5-Step Guide To More Effective Public Speaking

As always, I picked my #1 tip with purpose.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret today:

"Passion can be felt."

What do I mean by this?

 
When you speak passionately and from the heart about something, your words are guaranteed to be inspiring to other people.

Speaking from the heart touches people. It excites them and helps them feel what you feel in the moments when you speak.

It doesn't matter whether you're live on stage at an event or if you're on a YouTube video. The point is that passion can be felt through a TV screen as easily as it can be felt in person, across an event hall.

My suggestion to you is to speak with passion whenever you get up on stage or have to address an audience. Because doing this makes you more effective at getting your message across.

One of the ways I like to be sure that I'm speaking with passion is to first 'feel' the impact of what I'm about to say. Once I've felt the impact of my own words, it becomes easy to let them come out. Because how do you expect your audience to feel the impact of your words if you don't first feel them yourself?

You should absolutely try this out and see if it works for you as it is guaranteed to.

But while we're at it, we should consider...

I learned this back when I was a TaeKwonDo instructor:

One day, my instructor came up to me and said, "Devon, remember that when you’re teaching, you're not talking to a class. You're talking to a 'group of many one persons'" (see how I used storytelling to paint a picture there?).

This is one of The things I want you to remember when you speak to an audience.

If you want to be a more effective public speaker, you have to be able to connect to the "individual" rather than the crowd.

A good way to do this is to remember this top…
"To connect with many, connect with one."

This is one of my favorite sayings.

What it means is that often, the most effective way to connect with an entire audience is to pick out ONE person in the audience and connect with them individually. And that by doing this, you end up not just communicating with that ONE person, but you actually end up communicating with the entire audience because the audience can SEE themselves in that one person you’re talking to.

For more tips, click here: How to Engage Audience [Top 11 Tips]

Have you ever had the experience where someone tells you something one way, and you don’t get it... but when they rearrange the words or say it a different way, it finally “clicks”?

This is what I’m talking about when I say to practice saying things in different ways.

Communication is about sending and receiving messages. The key to communication is to make sure that what you’re sending is the same as what’s being received.

Sometimes your message can make perfect sense when it is being sent (i.e., being “said”)... yet that same message will make zero sense when it’s being received (i.e., being heard).

One of the ways to make sure that what you’re saying is being reviewed properly is to gauge audience response. The way to do this is to say things a certain way one time when you’re in front of a group... and then the next time you’re in front of a group, say the same thing... but differently.

At the end of the day, pick and go with whichever method got the best response from the audience. Because the way your audience receives your message is arguably the most important part of the communication process.

Remember, what matters most of all is not the things you say, how you say them, or what you intend to say… but rather how what you say is received/heard by your audience.

And oh yeah, one more important note about saying things in different ways…

An awesome way to say things differently is to simply include words, pictures, charts, and even stories. Often, using a graph, an analogy, or a metaphor not only shortens explanation time but makes things 100X clear for your audience!

Effective speakers put their audience’s understanding above their own preferences every... single... time.