meeting that is when the organizers of the meeting should know to step in and remove that person.  But many times the interruption could be a very logical and politely put question or need for clarification.  A rule of thumb is if one person asks a question, that means that four or five in the crowd had that question in mind but did not have the courage to interrupt you.  Sometimes the disruption may not even be audible.  If might be just a hand in the air or a facial expression that is clearly communicating the need to interact with you.

Again, the more you can maintain composure and recognize the question and either answer it or divert it from your outline, the more confidence the crowd will have in you.  Many times the question will either be easily answered from your materials.  Don’t be afraid to say, “That is an outstanding question which is right here on my outline.  So I will be answering that in a moment”.  When you do that, it gets a chuckle from the questioner and the crowd and you can continue on your path to finishing your talk just making sure you highlight the area of the outline that came up in the question.

Be prepared also for either a legitimate question that you do not have a ready answer for or for questions that don’t make any sense to what you are talking about at all.  For both to simply recognize that the questions was a good question (even if it isn’t) and state that you will do some research and get back to them later with that background information.  That will usually quiet the disruptor down and let you get on with your program.

Questions are not the only thing that can go wrong.  Something could break either on stage or in the crowd.  A person could fall out of his or her chair.  A bird could fly in through a window.  The list of things that might happen goes on and on.  Again as you did with questions that you didn’t expect, maintaining composure and control is the key.  The audience will actually key off of you as to whether to panic about the interruption or not.  So if you keep your head and handle the disruption with humor and a sense of calm, that will put the audience in that mood too.  The effects of the disruption will minimize immediately and because you communicated that you were in charge at all times, the audience will respond to your leadership and come back to you to hear the rest of what you have to say.

You can achieve a feeling of control and calm by thinking through how you will handle the unexpected before you even step up to give your talk.  And because you actually expect the unexpected, you can capture strange things that happen to demonstrate your management of the time you have to speak to the crowd.  If you do that, it will work to your advantage and you the end result will be an even better presentation than would have happened without the disruption.

Author : Zul Affandy of (http://www.vikmall.com)

How you approach that moment when you stand up to give a speech depends a lot on why you are giving the presentation.  Now we are not talking about the fact that you have to give the speech to pass your general education speech class in junior college or that your boss is making you give the speech because he is to darn lazy to do it.  Instead to really give a good speech, you must know that the speech is designed to do.  By identifying what the goal of the speech is and what you want the audience to experience from your presentation, that will give you a lot of information both on what kind of content to use but on your attitude and “approach” when you actually get ready to give the talk.

There are some very basic reasons that someone gives a speech.  Those are to inform, to convince, to amuse or to cause action.  Many speeches you hear are a combination of these motivations.  A sermon is there to inspire which is  a mixture of to convince and to cause action.  A lecture in school is to inform and if you get lucky, the teacher will at least try to make the presentation also try to amuse you.  So that is the first thing to ask yourself when you have your topic and your audience.  Also there are variations on these themes.  A speech intended to sell something is a variation on the “to convince” format. 

A good question to ask when you are ready to put your presentation together is “What do I want my audience to do with this information?”  If you want them to walk away with new information that makes them smarter people, you were speaking to inform.  If you want them to laugh and have a great time, you were out to amuse.  If you want them to go out and use your web site, to join your political party or stop hurting the ozone layer, the objective of your speech is to convince.

You will not necessarily announce when you start speaking what your objective is.  Sometimes it’s obvious.  If you are addressing your class at school, its obvious you are there to inform the students.  But you may also be looking to convince them to live a certain way or to take some other action with the information you are giving.  A speech to amuse is very often also a very softly worded sermon on behavior.  Just watch any comedian and you will hear small snippets of philosophy such as “people, we are all the same, we just have to learn to live together” in the middle of the comedy set.  That comic is actually out to convince you to change your outlook and behavior and using comedy as the tool to that end.

These are all very valid adaptations on the basic forms of a speech.  To make sure your talk reaches its primary talk, lay down the outline or the “skeleton” of the speech with your primary goal in mind.  You might even “back into it” by writing the conclusion first.  The conclusion might be, “And so ladies and gentlemen, I hope you can see that using mass transit will do a lot to help the ozone layer”.  From there you can back up into the body of the speech and lay down, again at the skeleton layer what your three points of the body of your speech is.  These are the things that must get done and that you will evaluate whether you were successful by whether you got those points across.

