How You Can Develop Your Charisma

Giving a speech can be a pretty lonely event. I mean, there you are up on the stage delivering your presentation and if you are not connecting with your audience then they’ll get bored and their attention will wander. This will leave you standing in front of everyone pretty much all by yourself wondering what happened to the importance of public speaking. I think that we can all agree that this is something that we really don’t want to have happen. How can we prevent it? The answer turns out to lie in just how much charisma we have.

The Power Of Charisma

So just exactly what is this thing that we call charisma? If we look it up in the dictionary, we find that charisma is defined as being “…a special magnetic charm or appeal”. What this means for us as speakers is that if we are able to develop our own personal charisma, then we will have found a way to cause our next audience to become interested in what we are saying and perhaps to even hang on our every word.

One way that we can go about boosting our personal charisma is to take the time to discover what kind of speaker we really are. Are you very creative? Are you nurturing? Are you analytical? Knowing the type of speaker that you are allows you to focus on the qualities that come most naturally to you. By doing this we can be engaging and spend more time focusing on the message that we want to deliver. All too often, speakers try to water down what they are best at and the result is that end up losing the qualities that make them the most competing to their audience.

The good news about charisma is that as speakers we can learn our own brand of charisma. We need to understand that charisma allows us to create an emotional focus on our audience. Children have the ability to be charismatic with little or no effort, as adults we have to relearn how to do this. Children will allow themselves to be consumed by the emotion of a story that they are telling. The good news is that our audience is hard-wired to respond to a speaker who delivers a speech with strong emotions.

How To Develop Your Charisma

So what does it look like when we are speaking to an audience using our charisma? One of the key characteristics of speaking with charisma is that we come across as speaking with both clarity and straight talk. Speaking with charisma does not allow us to use any double-talk or weasel words. When our audience hears us speaking this way, it will grab their attention and cause them to sit up and start to listen to what we have to say.

Using charisma in a speech is not always easy. A lot of times what can happen to a speaker is that they forget to apply an emotional focus to their speech. Instead, what they end up doing is they spend time thinking about all of the things that could possibly go wrong while they are giving their speech and they end up becoming distracted. When this happens, you are going to be betrayed by your body language as you take the stage. Your audience will detect that you are fearful of making a mistake and they won’t pay attention to you.

One of the other aspects of charisma that a speaker needs to understand is that it is linked to the speaker’s physical presence on the stage. We need to keep in mind that we have a number of different options when it comes to where we want to position ourselves to deliver our speech. Many speakers think of walking all over the stage as a way to show that they are high energy and that the audience should view them as being cool. However, what’s going to happen all too quickly is that your audience is going to get tired of trying to track your current location and they will simply stop paying attention to you.

What All Of This Means For You

The goal of any speech that we give is for us to find a way to connect with our audience and share the benefits of public speaking. We’d like to be able to share our message with them and find a way to change their world. However, all too often we find ourselves on a stage addressing an audience that has grown bored or disinterested in what we have to tell them. In order to prevent this from happening, we need to find a way to develop our own personal sense of charisma.

Charisma is how we can appeal to our audience. This is how we can get our audience interested in what we are telling them. In order to develop your sense of personal charisma, you first need to make sure that you understand what kind of speaker you are. If you don’t do this, then you can lose your ability to connect with your audience. Speaking to an audience using charisma means that we need to communicate using clarity and straight talk. Speaking with charisma is not always easy. Speakers sometimes forget to apply an emotional focus to their speech. Charisma will come across in how we choose to use the stage that we are presenting on. If we move around too much, our audience will grow tired of tracking us and will stop paying attention.

We never want to find ourselves in the dreaded situation where we find ourselves giving a speech that nobody is listening to. This is where charisma can come in. The good news about charisma is that it’s not something that we are born with – we can develop it over time. Take the time to understand what kind of speaker you really are and then create your own sense of charisma. The next time you give a speech, your audience won’t be able to stop listening to you!

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

Question For You: How much do you think that you should move around on a stage while giving a speech?

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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!