This article helps you identify your natural speaking style and habits and then provides a series of public speaking exercises to help you feel more confident and have a lasting impression with your audience.
The reason public speaking feels unnerving is because IT IS! The National Institute of Mental Health reports that public speaking anxiety, or glossophobia, affects about 40%* of the population. The underlying fear is judgment or negative evaluation by others. As a person with lifelong anxiety who is also a recovering perfectionist, I most definitely was once part of that 40% group. My drive to manage the physical manifestations of stress associated with public speaking are tied to what I dramatically refer to as my public speaking failure. You can read all about it here. I was determined to overcome the crippling anxiety I felt anytime I had to speak in front an audience and I am going to share my process for getting mentally and physically prepared to publicly speak in front of an audience. The nervous butterflies and slightly elevated heart rate may never go away completely but my goal is to help you calm your nervous system and deliver a compelling message through a series of public speaking activities. Practice is the name of the public speaking game.
Speaking Style and Habits
Every person has a natural way in which they speak – your style and habits.
- Style = Your default speaking style. If you were talking to a good friend or colleague, how would they describe the way you speak? Do you talk fast/slow? Are you monotone? Is your voice naturally quiet?
- Habits = Tendencies to use of filler words; touching your face; swaying; pacing etc.
Example: My natural style of speaking is to talk fast with expressive facial movements, lots of non-verbal communication, such as nodding and smiling, and extensive hand movements.
One of my habits is that I have a tendency to look up towards the ceiling when I am speaking. I used to have the habit of saying “like” often when I spoke, but I have managed to work that out of my speech through intentionality and practice.
My speaking style is a reflection to my personality. I am not trying to completely change how I come across but rather eliminate any distractions that may come with my style and habits so that my main points in any presentation are the center of attention. Maybe your tone of voice leans towards the monotone side or, you communicate with a quiet voice. It is important to understand your default speaking style so that you can make the needed adjustments to maximize your audience’s attention and ensure your content is effectively ingested.
Record Planned or Impromptu Speeches
For public speaking beginners and more experienced speakers alike, the best way to understand your default style and habits is to take a series of videos of you standing up and delivering a speech. This doesn’t have to be a prepared speech. You can talk about what you ate for breakfast or any other random topic. The idea is to capture about 2-3 minutes of you speaking to the camera so that you can watch and evaluate your style and habits. From there you can identify what adjustments need to be made, based on what you observed, and start making small improvements. I also recommend having a trusted friend, colleague or family member evaluate your speech or presentation to provide another point of view on your delivery style and habits.
Homework: Jot down what you, and ideally another person, observed as your style and habits. The sections below further detail examples of styles and habits.
Public Speaking Activity
Now that you have identified your default style and habits, an effective way to become a better public speaker is to practice improving just one style or habit at a time. For example, when I watched my first recorded speech at a Toastmasters meeting, I was shocked at just how fast I spoke. It was likely hard for the audience to keep up. When I conducted practice sessions for future speeches, I would do a round of practice where I exclusively focused on speaking more slowly and nothing else. The good news is that this intentionality of practice really helped me learn how to slow down even when the physical manifestations of public speaking stress would creep in. Rounds of practice are warm-up exercises for the big show and train your body to act how you want it to!
You are going to practice all or part of your speech and ONLY focus on improving (or incorporating) one of the below skills at a time. I recommend recording your practice rounds so that you can compare them to your baseline video. These exercises are a great way to fine tune your communication skills.
STYLES
Speed
Focus exclusively on the speed in which you speak. If you are a fast talker, be laser focused on slowing down your pace of speech. Build in extra pauses between key points to give your mind a minute to relax and to allow the audience a chance to digest what you have said. Depending on your subject matter, if you speak too quickly during your speech, your content may get lost on the audience if they aren’t able to keep up. While you may know your content cold, the audience is hearing it for the first time. As a naturally fast talker, it will always be my default to speak on 1.5x if I don’t remind myself and practice slowing down. If you naturally speak slowly, keep doing what you are doing.
Talking fast during a speech is often the result of nervous energy pulsing through your body. A great exercise is to focus on deep breathing or diaphragmatic breathing to slow down your heart rate prior to a speech to get you in the zone. Slowing down your speech also has the added benefit of reducing the number of filler works that you use.
