3 Tips on How to Improve Your Public Speaking

Public speaking is a requirement of a lot of jobs. If you want to promote up within your company, you may need to be able to talk to a group of people or even an entire room. Don’t worry if your public speaking skills aren’t what you want them to be. Here are three tips to help you improve.

Hire a Business Speech Coach

If you want to make major improvements in your ability to speak in public, you should hire a business speech coach. They can review your current skills and areas of weakness and show you what to do to improve.

A business speech coach will give you exercises for your voice or even ideas on how you can present yourself better. They can offer guidance on body language, tone of voice and other skills that will make you a more powerful public speaker. If public speaking is going to be a major part of your new career, the investment in a speech coach may be worthwhile.

Watch Speeches

Go online and watch speeches that others give. You can easily find seminars, classes and public speeches by famous speakers, politicians, teachers and other public figures. Notice how they stand, the gestures they make, their tone of voice and even what they say.

You’ll pick up a lot of good points that you can apply to your own speeches if you watch others. Mimic their habits and style as it feels comfortable to you and pertains to your situation. While it’s important to be yourself, it’s also a good idea to follow the example of those who are skilled in this area. Dynamic speakers weren’t born with their skills; they had to develop them over time. This means you can also learn to do what they do and captivate an audience with your words.

Practice

It doesn’t matter how much you read about public speaking or if you hire a coach, you won’t improve if you don’t practice. Give a speech in front of the mirror at home. Ask family and friends to sit and listen to your speeches. Get comfortable speaking aloud even if it’s just to yourself.

The more you give speeches even if it’s to your reflection or your dogs, the more comfortable you’ll feel. Once you get used to speaking aloud, you can work on other areas, such as how you stand or whether you make eye contact.

Talk to your business speech coach and ask them who to watch and what areas you need to improve in. Focus on those factors and work on your skills. With enough time and practice, you can learn to be an effective public speaker.

You may not win any awards and you may not capture the attention of everyone in the room. However, you will learn how to get your subject across and get people to do what you want them to do in your speech as you develop your skills in this area.

Claudette Roche is an accent modification in the Vero Beach, FL area. She teaches foreign and American accents to actors and business persons/executives. In 2010 she was named as one of The Top 5 Voice Coaches by Hollywood Weekly Magazine.

Claudette Roche is a dialect coach who teaches accent coach.