Public Speaking, Presentation & Leadership Skills

slides – is it important? Do you always pull out slides or projector when you are having an important conversation with your friend or relative in a restaurant. Rather that will be the odd thing to do. We look into their eyes and give them the proper / full attention along with the words. They feel important and start taking your words seriously. This, I know will raise a question: then why do we use slides? If you look at the maximum of the best speeches of all time, you will not find any use of slides. Though there are question: would these speeches have been better if they were narrated over slides? In many cases, no. You’d have to listen carefully to figure out when ideas would be better presented visually rather than with words alone, which is the secret for thinking about your own presentations: when do you truly need a visual image to express an idea? And when would it be better simply letting your voices tell the story? Most of the time we speak with sl...

Every Saturday I take my son to his music teacher, the different ways of practice that his teacher teaches him is equally applicable to public speaking. Whenever he made a mistake, she got him to start from a few notes before the mistake and carry on a few notes after the mistake, rather than going back to the start each time. This meant that the part of song that needed the most practice got it, rather than becoming excellent at the first part of the piece and then gradually getting worse as it went on. She also made him practice in various styles and speed. This kept him interested and also started making him versatile. It is good idea to aim to memorise your speech and have notes or cue cards to refer when needed. But as you get confident you should aim to become less reliant on your notes and to leave the script behind at times and just go with the flow. You may find yourself with a different audience to what you prepared for and they may appreciate a different angle on yo...

The biggest fear of public speaking is what would my audience say? What happens if they are not interested? Capturing the audience attention is challenging, and from the onset is daunting. But if you can do it, you will be hooked on to public speaking. In today’s fast world, especially with so much portable gizmos, the speaker has to grab the audience attention from the word go or they may start doing other thing.  Here’s some tips of capturing the audience attention from the word go. Get acclimatised:   Join the crowd before the presentation. The last few minutes is not for going through you notes but mingling with them. This helps you to get rapport with the future audience, know them. This may help you to tweak your speech at the last minute to suit their needs. Moreover it will help you to be at ease in the presentation, by having some familiar faces in the audience. When you stand up to speak, first smile, look around the room and make eye contact with s...