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[C955]Confidence In Public Speaking

by Rickie Smith, Ric

Humor in public speaking is the most widely used tools when giving your target audience something to take with them. Remember, this is the whole point of public speaking. Whether you give them something entertaining or persuasive, you will want your audience members to be able to say that they learned something or that they haven't wasted their time listening to you. Even if you provide them with just some new and interesting facts you will You will find that it can be difficult to break through and audience. Therefore you will want to rely on the use your emotions to convince them that they are getting something worthwhile out of the time that they are giving to you.

Using humor in public speaking will allow you to change the mood of the people in the room while making them feel more comfortable. Of course you will not only want to make sure that your humor is appropriate, but you will also want to learn whether to actually to use it in your speech or for demonstration purposes. Everyone has their own way of dealing with public speaking, but you will find that humor will go along way when it comes to informing, persuading, or entertaining your audience. Yes, you might have something serious to say, however, this doesn't mean that you have to be serious. You can use the humor to help everyone get and feel somewhat relaxed about a serious matter.

Humor and laughter, much like music, is something that is understood by the general population. Just be sure that you do everything you can to make your audience feel more comfortable. Give a lot of thought to the type of humor that you plan on using. The type of humor you choose must fit perfectly into your speech, otherwise you will most certainly lose your audience's attention.

You may consider the use of humility. In these cases, this is where you try to bond with the audience by telling a funny story about yourself. There are various to introduce humor into the speech, but you must find that the time will always feel right. You will want to make sure that all the stories you tell are appropriate and that your personal shortcomings are something that you added to the speech in an effort to make your entire audience feel better.

In addition, you may want to combine a little bit of humor and humility so that you can not only bond with the audience but also really get and keep their attention. Be sure that everything that you plan in your speech is tasteful. Using humor in public speaking combined with all of your knowledge and experience on a certain subject will allow everyone to take away something from it and remember it.

Here are a few simple Tips to follow for using humor in public speaking:

1. Know your audience and be extremely careful not to offend anyone with the use of your humor

2. Involve your audience in your speech.

3. Tune in to several TV shows and watch how experienced public speakers using timing with their humor.

4. Go to the library and check out several books on public speaking jokes so as to not "reinvent the wheel".

5. Make sure the humor is relevant to the subject matter.

That's an easy question to answer. And the answer is this ? forget that the audience are there and deliver the presentation to please yourself.

Let's think about this for one moment? Why has the speaker been booked and what is the speaker's number one priority?

That's easy - target your audience's needs.

The biggest mistake a speaker can make is not to prepare thoroughly, and a key aspect of that preparation is to understand who will be in the audience.

So, let's assume that you've done your homework. You have a good handle on who'll be in the audience, so far so good, but what else can we do to turn them off?

There are so many opportunities to build a communications barrier between you and them and I'll be discussing some of them in this article.

Imagine a short wave radio. You know the one that whistles and crackles a lot. You can hear a voice delivering a message, but those whistles and crackles are breaking up the words, and although there is a message, there is also interference. The message is incomplete and sometimes unintelligible.

It's the same in public speaking. If we can remove the interference then our message becomes so much stronger. A major problem is that we are not aware of the frequency or the nature of the interference that we introduce.

Lack of eye contact is a popular omission from a presentation. Or the speaker often feigns eye contact by actually looking over the top of people's heads. The secret is to make everybody feel that you are speaking to them individually. Make them feel special. Be generous with your eye contact. Nobody will bite you for looking at them, but they might growl a little if you don't. Just three of four seconds to each person and keep it moving to cover all of the audience segments.

Have you ever noticed a speaker swaying from side to side? This toing and froing from foot to foot, rather like a slow dance. It is distracting and it also can have a hypnotic impact on the audience. You would have lost your audience after ten minutes. Equally, rocking backwards and forwards, especially on an old wooden floor can result in an incessant creaking like the mast on a 17th century war ship.

Playing with keys and coins in the pockets is another regular mistake. How can you make natural gestures when your hands are tucked away from view? And that jangling of the coins and the key ring is so annoying and distracting. For gentlemen in particular, it is to say the least? unsightly.

Every day, we all hear lots of unwanted and extraneous verbal material like ? OK, right, y'know, um, ahh, init, yeh, wicked, now, so? But that's normally delivered in every day chatter. However, when these words are used within a speech or presentation, they are magnified and distorted out of all proportion. The recommendation is simply ? leave them out, the interference will be reduced and the message will carry greater clarity.

If you are delivering a technical presentation to a non-technical audience, please avoid jargon and acronyms. The audience will mentally drift off if they are given too much indigestible jargon in too short a space of time. I hope that most people would know acronyms like NATO, MEP, NSPCC, PDSA and KBG, SLA, TLA, but even people who are mostly up to date with their essential reading will not know them all.

In Britain we have an organisation called SAGA, which runs special events for the over-fifties. As an acronym, do you know what SAGA means. One rather energetic lady in her seventies gave me one hilarious answer, but I can only tell you what she told me if you attend one of our workshops.

If you wear glasses, be aware that they can be a major distraction. It's simple, either keep them on, or take them off. At college I used to have a lovely professor, but he was at that age, rather as I am now, where his eyes were beginning to fail him. He couldn't see his students without the glasses and he couldn't follow his notes without them. The answer again is simple - invest in a pair of (sometimes) quite expensive bifocals. They are an investment, not an expense.

During the course of sixty minutes, the glasses went on and off on 78 occasions. Yes, that's pretty distracting.

Finally, avoid ambiguity, unless you are doing it for comic effect.

Groucho Marx gave us the famous, ?New York man shoots elephant in his pyjamas.'

The key message is this ? once you begin practicing your speech, just concentrate on removing those distractions from your presentations as they are barriers to communication. Ask a collegue to give you some objective feedback focussing on the distraction factor. Think of the short wave radio and keep that frequency of speech clarity clear.

Copyright (c) 2007 The College Of Public Speaking

Article Source : The Truth Is Speaking You Should Listen

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Both Rickie Smith & Vincent Stevenson are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Rickie Smith has sinced written about articles on various topics from Adware, Children and Forex Trading Forex. For more information about depression visit our comprehensive website at . Rickie Smith's top article generates over 22200 views. to your Favourites.

Vincent Stevenson has sinced written about articles on various topics from Writing, Marketing and Communications and Public Speaking. The College of Public Speaking assists the Corporate, Public and Voluntary Sectors improve their communication skills. Utilising the trusted research of US Educational Psychologist Albert Mehrebian, we use cutting edge business scenarios to develop speake. Vincent Stevenson's top article generates over 8100 views. to your Favourites.