How to Prepare For a Great Speech

What is the purpose of your speech? To inform? To persuade? To entertain? Once you know the general purpose of your speech you can begin to prepare for your speech.

Anyone can talk for five minutes. The problem is leaning how to stop at five minutes and still have given a complete speech. Before we begin, let's outline four essential steps for preparation which are explained in details below:

When researching your speech, decide what your purpose is, and keep that in mind throughout your preparation. For example if you are presenting an entertaining speech, you will be looking for entertaining stories that you can use. If you are looking to inspire, you will need inspiring stories etc.

Most of the time you will need to find a small niche in the topic and build your speech around it. Trying to go too broad will make your speech dull and too long. Two or three ideas are the most that you can convey in one short speech. In some cases, you are better off to keep it to one idea with a couple of points. Trying to say too much will just make you have to talk really fast and still not get the topic covered. You may want to run your idea for a speech by the person who offered the invitation just to be sure that you understood what was expected.

Now that we have decided what we are speaking on, let's put the ideas into a logical structure. Which aspects of your topic you are going to speak about, and more importantly which you are going to leave out? Most topics contain enough information for a whole series of presentations, so unless you are speaking about a very specific topic, you are going to need to do some pruning.

The best way is to start by writing down all of the aspects of a topic, and then slowly structuring them into the key points that you would like to bring across, and deciding which points you will discard.

By becoming aware of the areas in which you want to improve your public speaking you can begin improving in these areas even before your next speech. This can be done through preparation, and also through visualization.

I'll straight-out these in categories:

• » Eye Contact - Using natural, direct eye contact helps your audience feel connected to you.
• » Gestures - Gestures can help you paint pictures with words, but make sure they don't get in the way, and they are natural.
• » Enthusiasm - Be enthusiastic. If you don't care, why should your audience? Your enthusiasm builds your audience's enthusiasm.
• » Articulation - Articulate your words clearly so the members of your audience will understand you.
• » Breathe - Breathing helps you control nervousness. It also gives you time to gather your thoughts. Remember that a pause can be used to provide emphasis.
• » Posture - Correct posture conveys confidence
• » Language - Use proper language and be careful not to use non-words and fillers such as "um" and "uh" too often.
• » Smile - A smile will not only make you look and feel better, but also make your audience more receptive.

And finally, do not leave the podium immediately after you finish giving your speech. Count up to 15 in your head before leaving the podium. If there is an option for questions, it always engages the audience more to respond from the podium than to return to a seated position and attempt to answer questions.

I know what you are thinking right now: "It's always easier in theory than in practice", but if you don't know how to swim you first need to enter into the water and learn it.
I wish you luck!

Mon, Jun 1 2008

The Small Biz. Guru says:

Good article. Another point to address is to make sure you curtail your subject matter to the audience. For example, if you're speaking to a bunch of farmers, probably speaking about fuel efficient mini-cars is not ideal.... they need trucks to do their jobs and would pretty much brush off your speech. Also, it should really be emphasized, enthusiasm. If you're not passionate about what you're addressing, do not even bother going up to the podium. In my opinion, passion is one of the top three traits a speaker must have because if you don't, your audience will know and will think you do not support what you're preaching. ~the GURU http://smallbizguru.blogspot.com

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