With that skeleton done, you can go back and start writing the speech from the beginning and use any or all of the public speaking approaches to layer that on  top of the core reason for the talk.  You can use humor, inspirational stories, urban myths or factoids from history to help your speech be fun, compelling and attention grabbing.

If by the end of  your talk  though, you can tell you hit that primary goal, then your speech was well constructed.  And a well constructed speech is easier to give.  It is also easier for your audience to hear so everybody wins.

Author : Zul Affandy of (http://www.vikmall.com)

Any guide to success in an endeavor will tell you that there is no magic formula to success.  But in a lot of fields of endeavor, there seem to be “insider secrets”.  And taking on the challenge of becoming a truly great public speaker is a noble ambition.  But if you could learn the insider secret that makes the difference between good public speakers and great ones, that would help you make that transition. 

Actually there is one great secret to what makes speakers that really shine in front of a group so great.  But it isn’t magic or something that you can take as a pill and an hour later, presto, you are ready to stand up and dazzle the crowd.  It is a very simple process that is something you already know a lot about.  It is just simple, old fashioned hard work and preparation.

The further in advance you can start getting ready for a presentation, the better your public speaking will be.  You know that feeling of terror that you experience when you address a crowd.  Well you may not be able to pinpoint why that feeling comes upon you because who can think when terrified?  But many times it comes up because you aren’t completely prepared and you don’t know what to do or how it will go because the material is not as well developed as it should be.

If you put the work in on your presentation, it will make all the difference in the world when you stand up to give your presentation.  First of all, make sure the content meets your standards.  You should make that speech compelling and fascinating to you.  And if that presentation is full of great material that it not only fascinates you but you will be eager to get up there and share what you know with this crowd.  And that eagerness to speak is a very refreshing feeling when it replaces that terror you felt when you did not work hard in advance to make sure the material was well developed in advance.

Your audience will notice that big change in your attitude too.  Enthusiasm is contagious and if you get up in front of them bubbling with anticipation because what you have to share is just that cool, they will be eager to hear it.  It’s like when someone says to you, “Hey, want to know a secret?”  You are dying to hear that secret.  That is the attitude you will see in your audience when you get up there not only well prepared but excited to tell them what is in that outline.

The more you have that outline and the details of your presentation in your mind, the more confident you will be in front of a crowd.  If you have that presentation virtually memorized, when you begin to speak, you will look at your audience more and only have to glance at your outline to stay on track with where you want to be next.  That is a terrific skill to develop and huge benefit when speaking to the crowd because you have that material down pat in your mind and you always have a destination throughout your talk.

It will take some work to get to that level of confidence in your material.  Rehearsals of your presentation help a lot.  Prepare a dynamic opener that puts the problem statement into the minds of the crowd and then proceed to solve that problem. Also know the navigation plan of your presentation and plan the transitions from point to point.  That will help you not get stuck in one part of the talk and not have awkward transitions which will make you and then your crowd nervous.

Finally plan how you will conclude.  There is a conclusion you want your audience to reach.  Make sure you know the critical points and what parts of your talk are “optional” or there for illustration or to fill time.  In that way, you know where to cut if time runs short and you will still get to your point and close strong.  If your talk has good content, enthusiasm, good points to lead up to solving the problem and closes strong, not only will you feel great about it, your audience will applaud the job you did.  And won’t that be a nice way to end a public speaking exercise for you?

Author : Zul Affandy of (http://www.vikmall.com)

When an author is trying to come up with a topic for his next story or novel, the old pros in the writing came will always give him the same advice.  “Write about what you know.”  That is because if you speak from your own area of expertise, you will speak with authority and passion.  And authority and passion not only make for a great story or novel, they make for a really good public speaking event as well.

When you are putting together what you will use for your talk to that group you want to amaze, you want both of those elements, authority and passion.  But on top of that, you have to give them something to make it perfect.  You have to tell them something they don’t know.  To achieve a balance of what is familiar with what is new and fascinating will be the stuff of your research and preparation for public speaking.

Sometimes telling them something they don’t know might be just bringing a new joke that they have not heard.  Or you might bring a fascinating story or anecdote that will lead directly into your talk.  That can grab their attention and let them know that this is going to be an interesting take on the subject.  Finding jokes that nobody has ever heard before can be a challenge.  But that is ok because canned “jokes” are not best for your speech anyway.  It is much better to find a funny or very amusing situation that relates to the topic from your past.  By telling the story of that situation with plenty of self referencing humor and commentary, you can have your audience very amused as you move into the body of your speech but at the same time very interested in you and so in your topic.

