Nowadays, we all need to have an indispensable tool, both in personal or professional life, and that is the ability to speak in public. Although it is a tool that we all have, many people cannot use it because of a common factor that only some of us master: it is fear; many people are afraid, and even dread, to speak in public because they are not sure if we will take them into account, if the topic is interesting or not, or most times they imagine we will make them the fun of. We will now share some tips that can help us confront fear and thus be able to speak in public.
Contents
Training
As in any sport or activity, it is said that practice makes perfect. Here, we must consider overcoming the fear of public speaking, and this is something that we can simply develop together with our family or friends. We face that fear by relying on those people we trust the most. In this way, we will not only be training to overcome fear, but we will also discover the best way of communicating to a group of people, fluency in speaking, postures, gestures, and body movements to capture the attention of those who listen to us.
Don’t let our nerves control us
It is normal to feel nervous before starting an important activity in any area of our life, and for talking to one or more people, nerves come to the surface more than ever. The important thing is to control our moment and our nerves, not to let them control our situation; the best way to overcome nerves is to perform a series of deep breathing exercises so that our body enters a state of relaxation that allows our ideas to flow to reorganize them, and channel the energy generated by the nerves in our favor; so we can communicate our ideas passionately.
A powerful starting that capture attention
When we want to talk in public, we consider that one of the most important things is to capture the audience’s interest. That is why we must prepare ourselves so that our starting generates an important impact on those present. One of the best practices is to interact with the public to break the ice and feel more confident; it is important not to memorize our speech automatically, because if from the beginning we interact with our audience, they will want to interact again, and we must let them do so fluently. If we prepare our speech automatically, any interruption will make us lose concentration or even the orientation of what we had prepared. We must be as spontaneous as possible, as long as we manage our ideas and objectives that we have to convey.
Interact and reflect the passion we feel for what we do
As we mentioned in the previous point, it is not only important to start the presentation by interacting with our audience, but also to do so throughout the presentation; one of the most common practices is to divide the audience into segments to interact with each of them at distinct moments of our participation. It is important to prepare our content very well. As time goes by, we must analyze the body language of our audience; we must always look for ways to reflect our passion for what we are doing so that they feel comfortable and attentive to take part and interact with us; that is why we must interrupt our participation naturally to recapture the attention of those present when necessary. Remember that the first or only thing that people will always remember is how we made them feel at that moment.
Make people own our idea
When we interact and reflect the passion for what we do, we can transmit the ideas and make our audience take ownership of them; it is important to make the audience feel identified with our project or idea, rather than the service offered through the presentation; we must always make sure that we do what we really like, so it will be easier to transmit the idea and feel more confident about ourselves when we speak.
Do you have an opinion on this topic? How else can we confront the fear of public speaking? How do you control your nerves before any event?
If you have any doubt or query you can contact us or write your query below (in the comments section).
Image from Roché Oosthuizen via Pixabay.com under Creative Commons license.
