Public Speaking

     Public speaking is the act of addressing a gathering of people with the intentions of informing, entertaining or persuading. It is, however, never as easy as it sounds. In fact, it is one of those tasks that frighten people to the bits. But like any other task understanding, techniques and practice make it very handy.

     Public speaking is not just a one-sided conversation where you speak and speak without being listened to or judged. So turn a deaf ear to all those who say, “While making a speech think that people sitting before you are deaf and dumb.” This statement has although helped me more often than I’d like to believe, but it has resulted in consequences I was never ready for because I always thought that my speeches would never be judged and getting feed-back(specially negative) would come as an offense all the time. Also, it would make me over-confident and I would end up saying wrong things and expecting people to not notice. Therefore, what I believe now is that it’s important to have a clear-cut image of the audience in your mind before speaking in public. And not only that, knowing about yourself, who you want to be and what kind of setting you have to speak in are equally important. So, it’s a two-way exchange like any other means of communication.

     The first thing for this kind of communication would be knowing your audience. Now the question is: why is this so important? Well, what I think is that public speaking is all about interacting with public, actually getting your point across and winning their hearts and this can only be done when you know who you are talking to you. In daily life as well we use different approaches to talk to and win different people. You will obviously not use the language you use to win a friend to win a teacher’s heart or vice versa. Similarly while speaking in public analyzing your audience, having knowledge about their age, education, gender, occupation, culture, ethnicity, group affiliation etc matter a lot in order to relate to your audience and make an impact.

     Once you know who your audience is, you can then decide who you want to be before them. Let’s say if you are a teacher delivering a lecture in class you most probably want to be a teacher i.e. talk, act and move like one, whereas while giving a speech in front of your class-fellows you would want to be more of a friend and your voice and body language will change accordingly. Discovering who you want to be in front of your audience is the most crucial and challenging step in my view. It’s more of a mental process. You need to first make the appropriate choice and then start thinking like that. Make connections with your audience in your head before even meeting them. From experience, imagining your speech (your deliverance and audience’s response) in your head with the best possible outcomes also helps. However, having a mental picture of who you want to be is not all; you need to look like one too. Your dressing and attire, too, should complement the image you want to portray.

     So after you have an idea who your audience is and who you want to appear as before them, then you can start working on preparing your speech. The first step for this is choosing a topic and I believe this choice should be made keeping your audience in mind for when you talk about something to interest them it will make it easier to win their hearts. However, the rest is about who you want to be or present yourself as. The kind of tone you pick up, the kind of language you use, the flow of information it will depend greatly on whether you want to be a teacher, friend, diplomat, colleague, debater or comedian to your audience. But the thing that would really matter here is that you make the right choice about who you want to be for a wrong choice would cause your entire speech to crumble down. And this decision again should be made keeping your audience in mind.

     Other things to be kept in mind while preparing a speech are time-limit, setting and your turn. Since time-limit is not an issue, mostly, so I won’t talk about that, however, it’s important to keep track of time, especially when you are being graded for that. But the major issues are setting and your turn to speak for they really matter. Setting would include the size of the room, sound system, lights etc. It’s very important that you analyze the place well and alter the pitch of your voice and your body language accordingly for the place where you rehearsed would most probably be very different from where you actually have to deliver the speech and this analyzing becomes spontaneous if you are not familiar with the place. So you must always leave room for flexibility. Your turn will greatly determine the audience’s response. However, I believe this is one factor that you can stop worrying about because if you have command over the above mentioned areas, no matter when your turn is you’ll lasso the hearts of your audience.

      So now you know your audience, you know who you want to be, you have a speech on you, you are ready for any change in setting but still there is something holding you back. Yes, you guessed it right! It’s the fear of public speaking. In class we studied about five major types of this fear: fear of being stared at, fear of rejection, fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of showing fear. These fears are very normal and come to almost everyone but the difference is in how we deal with them. I strongly believe these fears are plain paradigms; there is actually nothing in them to hold us back. Let’s take the fear of being stared at. Now obviously no one likes being stared at and especially when you are extremely conscious about yourself (which is mostly the case while speaking in public). But if you are confident about the way you are carrying yourself and the way you are delivering your speech than trust me it’s the last thing you’ll care about and you might as well enjoy being stared at. And in case you don’t, abandoning eye-contact is never an option. Look for people in the audience who are supportive and make eye-contact with them often but not all the time. Fear of rejection and failure are simply mental barriers, they’ll go away once you are prepared and confident about your speech. Fear of the unknown is very common and the most absurd one I guess because worrying about something that you don’t know and probably might never happen is useless. Making a mental picture of your speech with positive outcomes will be helpful to overcome it. I find the last one, fear of showing fear, very interesting. I mean how epic is that that apart from feeding all these fears we are feeding another fear- the fear of showing the fears we are feeding. Honestly speaking, once you have got rid of all the other fears this fear diminishes automatically because then you won’t be afraid anymore. However, not being afraid doesn’t mean that you become over confident. It only means that you know how to deal with your fears and that your fears will no long hold you back from giving your best.

     I believe that in all the above tactics your genuine interaction with audience is what works as the magic spell. Try doing that and you’ll see just how simple it becomes talking to large gatherings. So, take a deep breath, let go of all anxieties, connect with your audience and make public speaking what it should be- FUN!