Sometimes finding material that is new to your audience is obvious and easy to identify.  It might be that you were invited to give the speech because you have some expertise in a subject that your audience wants to know about.  If you are giving a speech about how to make your own PC from scratch and you know a lot about that, you are in good shape right off the bat.  Your listeners are sure to learn plenty from your presentation and have lots of questions for you after your talk.  You told them something they didn’t know.

However, if your topic is a little more in the area of common knowledge, you might have to do some research to find things to share that will get those eyebrows to raise.  One rich repository of little known facts lie in what we call trivia and urban myth.  You might be giving a talk about the internet.  Now most of us know quite a bit about the internet.  But with a little research, you can uncover a lot of trivia about how the internet came to be, how the internet actually works at a structural level or whether or not Al Gore really did invent it (he didn’t).

But the internet is also a great topic to go out and pull in literally dozens of urban myths that will make for a very enjoyable presentation.  From how viruses work to whether or not that African prince really will send you 5 million dollars or not can give you lots of things to share that your listeners probably did not know (incidentally - he won’t). 

So approach your research both to fill your speech with good solid content but also to include information that may be amusing or anecdotal to give your listeners something to talk about over coffee later on.  If you make your speech that memorable, they will think of you as a great speaker and probably ask you back again.

Author : Zul Affandy of (http://www.vikmall.com)

There is a bit of a misperception about the phrase “public speaking”.  The misperception that the technique of becoming good at public speaking is all in how you speak.  The truth is that your voice is only part of what you need to be successful in giving a presentation to a group of people.  To be an effective public “speaker”, you should use every resource you have including your body language, your arms and your legs to capture the attention of the crowd and hold it.

There is nothing more boring than a speaker who stands in one place and never moves his arms and speaks softly just putting out the information of the talk.  So to avoid this curse, learn not only to communicate with your entire being when you are in front of an audience.  Learn to express yourself with facial expressions, with gestures of your arms and with movement.  Because that extra effort is what can make a fair presentation good or a good presentation a great one.

A good public presentation can be compared to eating a meal in a restaurant.  A good chef knows that there is more to fine dining than just food because you also must have good service and ambiance so the presentation of the food makes the meal delightful to eat. The same is true of a public speaking situation.  It isn’t enough just to stand up there and speak out the information.  You are not just speaking because you are only really successful when you are communicating.  And to communicate, your audience has to grasp what you are saying and be prepared to make it real in their own lives.

Movement is probably the most underused public speaking method but it is also one of the most effective.  To put it bluntly, when you speak to a group, don’t just stand there.  Get out of the podium and move around a bit.  Walk from one side of your speaking area to the other.  Use your hands to help you describe an illustration or to gesture with emphasis toward the crowd when your text fits that kind of expression.  This movement is good for you because it’s a way of walking off your nervousness.  It’s good for the audience because it keeps them interested.  And it’s very good for your presentation because it is a powerful way to get your point across and to assure you are being understood.

The relationship between public speaking and public performance is unmistakable.  When you watch a speaker, the key word is “watch”.  Taking in the presentation of a speaker is an event that brings in all of the senses.  And the more your audience actually “experiences you” rather than just hears what you say, the better they will like your presentation and the more likely they will be to agree with what you have to say or take action in the direction you had hoped they would.

Of course, it can be a nervous moment the first time you decide to step away from the podium and use your body as part of your presentation.  If you walk and move in front of people, there is always the chance an accident can happen.   You could swing your arms in emphasis and knock something over. You could trip over a microphone cord and be in danger of falling down.  Or your wardrobe could malfunction because of the increased stress and that would be a horrible thing to deal with when everyone is looking at you.  You can do take some extra measures to be sure your wardrobe is secure beforehand and to evaluate the speaking setting so you are aware of potential causes of accidents.  But the possibility of a mishap is just a risk that you should be prepared to take because the movement you use is so powerfully effective that the rewards are too great to pass up.

The other risk is that by stepping away from the podium, you step away from your outline.  To enable yourself to wean away from having to have that outline in front of you all the time, select one or two sections where you will depart the outline and share a personal story.  Then your movement will be confident and effective.  And when you can integrate confident movement into your presentation, your public speaking skills will go from good to great instantaneously.

