How To Be A Confident Public Speaker – Part Two
If you missed part one then catch up here.
So, we’ve seen that it’s really helpful to treat confidence as a skill, rather than a quality or a personality trait. It’s something you do rather than something you have. And we can all learn new skills, we do it all the time. Also there are many things in your life you are confident about already, so you can learn from yourself.
One thing that definitely helps to generate confidence is the feeling that you know what you are doing. Sure enough, people who are really good at speech-making know what they are doing!
‘To fail to prepare is to prepare to fail’
OK it’s an old cliché, but there’s a lot of truth in it. Good preparation is an excellent place to start. As you plan, prepare and practise, you cannot fail to increase your confidence. Of course, even when you have a really good speech prepared there’s still the question of delivering it – but we’ll come to that later.
Planning
Start by doing some planning. You need to find out, or decide, the answers to some practical questions like… How long are you going to speak for? Where will you be in the order of events? What does your speech definitely need to cover (like who do you need to thank?). Make notes of these things and you have some kind of framework ready.
Then think endings and beginnings. Start with the end – how will you finish your speech? Usually it’s with a toast, so find out what the protocol is, and write out exactly what you are going to say. Then, how will you begin? Often it’s with thanks and/or a welcome. Decide on that and again write out the words. You will be feeling better already.
Beginning, Middle and End
Now all you have to do is fill in the bit in the middle. This is relatively easy with wedding speeches because we all know what is expected – you are highly likely to be talking mainly about your daughter, your new wife, or your friend the bridegroom! So that’s a matter of deciding what you want to say and starting to jot it down.
There’s loads of help available for constructing a speech, and that’s not the focus here – we’re looking at how you get to feel good about it. The crucial point is that you can’t feel confident unless you have prepared properly. There are a few people who are capable of making an excellent impromptu and unrehearsed speech, but not many! And then only because they have done it numerous times before. The rest of us have to put in some effort.
So aim to get to the point where you know roughly what the contents of your speech are and have it written down, either in full or as notes. Then you can move on to the next step.
Top Tip
First though, I recommend that you learn the opening and the ending. Never try to memorise an entire speech, but it helps enormously if you have practised your start and finish until they are polished and smooth.
Steve Roche
Professional Life Coach
Don’t forget to come back for part three next week and if you’re worried about your wedding speech then don’t forget you can ask our wedding speech experts a question just by clicking the link.
Related Posts:
