3 Easy Steps to Improve Your Confidence in Public Speaking and Communications
Here are three steps our CEO, Jessica Chen, curated to improve your public speaking skills and boost your communications confidence.
1. Prepare Your Mind
A good practice to mentally prepare and eliminate self-doubt is to try imagining three scenarios where you felt uncomfortable/doubtful with communicating. Evaluate these three scenarios and visualize yourself presenting and performing well. This will give you an idea of how you would like to perform and can help ease your anxiety.
A good tip to remember is that public speaking is made up of 30% skill and 70% confidence.
2. Prepare Your Materials
- Know Your Audience
Be aware of who you will be presenting to. Your topic should focus on what your audience is interested in to keep them engaged during your speech.
- Arrange your Speech
Your speech should include a beginning, middle, and end.
The beginning should highlight the main point to capture your audience’s attention. The middle will be data and research about your topic and the end will bring everything back full circle. Reiterating your point from the beginning will remind the audience of your
- Tone of Voice
Your tone of voice says a lot about your energy, focus, and ultimately your confidence.
Wendy LeBorgne, a voice pathologist and communications coach, divides tone of voice into 5 elements, shown below.
3. Prepare your Emotions
A good strategy when speaking to an audience is to visualize yourself speaking to one person rather than the whole audience. The idea of addressing a group of people can be nerve-racking but imagining that this group is made of individuals who are each absorbing the information you are presenting can help you downsize that fear.
Another way to help settle and prepare your emotions is to transfer that anxious feelings into energy. Your audience will feed off your high energy and enthusiasm, which then elevates the experience for them.
Lastly, breathing. It’s self-explanatory but something we all forget to do, especially during public speaking. Breathing can help you recollect your thoughts and slow down the pace of the speech when you find yourself starting to talk too fast. It can also help you get to a more calmer mindset.
Just remember, you can be a powerful public speaker. Try following and practicing these steps and you will be on your way to becoming more comfortable and confident when public speaking and in your general communications ability.
Check out the full live LinkedIn presentation where Jessica goes over each step in detail and shares some of her personal experiences!
We are also excited to launch our Powerful Presentation E-Course that includes a detailed guide to becoming a powerful public speaker. If you’re interested in cultivating your public speaking skills, this course is for you! Simply click the link below to begin.
To learn more about confident communications skills, check out our article where we go over the use of Power Words and how they can boost your speaking skills.
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