Author : Zul Affandy of (http://www.vikmall.com)

There is a style of public speaking that absolutely terrifies a lot of people.  But when you see a public speaker speak extemporaneously, it is one of the most relaxed and easy to digest forms of public presentation it is.  Now, to drop the fifty cent word, to speak extemporaneously means to speak without notes.  In other words, pure extemporaneous speaking is done entirely without preparation and is done completely “from the hip” so to speak. 

There are variations, however, on pure extemporaneous speaking.  But if you can adapt to a more extemporaneous style, your presentation will benefit tremendously.  Because people speaking directly from their minds to their audiences do not need notes, a podium or any helps at all, the level of eye contact and audience interaction is improved tremendously.  Freed from being tied to a podium and an outline, you can wander free around the stage and even into the audience and speak to them almost face to face.  That kind of physical motion will grab an audience’s attention and keep them fascinated with what you are doing for as long as the talk goes on.

But don’t be deceived by thinking that a extemporaneous speech is rambling and has no structure whatsoever.  One reason that many very seasoned public speakers go to it is they are capable of capturing and holding the outline of their talk in their minds and speaking from that outline without the aid of notes.  This kind of ability does not just come naturally. To be able to be relaxed enough in front of a crowd to not only speak spontaneously but also to do so while following an outline carried in the mind takes experience and the self confidence that comes with practice.

Giving an extemporaneous talk is equivalent to improv in the theater world.  But that doesn’t mean that a speaker who appears to be speaking without preparation is speaking without preparation.  Often it means that what you are seeing is the result of extensive preparation.  Many times extemporaneous speaking means that speaker carefully wrote and prepared that talk to have the appearance of spontaneity.  Then he or she became so familiar with that outline that it could be delivered completely without prompting. 

This is more than just memorization.  Memorization implies that the talk must be given word for word as it was written and in exact order.  A memorized speech would come unraveled if the speaker lost his or her place because of an interruption.  But an extemporaneous speaker can be interrupted, take questions and even scramble that presentation because that level of familiarity with the talk is so complete that he or she literally lives and breaths what is being presented. 

So, is it worth the extra work to learn to speak by “shooting from the hip”?  It absolutely is.  For one this, to be able to speak extemporaneously is the pinnacle of public speaking skills.   When you see such a speaker on television or in a public setting, it may seem that he or she is making it up on the spot.  What you are really witnessing is the Oscar level of skill and ability on display in a public speaking. Anyone who strives for the best can set extemporaneous speaking as a goal.

But more importantly, being able to speak to a group in this manner is such a higher quality of presentation that you as a speaker will not only have more fun, you will see a higher level of response from your audience.  If you are teaching, they will learn better.  If you are trying to sell, greater sales.  If you are speaking to amuse, more laughs.  So for no other reason than to see such improved outcome from the work you put in to public speaking, learn to speak extemporaneously.  The rewards are tremendous.

Author : Zul Affandy of (http://www.vikmall.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.

Author : Zul Affandy of (http://www.vikmall.com)

The difference between a public speaking presentation that bores you to tears and one that leaves you with a smile on your face and thinking about that presentation is often not the content but the style of the speaker.  You can take the same exact written talk and give it to two speakers and one will turn that script into an exciting live event for his audience and the other will leave that crowd cold.

Obviously your goal as to be that speaker that can really make any presentation come alive.  The first “myth” to get out of your head then is that how well you do at creating excitement has anything whatsoever to do with your subject matter.  While it always helps for you to be excited about the topic itself, you can develop the skills to take any text and turn it into a genuinely exciting public speaking event for any crowd and to do it every time.  Its just a matter of knowing how.

Much of how excited your audience will be has to do with your own level of energy, your sense of humor and how much you are enjoying yourself up there.  This is one of the great secrets of the really great entertainers or public speakers.  If you are having fun, your audience will have fun too.  Fun is contagious.  Think of the great late night host Johnnie Carson.  He always seemed to be having a great time.  And as a result the world wanted to join him and have a great time too.  You can cultivate that personality and that attitude when you are on stage.

To have fun during your public speaking engagement, you have to learn to have some fun with the subject matter.   This is not always easy if the subject matter is mundane and ho hum.  But if you see that topic as boring, so will your crowd and your time talking to them will be a tedious trial on your soul and on theirs too.  So have some fun even with how mundane the topic is. If you join the audience in their feelings about the topic, you and they become partners to find the excitement in this topic. 

