Are you a shy student who freaks out just at the idea of giving a speech in front of the whole class?
It’s the morning of your presentation: your PowerPoint looks cool and engaging, and you have your speech ready, repeated like 100 times. And then, in the moment of presenting, the nervousness kicks in and you start hesitating between sentences. After your presentation, you ask your closest classmates for feedback and they tell you you did well. But this does not remove that feeling you have that, despite the careful preparation, something did not work out as you had planned.
Before you start judging yourself–wishing to be naturally extroverted, let me tell you that my intention with this article is to gift you one of those life lessons you learn through your experiences, and in this case, it is this: public speaking does not necessarily have to do with our personality–it is about conveying emotions, passion for what you do and confidence.
In other words, I truly want to encourage you not to try to hide or change your personality, quite the opposite: it is just a matter of training your charismatic speaking skills because, as they told me in the public speaking course that was for me a game-changer, “Authenticity beats the rules.”
But let me briefly tell you my story first to make things a bit clearer:
A rough but successful path
We all have that something that comes really naturally, easily, don’t we? In my case, as a high school student, my classmates and friends always told me that pretty much in any stressful situation, I looked extremely calm, for instance before an oral exam.
While at high school and university for my bachelor’s, I did not give too much importance to this but something changed when I started my master’s as, being just around thirty students, we were encouraged by pretty much all of our teachers to give presentations in front of our class or take part in class debates. I still remember my first presentations where I felt so nervous that I preferred sitting down rather than standing because I would “look less nervous.”
But the hardest public speaking experience for me was probably the training exercise one of my teachers gave us, that of watching the recorded video of our presentations.
Do you remember when I just said my classmates at high school used to praise my calmness in stressful situations? Well, it was then that I realized that when in front of a whole class rather than just one teacher, that disappeared and, instead, I looked quite the opposite of natural.
While the exercise was useful to helping me realize that, it did not make me conquer the “fear of the stage.” That would come years later, after finding an ad to a communication course while on LinkedIn that included a public speaking module during which a specialized coach taught us some tips and tricks I would have never imagined could actually work. Do you know those funny tips as imagining people without their clothes on etc.? Well, thanks to those kinds of tips and some other practices, I am now proud to say that that shy girl was recently able to present not only in front of an entire audience but at an event held by my former university in front of the local mayor too! And believe me, it gets easier and easier with the right practice. Let me tell you how I did it.
The takeaways from the public speaking course
These are the main tips and tricks I learned both from my first “public speaking attempts” at university and during the course, which have now completely changed my way of presenting in public–much more natural and authentic:
- While you are speaking, within the crowd, find someone who gives you that feeling of “trust;” perhaps someone who is making eye contact, nodding, and smiling at you while you talk–they are always there. Finding those people always encourages me to continue with my discourse.
- If helpful for your memory, you can prepare scripts of your speech the day before. A small, but important tip, tho: avoid writing the full speech with the exact words you will be using–I used to do this for my presentations at university and it would just make me more nervous as I would then focus on remembering the exact words rather than the whole sense of what you want to express. Instead, try using bullet points to summarize the essence of what you’ll be saying!
- A rather classic but really useful training activity is: speaking in front of the mirror. Why? Because you can pay attention to yourself and work on different aspects such as how you use your voice, your hands, and where you tend to look while you are speaking.
- As for the eyes, after finding your trustworthy-looking person in the crowd, try to spread your eye contact as much as possible among different people, if not it will seem like you are speaking to just one person and the others will not feel as involved.
- As for the voice, the technique I found super useful is that of stressing the most important words and, for this, during the course, we did a fun exercise–you can find plenty of them on Youtube–during which we repeated the same speech at different speeds and tones of voice. I think this is useful because you would then start paying attention to your own voice and “play with it.”
- As for the hands, while it might come naturally, placing them on hips do not really look natural. The main problem here is that your hands need to “look busy” (unless you have a microphone, then the problem is solved) but, if you don’t, the best tip I can give you is just to be yourself! For example, for us Italians, hand gestures accompany our everyday chats so when I added the hand gestures in my speeches, it actually helped me to feel as if I was speaking with my friends. Besides feeling less nervous, this helped me look much more natural!
As I mentioned at the beginning, I recently realized that public speaking is not really as related to our personalities as we might think. I was recently surprised when an extroverted friend of mine admitted being extremely nervous when she needed to present in public. On the contrary, last year I listened to a speech by a person who was extremely soft-spoken but, as such, conveyed calmness and peacefulness. The most important lesson I assumably learned on public speaking is that the more you fake it, the more people will notice. This is why, if you want to become a good public speaker, you need to bring your true self with your unique personality, to the stage.
How to do this? By training your ability to be yourself–as authentic as possible–on that stage with the help of good training.
In this regard, you can find many public speaking courses advertised, for example on LinkedIn but, based on my experience, I would recommend choosing an in-person or even hybrid one because public speaking is not only about using your voice, as I previously said, but also the rest of your body. Indeed in my course; which was hybrid but the public speaking module was in-person, I had the opportunity to practice these tips and tricks with other young people, which was also very helpful as it made me realize that we are all facing the same difficulties in hiding our nervousness while being ourselves in front of an audience.