Public speaking is something we cannot avoid in our life. The situation will arise when we are called upon to stand up and speak our minds out. When that situation comes are we ready deliver?

Hide: It’s not your fault if there were a set of circumstances that ended up forcing you to do or say what you did. This is another classic defense that won’t go over very well with your audience. Don’t even try it. Instead, accept responsibility no matter what the sequence of events was that led you to where you were.

If you simply resolve to make changes or achieve things but don’t have any timeline set to your goals, you run the risk of getting lazy and procrastinating. Set up a plan with deadlines to reach on a regular, perhaps monthly, basis. Then make sure to update your plan if a deadline is missed so that the subsequent deadline doesn’t become impossible to meet.

If you need to refer to something that you wrote on a page at a later point in your presentation, rip off the page and ask someone to tape it up on the wall – don’t forget to bring big masking tape for this.

Reading about, talking about and thinking about public speaking doesn’t improve your actual skills…. public speaking improves your presentaion skills.

Keep it simple : Have few main points and use numerous real-life examples for each one. Our audiences are keen to learn something new and they are not waiting to test our knowledge.

So rather than re-writing the same reply nineteen thousand times over the next ten years, I thought I might make my life easier and formalise my thoughts on the matter with a post.

Practicing doesn’t cost very much except time. That’s probably the worst part of it. If you want to improve and become a better public speaker then you need to set some time aside for practicing on your skills. Practice in front of an audience of friends of yours and ask them for feedback.