Speaking with Confidence
Speaking in public is an essential skill regardless of your profession.
It’s crucial to showcase the impact of your work. You may hope that hiding behind your keyboard is suffice. But it isn’t!
Furthermore, you never know when you might be called upon to speak at a wedding or a funeral.
That’s why you need to learn to speak in public, with confidence. I too need to improve this skill. That’s why I found Nick Gold’s book, “Speaking with Confidence” useful, and decided to share the lessons I learned from it here.
1. Your Audience is on Your Side
Standing on the stage with everyone’s attention on you is going to make you feel judged. Add the interrogation lights, and this feeling is going to be amplified. No wonder Glossophobia — a common fear of public speaking — is a thing.
But the good news you aren’t as judged as you think you are. The reality is that your audience want you to deliver a truly memorable speech just as much as you do.
2. Transforming Fear into Excitement
Knowing that the audience is on your side won’t stop your heart from beating like Lars Ulrich’s drum. That’s why actors and public speakers have a trick to deal with this. They trick themselves to believe that they aren’t afraid but excited.
“Tell yourself you’re scared and you can become overwhelmed quite easily. But tell yourself you feel excited — after all, excitement and fear manifest in similar ways in the body — and something remarkable happens. You breathe more easily, blood pumps around your body more freely, oxygen gets to the brain quicker, meaning you think sharper and smarter” — Farrah Storr
3. Own What You Say
In his book, “Talk Like TED”, Carmine Gallo argued that engaging presentations need to touch the hearts of their audience. Emotional…
