The Actual Message Sent By a Professional Speaker
Your verbal message is the first to polish. Supporting this verbal message is the message you send with using the tone of voice. The tone of voice has the ability to liven up your topic. Emphasize highlighted points with excitement and enthusiasm. A quiet, somber tone of voice can bring seriousness to identifying problems you present when you present your solution. A loud, booming voice can emphasize definitive statements.
The environment that you hold your presentation in impacts your message. The room itself can be a distraction and you can lose your focus and worse yet, you can lose the attention of your audience. Details like the room temperature (too cold, too warm) or noisy traffic (beeping horns and emergency vehicle sirens) may seem like they are out of your control, but you do have some control. Other environmental considerations include the appearance of the room. Is it professional? Is it warm and cozy? Does it enhance the message you want to convey or does it take away from it? It behooves you to minimize as much as possible all of these types of distractions from your presentation.
Your body movement during your presentation has the ability to strengthen the impact of your message or it can seriously be a distraction. One of your goals as a speaker is to look so natural with your movements and with what you say that no one even notices that you are using intonation and inflection or body movement as a means of emphasizing the points of your speech.
Make a video tape of yourself. Do you even know that you are making these movements? Probably not. A video will help you identify which distracting movements you’ll need to work on eliminating.
Work on eliminating nervousness when delivering your speech. This will come as you get more familiar with your material. This will also come as you take the time to focus on delivering your message instead of focusing on the feelings of fear and anxiety.
The real success of every presentation is leaving your audience with something of value. What do they get out of spending time in your presentation? Many people believe that they need natural brilliance in speaking well and presenting well. The believe is that they need to be polished, smart, witty and charming all before they actually start to build a speech. Those attributes can come naturally, but most often, they come as a result of passion, knowledge and practice of the speaker’s material.
Give your audience something of value by becoming their friend. Sometimes you may need to stop thinking of yourself as a professional speaker and start thinking of yourself a close personal friend of the audience member. You’ll teach them something and give them advice. You’ll sound more natural in our speech and you’ll be more relatable to your audience. People often associate those on stage as automatically having knowledge and wisdom on the topic covered. While this thought is great to establish you as a leader, the points you make in your presentation may be better received if you came across from a more personal standpoint.
Filed under: Writing & Speaking