How To Teach Public Speaking

Hello. My name is Michael Ronayne. I'm a director of the College of Public Speaking, and I'm going to be talking about different aspects of public speaking.

Teaching public speaking. Now, there's a saying which goes "You can't teach what you don't know, and you can't lead people where you won't go." And the point there is simply you need to have the experience yourself.

Similarly, if you're going to learn a musical instrument, you probably want to have a lesson from someone who already plays that instrument well and has probably played it professionally and in public as well. So I think it's very, very important that you're able to do what you're asking people to do. I remember personally, an example when I was working in sales, of having had a lecture from somebody who was supposed to be training us salespeople, and it became very clear, very quickly, that this person had never actually done what he was asking us to do.

And if that's the case, and people pick that up, your credibility goes completely. So if you want to teach public speaking, you need to be a public speaker, and the best way to become a competent public speaker is to join a speaking club or a speaking association. You've got the Association of Speakers Clubs, up and down the country, you've also got Toastmasters as well.

Their club evenings follow a similar structure. You'll have a group of people, usually ten, fifteen, maybe a little bit more, but everybody on the same level. Everybody's learning how to speak.

So you get an opportunity in a friendly environment to talk. You get an opportunity also after a while, to give feedback to other people that are speaking, because when you start, you'll get feedback on your presentations and performance. Once you've done it a few times, you'll be invited to give feedback on other people's presentations and performance as well.

So it's very, very important that you're giving positive, uplifting feedback to people, because if you want to teach public speaking, if you want to teach anything, you need to build people up. And there's a tendency I think, that we always have, is that we immediately focus on people's faults. "You didn't do that.

I didn't like that." Now, in public speaking, people are already usually feeling fairly nervous and vulnerable when they stand up in the first place, and the last thing they need is someone pointing out everything that they did wrong. So you need to phrase everything in the positive.

You need to be specific. Rather than just generally saying, "You didn't look confident," how didn't that person look confident? What was it? Was it eye contact? Was it mumbling? Was it poor body language? So as a speaker, you then have the experience to be able to help other speakers. And usually what happens if you become a competent speaker, people will then start asking you to help.

You know? And you can actually start building up a business yourself that way. There are speaking organizations that work professionally, but usually they choose people from a network of speakers and the network of speakers are probably people associated with speaking clubs. So if you want to teach speaking, you need to become a speaker, and if you want to become a speaker, really you need to join a speaking club. .