Volume
This one is exceptionally important especially if you are speaking in front of a smaller group and don’t have a microphone. If you are a quiet talker, you want to be intentional about turning the volume way up. If I am interacting with someone who is hard to hear, 50% of my attention is focused on straining to hear the person speak which leaves only 50% of my attention on what they are actually saying. Pay attention to the body language and facial expressions of your audience. If they appear to be straining to hear you or even say “can you please speak up?” then you know you need to speak more loudly. During this round of practice, let your vocal cords boom and focus on nothing else. For you loud talkers, keep doing what you are doing!
Clarity
How clearly can the audience understand the exact words you are saying. Do you struggle to enunciate your words? This can also be referred to as mumbling or running words together and it forces your audience to strain to understand exactly what you are saying. You may turn to your neighbor with a “What did she just say??” Slowing down and speaking with a louder voice can improve clarity as can doing a series of tongue twisters to get in the habit of really sounding out your individual words.
Inflection
Variety in pitch is important for engaging your audience and maintaining their attention. If you are naturally monotone, this exercise is your big homework. Monotone voices can have a number of effects on the audience: 1) You may come across as uninterested in what you are speaking about 2) You may potentially lull your audience into a sleeplike state. This may seem dramatic so let me provide an example. When I was a Business Developer for a large construction company, we had an interview for a simulation lab project at a hospital. Our proposed Project Executive had just finished a project at the hospital and the hospital team loved him. A donor had funded the simulation lab project, and the donor was part of the selection committee. We lost the project because the donor didn’t feel like our Project Executive seemed overly excited about the project. The Project Executive was in fact very excited to again work on campus, but his monotone voice conveyed otherwise to the donors who were contributing a large amount of money to the project.
HABITS
Eye Contact
Whether delivering a speech in front of an audience or just casually speaking to a group, eye contact is extremely important and can make a huge difference in the level of audience engagement. Instead of going back and forth with your eyes quickly scanning the room or group, you want to practice locking eye contact with one person for 5 seconds before moving on to the next person and doing the same. During this round of practice, you are just going to focus on your 5-second rotations of eye contact. If you are practicing on your own, focus on objects within your view and lock in eye contact for 5-second internals.
This eye contact strategy accomplishes two things:
- It makes members of the audience feel a stronger connection to you because of the prolonged eye contact.
- It keeps you more grounded and focused during the actual speech because you aren’t constantly scanning your eyes and head.
Body Language
Are you a hand talker? Do you have a tendency to touch your face or hair when speaking? When you are speaking, your goal is to minimize as many distractions as possible so that your audience is focused on what you are saying. If you naturally use a lot of hand motions when you speak, that is ok, but consider toning it down a notch if your hand gestures are distracting. For this round of practice, give your speech in front of a mirror or a camera to evaluate your body language. As a rule, focus on not touching your face or hair at all. Avoid crossing your arms and instead adopt a power pose where you have your arms at your sides.
Movement
Movement can enhance a speech if it is intentional and sporadic. Pacing, swaying or constant movement become distractions. For this practice, you want to first make sure aren’t pacing or swaying. If you need to just stand in one place for the entire speech to avoid either of these things that is perfectly fine. I consider strategic movement to be an advanced speech tactic so this one may come with time. Once you feel like you have curbed any distracting movements, you can focus on moving across the stage or room with purpose. For example, maybe you walk to one side of the room for part one of your speech and then back to the middle for part 2. Mosey on over to the other side of the room for your last part. This below video provides a good demonstration of what this might look like.
Filler Words
Like, um, you know, so…these are common filler words that can easily creep into our speech if we allow it. Filler words are another form of distraction that can derail your audience from the message you are delivering. Filler words enter our speech for a number of reasons including:
- We aren’t embracing pauses and/or moments of silence
- We haven’t practiced our content enough and are filling our speech with fluff
- We speak too fast
- HABIT
Based on your filler word(s) of choice, swap them out with pauses. Additionally, a good way to reduce filler words is to slow down the pace of your delivery to a crazy slow level so that you can think about each word before it leaves your mouth. In my opinion the very best public speakers have virtually zero filler words in their speeches. Reducing filler words will take time so chip away at it little by little.
It’s a Journey…
Does this seem like a lot? Improving presentation skills takes time but like anything, the most you practice, the more comfortable you will get with the uncomfortable. Be kind to yourself and celebrate small improvements! For me personally, chipping away at the fear of public speaking was empowering and helped me feel more in control anytime I had to speak in front of others.
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