How To Be A Confident Public Speaker – Part One
Weddings and speeches – they go together like Bride and Groom, burger and chips, Saturday night and Strictly. Which may or may not be good news.
Some people leap at the chance to speak in public. I was at a wedding recently where the best man finally had to cut it short after thirty-five minutes – and the audience was still with him!
But for many of us it’s a bit of an ordeal… and making speeches is a matter of squeaky voices, trembling hands and nervous, sweaty performances. Sound familiar?
But it need not be like that. You can quickly get to feel more confident about delivering your speech. And it’s important, because you’re not going to do this very often, are you?
What is Confidence Anyway?
As a professional life coach, I’m often asked about how to become more confident. And I think it’s good to start by asking this question in turn – what is confidence?
The word actually means ‘with faith’. So people who have confidence have faith in themselves and their ability. They trust themselves and that makes them feel better.
A lot of people think that the confident ones are born that way, that it’s a gift, like being artistic or musical, that you either have it or you don’t.
Good News
The first bit of good news is that confidence is actually a skill – a behaviour that you can learn, just like you learn to drive. Or learn to get on with your mother-in-law. OK, bad example. Perhaps more like you learned table manners when you were a kid – that wasn’t a gift, it was a set of behaviours that you absorbed and practised over time so that you could get on well with people.
More Good News
The second point is that confidence is something you do in context. You wouldn’t expect to be incredibly confident in everything you do, all the time. Would you? But there are undoubtedly some things you are confident about already. So there you are, it’s a skill you already have. Now it’s just a matter of transferring that skill to the new context of making a speech. And that’s easier than you might think.
A First Step
To start with then, think of the areas of your life – the situations, people, activities, or skills – that you are confident about right now. Ask yourself, what is it about those things that makes you feel that way? Almost certainly one part of it is that you Know What You Are Doing.
So that would seem like a good place to start….
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