How To Grow Your Self Confidence In Public Speaking (Ep23)

A lot of people lack self-confidence when it comes to public speaking. Are you one of those people? Are you fearful or nervous about getting up in front of a crowd?

Today we will look at four different techniques that you can use to grow your self confidence in public speaking so that you can deliver a great message without fear.

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First let me say that public speaking confidence doesn’t happen overnight. You won’t go to bed tonight and wake up a confident public speaker. But you can definitely grow your confidence by consistently practising and improving your public speaking skills.

So what are these four techniques that we can use to become more confident at public speaking?

Improve your knowledge about public speaking

This is a really simple step to take.

You can check out more of the videos or podcasts or articles on PublicSpeakingPower.com.

You can look at other public speaking blogs like Six Minutes.

Or you head over to YouTube and search “public speaking tips and help” or “fear of public speaking”.

Learn more about public speaking and learn more about the fear of public speaking and the associated anxiety so that you can begin to treat it. Because the more you learn about a topic – the more you learn about the difficulties that may you have – the better you can overcome it.

Obviously it is also important to improve your knowledge of the specific topic that you are speaking about. The more you know about a subject, the easier your public speech will be.

Improve your public speaking skills

The most important thing that you can do is to practice.

You could do this in the comfort and privacy of your own home. You could use some of the “boot camp” activities that I have covered in the past. An example is the Noun Game. This is a fun activity where you take two separate nouns and relate them together in a story. These things can really boost your confidence in public speaking.

Improving your skills as a speaker will allow you to grow in confidence.

Improve your experience

Improving your experience requires that you get up in front of a crowd and speak.

The easiest way to do this is either with your friends or family. Another option would be to look for a Toastmasters meeting near you. They happen in cities and towns all over the world. People gather together as a group to improve their public speaking skills.

The great thing about these Toastmasters meetings is that everyone is there to become a better public speaker. They can give you valuable feedback and help you grow as a speaker.

Getting experience in front of a crowd is extremely important.

You could certainly film yourself to improve your public speaking skills but nothing quite beats the experience of speaking in front of a crowd. You can feel the crowd’s reaction and then change your speech and your technique based on that feedback.

Even writing can improve your skills in storytelling and delivery. My daughter just started getting into writing. She’s writing about how to take care of Prismacolor pencils and using stories and her own experience to help epople.

Visualisation

This tip doesn’t involve you doing a lot at all.

Neuroscience – the study of the brain – has found that visualisation can affect your brain in the same manner as if you were actually doing the event yourself.

So close your eyes and visualise yourself giving your presentation. We want to visualise it in full detail. See the audience. Where are they sitting? What are they wearing? And most importantly – how are they reacting?

Say your speech in your mind. You could even close your eyes and say it aloud. Mix together physical practice with visualisation of positive results.

Visualising a positive outcome will allow you to grow in confidence of the situation because you can believe that things will go well. Often our fears are rooted in the fact that we don’t know what the audience is going to think or what’s going to happen.

But if we close our eyes and visualise things going well then we’re going to have more confidence as a public speaker.

So those are four techniques to help you grow your self confidence in public speaking. Remember to keep practising and to keep improving.