How Speakers Can Boost Their Self-Confidence

You need to practice in order to develop your self-confidence
You need to practice in order to develop your self-confidence
Image Credit: Amy Wilbanks

Is there anything in this life that is as scary as getting up on a stage and giving a speech? There might be, but I’m not sure what it is. Despite knowing about the importance of public speaking we all feel nervous and uncertain about ourselves when we prepare to make a presentation. We’d like to be able to become more self-confident and be able to face our fears head on. The good news is that self-confidence is something that can be learned. We don’t have to grow our self-confidence by making huge leaps, this is something that can increase if we make even the smallest effort. The key is knowing what you need to do to grow your self-confidence.

It’s All About What You Do Each Day

If you want to build up your self-confidence, then it is not something that is going to happen overnight. Rather, this is the type of thing that will happen over time. Building self-confidence is something that requires you to make a daily effort. The first thing that you are going to have to do is to break down just exactly what you are going to have to do to build this skill into smaller components. Once you have done this, you’ll be able to practice what you need to do in more manageable pieces.

To make this start to happen you are going to have to ask yourself: what do I need to do in order to boost my speaking skills to the next level? As you start to make improvements in your self-confidence, you may find that opportunities for you to keep increasing your skills start to diminish. In order to overcome this kind of limitation, you are going to have to keep pushing forward and take the time to prepare and practice each and every day. It will be your responsibly to find your own way forward.

Take Time To Build Skills Before You Need Skills

The thing about giving speeches that a lot of us tend to overlook is that often we can’t predict when our next opportunity will come along. What this means for us in terms of our self-confidence is that we need to be working to boost our self-confidence before we’re going to get called on to give our next speech. As we all know, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

The next time that you are asked to give a speech, if it turns out that you are not prepared then you’ll end up not having the confidence in yourself that you’ll need in order to do a good job. The way that you can make sure that you’ll be ready is by always looking ahead. One of the best things that you can do is to take a look at what the people who are better speakers than you are will be doing. Ask yourself what you need to do in order to move up to their level of speaking.

All Learning Comes With A Curve

I’d like to be able to tell you that working to increase your self-confidence is going to be easy. However, it is not. In fact, along the way there is a very good chance that you may experience failure. Don’t sweat it – it’s ok to fail. When failure happens to you, what you need to do is to understand that this is simply part of your experience and you need to make a promise to yourself to do better next time.

The good news for you is that as you work to build your self-confidence you will become better. The experience that you build as you complete each small step will end up compounding for you over time. As you keep working to develop your self-confidence, you’ll be preparing yourself for greater future success simply because you are the one who is practicing and progressing in your confidence and the development of your skills.

What All Of This Means For You

In order to have the courage that it takes to get up on a stage and give a speech in order to share the benefits of public speaking, each of us needs to have self-confidence. Although we all probably have some of this, we may feel as though we don’t have enough of it. What this means is that we’ve got to make a commitment to ourselves to work to boost our self-confidence.

In order to increase the amount of confidence that we have in ourselves, we need to take action each and every day. We have to take the big things that we know that we need to be doing and break them into smaller pieces that we know that we can do. If it starts to become harder to make progress in becoming better, we need to double our efforts and keep on pushing through. Since we don’t control when we’ll next be asked to give a speech, we need to make sure that we’ve been working on developing our self-confidence skills before we are asked to speak. Working on our self-confidence skills is not an easy thing to do. In fact, sometimes we may fail. However, when this happens we need to chalk it up to experience and keep on. We will become better. Becoming more self-confident will allow us to do a better job of delivering our next speech.

Self-confidence is the thing that can provide us with the strength to take the stage and give our best possible speech. The fact that we may feel that we don’t have enough of it is ok. Self-confidence is something that with a little bit of effort we can all create more of. Take the time to work on building your self-confidence before you get asked to give your next speech. Doing this will allow you to become the speaker that you’ve always known that you can be.

– Dr. Jim Anderson Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: How could you ever tell if you had enough 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

Let’s face it – because of the importance of public speaking, giving a speech involves a great deal of stress. This stress has a way of affecting each of us differently. However, there is one thing that can happen to any of us – our minds can go blank at exactly the wrong point in time. Just like me, I’m sure that this has happened to you at one time or another. You are standing in front of an audience delivering your speech and you just got done saying something clever and now you can’t remember what you want to say next. What’s a speaker to do?