But along with finding excitement in the topic, learn to have fun with the audience.  You can do that even before you begin to speak on the outline at hand.  Take some time to step away from the podium and interact with the audience.   Ask them questions and learn who the vocal members of the crowd are.  Find out who the big jokers are and the ones who will have some wise cracks to add as you speak.

These connections and spontaneous friendships will pay off as the presentation begins.  But you are doing something dangerous there too.  By energizing the crowd, you are also giving them permission to jump in during your talk and “help you out”.  As you begin to speak, put energy and excitement, humor and personality into that text.  The excitement of the crowd that sprung into existence because you started your relationship with them with affection and humor will feed your presentation.

Yes, if you put this kind of snap and pop into your time in front of a crowd, you will see feedback come back from that audience, particularly from those wise crackers you took time to make friends with at the start.  But as scary at having that kind of interruption is, it means your crowd is energized and you an actually used that for your advantage.  You can actually develop the ability to “surf” these interruptions and use them to propel your prevention forward.  By teasing the crowd, asking them questions, the funny remarks that come back will actually be pertinent to what you have to say next.  You can take your cues from their comments and take them right back to your outline and take the presentation forward to its conclusion.

This kind of public speaking can be dangerous and more than a little scary to learn to do.  But because you had fun and our audience had fun, that presentation  is full of “snap” and is 100% more successful. And that makes it worth taking the risks to learn this kind of public speaking.

Author : Zul Affandy of (http://www.vikmall.com)

We all have our little vocal style that makes us unique.  How often have you heard someone make a remark about how interesting it is the way you phrase things? We learn the way we speak from our parents and our mentors growing up.  So if you ever listened to yourself speak, you would recognize the expressions you learned from your childhood.

Your vocal style is what marks you as a distinctive individual.  But when you stand up in front of a crowd, that distinctive way you speak becomes the center of attention for the length of your talk.  For the most part, that is what makes your presentation style enjoyable to your listeners.  But sometimes how you speak can become a distraction.  If you have some distinctive “quirks” that begin to dominate how you speak when you are in front of a group, that can be a big distraction to the people who are trying to enjoy your presentation.

There are some very noticeable verbal quirks that if they are affecting your ability to communicate as a speaker, they deserve attention so you can root them out of how you talk in front of people.  The one that is most notable is the dreaded “um”.  You no doubt have cringed listening to a speaker have to fall back on “um” during a talk.  It is one of the biggest clues that the speaker is nervous, insecure or inexperienced.  If you evaluate why a speaker uses “um”, it is usually one of a few things.  It could be because he or she got lost in the notes of the presentation.  “Um” is usually inserted to buy time because the speaker is nervous about a pause of silence. 

But “Um” is not the only quirk of public speaking that can become an annoyance to a crowd.  Another place holder phrase that sneaks in often is “you know”.  Occasionally you even hear professional public speakers use this one and it is almost as mindless as “um”.  Sometimes certain phrases become catchy for a while and if they begin to “infect” how you speak, they will become notable to your audiences but maybe not even to you.  The one that seems to be making the rounds lately is “at the end of the day” which is a fine phrase, if you only use it once.  But you notice when speakers use it in speaking publicly, they use it many times.

The real problem with vocal quirks is you may not know yourself that you are using them.  You are so focused on your topic and your presentation that they sneak in and become a crutch for you as you speak and before you know it, they are a habit that is hard to break.  But there are some things you can do to send the habit of falling back on vocal crutches packing out so your presentation is clean of them and easier to take by your audiences.

One way to pinpoint focus quirks is to record your presentation and listen to it later.  Now a lot of us don’t like the sound of our own voices so that is sometimes unappealing. But be brave because if you can identify any vocal quirks you might have, you have a good potential for rooting them out of your speaking patterns.  Another outstanding method of just identifying which vocal habits you may use too much is to ask your friends, spouse or even your children to listen to you as you speak publicly to help locate any vocal crutches you might be using.  The people who you are close with are willing to be brutally honest with you so you can become a better public speaker.

Once you know what vocal quirks plague your presentation style, make a conscious effort to get them out of how you talk.  Many times we fall back on vocal quirks when we are not confident in our material.  The answer for that is obvious.  Practice.  Know your presentation well and you will be more confident in front of people and that will help you smooth out the way you speak publicly.  And by making an effort to take out irritating vocal quirks from how you speak, you are assuring those quirks are not distracting your listeners from your message.  And then you will be more successful anytime you get up in front of a group of people to speak.

Author : Zul Affandy of (http://www.vikmall.com)