|
|
|
|
From a psychologist's point of view, the fear of public speaking is universal. Mark Twain also believed this and he often said there are two types of speakers: those who get anxious and those who lie about their nervousness. If we take a look at statistics, many people rate fear of public speaking as the top fear, before death, heights and even in-laws. But it is also the easier fear to overcome, especially when you have the advice from the professionals.
Be imperfect and happy about it
Humans are not perfect and this is good news, as perfection would make us boring. When education speakers enter a stage they know they are not perfect and they do fear the audience's rejection, but there is one thing they do differently from you: they never emphasize their mistakes and they never confess their fears to the audience. They embrace the fact people are going to judge each and every step they make and word they say, so they go ahead with the presentation. Confidence can be acted and after a couple of minutes of being confident and speaking to the audience, you will be able to go with the flow and nail the presentation right to the end. Before you ask, professional speakers do make mistakes, and then they take a deep breath and carry on, like nothing happened. The takeaway: don't expect to be perfect, just go there and do your best.
Public speaking is not your only skill
Way too many people judge their overall performances by their ability to speak in front of an audience. This is very, very wrong and dangerous to do. If you need to present something to an audience you are already a performer in your field, as only great professionals are asked to hold presentations. Apart from having great presentation skills, speakers are intelligent, have lots of work and life experience and many of them are leaders in innovation when it comes to their job. These are the skills one must judge himself or herself by, not the anxiety which comes around when you need to speak to an audience, so never look down at you because you can't hold a presentation. Yet! This leads us to the next point...
Practice, practice and practice some more
The more you practice your public speaking, the better you will become at it, so you have to work on holding more presentations. You can also spend time looking at how education speakers structure their presentations and how they act on the stage. If you look good, you will discover a couple of useful tricks you can apply to your own presentations. And make sure you rehearse your presentations, to make sure you know the structure of the speech.
Write your presentation support wisely
There is no point in writing loads of words on your slides: the less is more, so keep the slides as light as possible. One or two phrases are enough to remember you what you should be talking about. One of the most important presentation skills of speakers is the ability to develop one short idea into a chapter. This also relieves you from the stress of remembering large chunks of text and allows you to be fluent and natural in your speech. However, the ideas must be original and they have to belong to you, otherwise, you won't be able to develop them.
Before a speech is good to be nervous, as long as you can channel that nervousness into speech energy. Most professional speakers use their anxiety to create a charming energy for their speech, which can engage the audience and provide "fuel" for the presenter himself.
|
|
