Let’s face it – giving a speech can be a nerve wracking experience. Sure, you’ve created a speech and hopefully you’ve taken the time to practice it. However, when you are up there standing in front of a room of people who are all staring at you and you are thinking about the importance of public speaking, it can be a truly unsettling experience. I’m sorry but there is nothing that I can tell you that will ever make this experience go away. However, the good news is that there are a number of tips that I can share with you that can help you to boost your confidence so that the next time you get to give a speech, you can do it with gusto.
It’s All About Focus
Every speaker knows that they can become a better speaker. In order to make this happen we need to be willing to take the time to work on developing new skills. You need to take a look at your current speaking skills and you need to determine what skill you would like to master next. Once you’ve identified this skill, you then need to break it into a sequence of smaller tasks that you can work on one-by-one. Once you’ve done this, get busy working to master them!
Always Be Prepared
Let’s face it – giving a speech is clearly a high-pressure situation. In order to get ready to deal with this pressure, you need to make sure that you’ve taken the time to prepare yourself. All too often people want to take shortcuts because they don’t want to have to put in the time that proper preparation takes. You need to realize that you have to do this correctly so that you’ll be confident when the pressure is on.
Stop Talking With Yourself
I can’t tell you how many speakers that I’ve worked with who have spent time talking with themselves. That little voice that is inside of all of us can be either helpful or hurtful. What you are going to want to do is to listen to the positive things that you tell yourself and you are going to want to tune out any negative things that you hear yourself saying. The most important thing for you to realize is that you want to make sure that you don’t allow yourself to sabotage your self-confidence.
Do You Have A Playlist?
Although you may be working on a speech that does not mean that you can’t be listening to music. However, the type of music that you listen to is important. Because music can have a powerful impact on how we think and how we feel, you are going to want to create your own “speech creation” playlist of songs. When you feel that you need to boost your confidence, you can switch on your playlist and feel better instantly.
Connect With Your Audience
When we are trying to build our confidence, we don’t have to do it all by ourselves. What this means for you is that you need to be willing to reach out to others in order to have them help boost your self-confidence. Work with someone that you trust to try to brainstorm what you can do in order to become more confident when you speak.
It’s All About Consistency
When we decide to become better at something, we realize that this is going to take some effort on our part. However, all too often we don’t take the time to work at it consistently. Instead, we try to find time here and there to spend some time trying to become better. If you really want to boost your self-confidence, then you are going to have to get consistent in your commitment to becoming better and spent the time in committed, focused, bursts.
Stay On Top Of Your Fear
Our nerves always have a way of getting the better of us. Every so often you’ll discover that you are going through an especially fearful time – you have a lot of self-doubt that is swelling up inside of you and is threating to take you over. When this happens you need to stay on top of your fears and remain resilient. The benefit of finding a way to do this is that you will start to trust yourself.
What Is Your Personal Mantra?
A lot of us may view personal mantras as being rather silly. I mean, really – who sits there and tells themselves made up motivational sayings? Well, somewhat surprisingly a lot of people do this. They do it because it really works. What you are going to need to do is to take the time to write down a series of words or a short slogan that you will be able to remember and repeat to yourself so that you’ll be able to remain confident and stay focused on what you are trying to accomplish.
Make Sure You Believe In Yourself
Look, the rest of the world is all too caught up in what they have going on. They don’t have time to be thinking about you and your speaking abilities. What this means is that you are going to have to be the one to believe that you can make it from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow. You are the one who will have to find the value that you bring and you will have to understand what you can offer.
Always Take Action
A key part of boosting your confidence is having you take action. However, in order for this to occur you are going to have to be the one to take small, bold steps. When all of these steps are taken together, they can create a set of amazing opportunities for you.
What All Of This Means For You
If we want to become better speakers, then we need to become more confident speakers. It is only by being able to believe in ourselves that we’ll be able to deliver the best quality speeches and share the benefits of public speaking with our audience. Boosting our self-confidence is a task that we have to be willing to take on ourselves – nobody else is going to do this for us. If we can figure out what we need to do in order to become more self-confident, then we can become the speakers that we always knew that we could be.
Boosting our self-confidence starts with us focusing our efforts on the next skill that we want to master. We have to be willing to make the effort to prepare ourselves. When we talk to ourselves, we have to listen to the positive and weed out the negative. Music is a powerful motivational tool and each of us needs our own speaker playlist. We can’t do this all by ourselves and so we need to find others that we can work with to boost our self-confidence. We have to consistently practice becoming better. We will always have self-doubt and this is something that we will have to manage. A personal mantra can be used to help us keep our focus. You are good and you need to be able to believe in yourself. In order to boost your self-confidence, you will need to take action.
The good thing about self-confidence is that it is something that we control. If we take the time we can become more self-confident and this is critical to helping us do a better job of delivering speeches. The time and effort that we put into become more self-confident will help us to become better speakers. It sure seems like this is the kind of investment that we should all be making.
– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™
Question For You: When we seek outside help, do you think that you should have them listen to you give a speech to boost your self-confidence?
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated. P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Communicator Newsletter are now available. Subscribe now: Click Here! Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time
Who doesn’t like winning an award? We all do. When we receive an award, it’s because we did something special or we have done something better than anyone else has. These are great moments for us. When we get an award, we are often asked to stand up and say a few words. Oh, oh – this is where things can start to fall apart. If we don’t have a plan for what we want to say, then we’re going to end up fumbling over our words and we won’t do a good job of communicating. What is the best way to hand situations like this?