Tips to kill the fear of public speaking

30 Dec 2018

Many people develop glossophobia of fear about public speaking or speaking in general. This phobia is believed to affect up to 75% of the population. These tips can help us make our public speaking more effective.

To be a good speaker, remember to be a good listener first. Being a good listener allows you to have more information and knowledge. And that can draw data for yourself that can be input later in your speaking. The tips for effective speaking start with the following;

1. Realize and understand the topic you want to talk about

First, you must realize and understand the topic or the issue of things you want to talk about. Imagine if you have a conversation with your friends. And somebody comes in and talks about something completely different out of the blue that has no relevance to any of the things you are talking about. People will get confused. The same thing happens when you are doing public speaking somewhere; it has a certain kind of topic or theme of the conference, and then you talk about something completely different from the context. Then the audience will misunderstand about what you are talking about.

2. Knowing detail of the content

Whatever the knowledge, information, and detail of the topic you want to discuss, knowing every angle, different analyses, and different arguments on the same subject can help you convey the message more properly and informatively. This will make your speech exciting and more enjoyable.

3. Keep things in sequential order

It’s better to start from easy to difficult to learn something—steps one, two, three, four, five. When you lay things down in this sequential order, it helps people to learn, contemplate, and understand slowly. Finally, they crystallize the whole idea and understand what you meant to say. And that is one of the keys that is very important. If you start skipping around, jumping around, from back and forth, it makes it very hard to understand and capture the idea of the things that you want to convey.

4. Keep your message precise and concise

Do you remember when you were in school, and some teachers kept saying things very long without any relevance or purpose? And you felt that you were wasting your time listening to that speech. That’s precisely the point. When we speak, and we keep things very precise and concise, straight to the point, and keep it limited, we can make more impact on the listeners because they can really understand and slowly capture the idea of things that you want to talk about: so less juice, more meat.

5. Give examples

Stories tell better than words. Can you think back to when you were in school? Some of the lessons you still remember today are things you have sentimental feelings about. Because human brains memorize things based on feelings, it helps us understand and remember better. So, when you include examples and stories in whatever you want to tell, it allows people to understand the concept of things you want to talk about and makes your speaking effective.

So, public speaking is something that many people always worry about and are even afraid of, but if you prepare yourself better with these five tips, you can speak much better in public.

How to kill that toxic ego Overcoming Pessimistic Nihilism