How To Improve Speaking Skills

Hello, my name is Michael Ronayne. I'm a director of the College of Public Speaking, and I am going to be talking about different aspects of public speaking. If you want to improve your speaking skills, I think the first thing to realize is they can be improved.

Now, the reason I say that is because many of a time particularly with managers, and business executives that I've gone to meet them and said, you know my speaking, it is so bad, whenever I stand up in front of a group of people, it just doesn't come across properly. And fairly quickly, I ask a very simple question, how do you prepare? And the amount of times I get an answer which is along the lines of, well, I don't prepare. And, somehow they are surprised that it doesn't work.

I think all of us would be amazed if a musician came off stage having done a really bad performance, and said to everybody, I don't know what went wrong, I mean I never practice, but, I don't understand what went wrong. It would never happen with a musician, so why does it happen with public speaking? Well, I think the reason it happens with speaking is that speaking is natural. We do it all day, we talk to each other.

And so there is a sort of feeling, well, I can talk naturally to everybody around me so it is exactly the same when I go on stage. And, it isn't. On stage, things change, there is a performance going on there, you need to be a little bit more in control.

So, if you need to improve your public speaking, the first thing you need to do is understand that it can be improved and what you need to then properly do is deliver a few talks to somebody or have somebody in the audience, who can give you some honest feedback. Because the other extreme from the business executive's saying, I don't understand why it goes wrong, are business executives who stand up in front of me and say, I'm not worried about public speaking, I have been doing it for years. And everybody in the room is thinking, I know, and it's been bad all the time, as well.

Because they have never had enough distance and they've never had any feedback to actually help them improve. So if you want to improve as a public speaker, you need to practice, but you need to practice in front of someone who can give you supportive, constructive, helpful feedback. So that each time you carry on after that, you're building on something and you're improving.

So to improve as a public speaker, practice, but make sure you are getting feedback. Have a safe time. .