Want to Become More Elequent and Secure When Doing Oral Presentations? This Is The Way!
These practices will 10x your impact when presenting!
Speaking well is a rocket ship for your career and success!
Speaking well is closely related to good leadership. A leader needs to be able to speak confidently and thoughtfully. The ideas need to be able to come across persuasively.
A lot of people may be good at the actual work, but if they cannot communicate and market that work and those ideas successfully — there is no payoff from their abilities in other areas.
Because really — there is always the need to be able to sell your ideas, to market them. And the way to do that is to do the talk. In a convincing manner.
So what are good ways to get there?
Eloquence is about feeling safe!
Personally, I always struggled with doing oral presentations. I felt I couldn’t do myself justice.
Why?
Because I was fearful.
And this is the key to good presentations. To not be afraid, to feel confident and secure.
All that talk about body language — learning rules for that and rehearsing those.
B*llocks I say. It is not to do with that. It is not about rehearsing a role for a movie.
No — it is about something completely different.
It is about being yourself. Because then everything happens naturally — and there is nothing more impressive than that.
And let me be very clear — being yourself you do best when you feel safe and relaxed.
So the question is very simple — how to feel safe and relaxed when doing oral presentations?
Two important ways to practice!
So I would recommend two ways of getting comfortable doing public speeches, the first one is done on the inside, the second one is done on the outside;
- Meditate on the presentation — put yourself in the situation, next to the people, go into that situation in your mind. Stay in it, stay in the feelings you perceive, get comfortable with those feelings. The more time you stay in this situation during your meditation, the more secure you will feel in the real situation. You can also feel yourself getting more and more comfortable in the situation, already when rehearsing it in your mind.
- Speak in front of a mirror — this is a super good exercise. You can take any subject matter that you know about, and then just speak freely about it for 15 minutes in front of a mirror. Just the way you would present it to the group of people that you imagine. It provides many positive effects; you learn how to speak eloquently about different subject matters efficiently, you see how you look when you do it which adds to your comfort doing it. It provides you with hands-on experience without actually doing the presentation in front of people. The more you do it the more comfortable you will become.
Stay with it!
If you have struggled with feelings of anxiety before when doing public speaking, you will feel similarly when performing the two above exercises.
The important thing, as with all bad feelings, is;
Stay with them.
You need to be ok with feeling bad, afraid, angry, sad. But not act on those feelings, but rather accept them fully. That implies being ok to tell yourself that you can live with that feeling for the rest of your life if you had to.
Most importantly — don’t act on the feeling. The feeling is fantasy — not reality. Don’t let it define you.
If you keep practicing per the above you will turn into a confident public speaker! It is just a matter of time.
Enjoy!
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