Hey guys, and welcome to this week’s challenge: public speaking practices. You don’t actually have to throw yourself in front of a big audience to increase your ability so speak in front of an audience, of course in the end, that’s where the real magic happens, but there’s a lot of ground work that can be done at home at your safe heaven to be ready for those moments than eventually always will come. Therefore, in this Weeks’s challenge I have set up a basic daily practice routine for you to get comfortable speaking in front of a camera by doing a 3-5 minute recording each day about anything, focusing in on using one body language technique each day. And then, reviewing your result not only to get comfortable with seeing and hearing yourself, but also in order to realise what you may need to tweak and adjust to improve. This is what I have found – when looking into expert’s advices – to be a good daily simple practice if you want to improve your public speaking abilities.
Why public speaking?
Public speaking is a skill that from time to time really puts u on the spot, it could be your moment to shine and make sure your opinions and visions are getting heard, or it’s just something you have to go through as part of your must do activates in your school, career a social event, etc. What we can say for sure is that it’s something we all needed to do from time to time, and the feeling of not being able to perform when all the eyes are turned to you. well, it’s one of the worst feelings imaginable; leaving deep wounds in our soul that can stay on for years and years to come. Furthermore, a good experience can thrill and excite in ways other things have hard to do. Take it from one that has made it through both experiences plenty of times. And if you want to make your dreams and vision come through, you probably will need help getting there, and that will hence require persuading some people to share your vision.
How:
When you want to learn something new, depending on what kind of person you are, you don’t throw yourself straight into the worst action, that will most likely just harm the confidence tied to the skill you want to develop. You incrementally increase your level of uncomfortableness to push yourself out of your comfort zone. If you want to learn how drive a car, you first start of on some remote parking lot, so all you need to think of is how to learn handle the basic of handling the car. Then you advance to some low traffic industrial areas to get comfortable on the road, and then you increase the level of traffic intensity and complex road layout. You Build your confidence step by step. That’s why we are going to start the practice of public speaking at home in a safe environment.
There are ways for us to improve our chances of making a successful talk, preparing ourselves by just putting in a few minutes of effort daily, time we all can afford to take. And it doesn’t matter if you have a big upcoming speech or if you just want to be prepared when it comes – because it will.
Of course there are tons of videos out there by pros that outline different strategies for how to go about public speaking. But that’s not what I’m going to focus in on this week, so besides the general tips like: KNOW YOUR TOPIC; HAVE A CLEAR FOCUSED MESSAGE; PRACTICE YOUR SPEACH ON YOUR OWN, TO YOUR FRIENDS OR FAMILY, etc, there are some more general practices you can take on to prepare yourself; getting comfortable standing and speaking and fine-tuning your body language which makes up for a majority of what message you’re actually sending out.
So the daily practice and objectives are:
Each day in the week record a video on yourself when you do a 5-minute talk, it could be of whatever, if you want it to be more easy, you take an area of yours you feel passionate about. Then watch it and observe yourself; give yourself credit for what you do good, and take note of some key things you will try to improve next time. Also, we are going to align this with the body language challenge we did a couple of weeks ago, were each day in the week got a particular focus:
- Monday – Smiling
- Tuesday – Energy level (vocal variety)
- Wednesday – Talking slower
- Thursday – Hand movements
- Friday -Eye contact
Bonus Challenge:
If you have time, before doing your recording, watch a popular ted talk or famous speech on YouTube and observe the person speaking, and in particular take notice of the daily theme, for instance, hand movements, or vocal variety. Try to get inspired and borrow some things you like and try them out, that’s the beauty of doing this on your own, you can play around as much as you want!
Final Words
So to sum it up, there’s tons of different things you can do to prepare for a speech, but I have found that just being comfortable with your body language and being used with the mind-set of talking publicly, even if it’s only in front of the camera, it will make for a solid base to start off from, and to make the jump to actually stand in front of real people less intimidating. So that’s why we are going to make a daily short recording of ourselves when we are doing a short speech or just talking, focusing in on practicing one body language skill at the time.
If you’re up for the challenge, please commit to me in the comments and it will increase your chances of follow through by a toon. Also if you have any questions or thoughts of your own, don’t be afraid to share.
See you in the Vlog guys, take care.
/Alexander
