Whether you’re a seasoned public speaker or preparing for your first presentation, taking the time to recognize and develop your strengths can help you become a more confident and successful speaker.
In this article, we’ll outline the qualities that make a good public speaker, walk you through how to identify your strengths (and weaknesses!) as a speaker, and offer some tips on how you can improve.
Ready? Let’s get started.
Effective speakers are those who can capture and maintain an audience’s attention — they have the confidence and charisma needed to make a lasting impression on their listeners. Strong public speakers tend to be well-prepared and make effective use of body language, intonation, facial expressions, and hand gestures to emphasize their points as they speak. They’re able to think on their feet, answer any questions that may arise from the audience, and may make appropriate use of humor to keep the topic lighthearted and engaging.
We can summarize these characteristics of a good public speaker as:
Next, we’ll consider how to identify, improve, and apply these characteristics to your public speaking.
In this section, we’ll guide you through assessing and improving your capabilities in all 6 of the characteristics of a good public speaker that we outlined above.
What is a strength?
Strengths are the unique combination of talent, knowledge, and skill.
While the natural ability that you might have (or not have) for public speaking is largely fixed, the good news is that both knowledge acquisition and skill development are areas that can be improved upon.
Identifying your current strengths and weaknesses allows you to pinpoint the best areas to work on increasing your knowledge and developing your skills. As you assess your starting point, you might want to ask yourself the following questions:
Whether you’re able to speak with confidence but tend to wander off-topic, or can craft a compelling story but lack the conviction to narrate it to an audience, identifying a clear baseline will help you to effectively target your public speaking weaknesses and improve the overall strength of your public speaking.
Let’s address each characteristic of a strong public speaker in turn.
Confidence allows a speaker to connect with their audience, demonstrate their expertise, and engage listeners in meaningful dialogue. Confidence also helps the speaker stay focused and deliver a message that is clear and concise.
To build the strength of confidence and communicate that confidence in your presentation, aim to:
The enthusiasm of a speaker indicates a crucial message to the audience: this is a topic worth caring about.
Enthusiasm can capture the attention of even the sleepiest audience, cultivate curiosity about a topic, and motivate and persuade towards a goal.
To build the strength of enthusiasm and express enthusiasm while speaking, you can:
Authenticity can be defined as the coherence between your internal reality and external expression. Speaking authentically allows a speaker to build trust with their audience, which is more likely to view them as genuine, personable, and consistent. Authenticity can be a powerful tool in breaking down the audience-speaker divide and can be put at risk by overly “performative” public speaking.
To bring the strength of authenticity to your public speaking, you can:
Nerves can be a key obstacle to communicating clearly and concisely, especially during high-stakes communications or when there is a large volume of information to convey in a short amount of time.
Concise public speaking not only helps maximize the amount of information conveyed but improves the chances of comprehension, allowing speakers to maximize their impact and ensure that all key points are communicated.
To improve the conciseness of your public speaking, you can:
As a public speaker, it’s essential to be aware of your audience’s needs, interests, and level of understanding.
Adapting to feedback from your audience – whether directly in the form of questions or indirectly in the form of puzzled looks! – allows you to tailor your message appropriately. Adapting to your audience can also help make your presentation more engaging, relevant, and even interactive.
To bring the strengths of audience awareness and adaptability to your public speaking, you can:
As humans, we learn through stories.
Incorporating storytelling into a presentation has the ability to uniquely engage and captivate an audience by adding depth and emotion to your message. This makes storytelling a fantastic strategy for making complex ideas easier to understand – as stories provide context and help listeners visualize the concept being discussed.
Storytelling not only helps to keep your audience engaged in what you have to say but has been found to increase your audience’s retention of information.
Suggestions for improving your ability to tell a story in public speaking:
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