Public Speaking Workshops

The Art of Public Speaking
Our Public Speaking training workshops are designed for both the inexperienced presenter or as a refresher for more experienced members of your company or organization. Our training workshops are offered in most major cities across the United States and Canada. All public speaking skills training workshops are small which will give you all the face to face time you need with our training team.

Our public speaking training workshops (presentation training) will eliminate your fear or inexperience in public speaking and dramatically improve your speaking skills whether you are persuading, educating, or informing. Our highly interactive workshops focus on professional business communication including preparation, structure, delivery, and strategy, use of visual aids, and handling questions & answers. Contact us today by phone at 713-627-7700 or via email: service@publicspeakingtraining.net

Public Speaking Skills Training: Public Speaking Workshops - Practice Does Not Make Perfect

Great Copywriting has the 4 "U"s and its own 3 "P"s. And, they're a piece of the perfect public speaking puzzle. But just a piece. In this article you will learn one of the three "P"s of public speaking... Practice.

Public Speaking Practice Does Not Make Perfect

You read correctly. Practice does NOT make perfect. Practice does, however, make you better and is critical to your success. It's hard to fight a cliche so embedded in our everyday thought process that it has become an aphorism- a phrase, metaphor or cliche that's accepted as a scientific fact. It is also a very dangerous cliché that hobbles the individual and damages groups. Let me share two very different examples with you.

The Cliche that Kills

My son takes music in school. We remind him to practice everyday. And we correct him everyday when he says, "I know. I know. Practice makes perfect." We correct him because while perfect would be nice, and something to strive for, all we want is for him to get better so he can play the songs he wants to play. We correct him because he's no dummy and a bit of a perfectionist.

He knows there are kids in his class who are very, very good at playing their instruments. My son tells me they are perfect. My wife and I know our son. After a little while practicing, he'll figure out that he's not as perfect as his 10-year old aficionado classmates. He will get discouraged, tossing his instrument in its case, flinging his music books across the room, say he hates "the stupid thing" and never want to play an instrument again. He'll end up quitting before he's even given himself a chance to get good.

Thinking that practice makes perfect is too big a promise to make or keep. It can kill your enthusiasm for something before you have an opportunity to have fun doing that thing to the best of your ability... which, with practice will get better over time.

Learning a Lesson

In July of 2007, the regularly scheduled Saturday morning speaker of a local religious organization asked me to stand in for him as he does a few times a year. He was going away for the weekend to visit with his grandchildren. The only parameters were that it be a 10-minute speech on the topic of my choosing. Easy. Right? Even better, the audience is a regular group of 120 or so people with whom I am familiar in varying degrees.

I picked a topic, did some research and wrote the draft. I edited the draft a few times- adding inflection to the printed word using bold, underline, capital letters, spaces, commas and dots- printed it out in the large font style I am comfortable reading from when speaking, and read through it once. Satisfied, I put the speech aside with the best intention to practice later.

Work got busy and I did not carve out the time to practice. After all, it was just a ten-minute speech. The morning of the speech I woke up and had a cup of coffee while reading through the speech I was to give a few hours later.

When it was time for me to deliver the speech a strange feeling hit me. The "I'm nervous and can't do this" feeling. I reminded myself that I had done this many times before, that I knew the audience, and that I had the speech neatly folded in my right breast suit-jacket pocket.

Unfortunately, it didn't help. I remained nervous and certain that the audience could tell I was nervous (which made me more nervous). I was also convinced that the audience could decidedly tell there was a difference from the last time they heard me speak.

Of course, things were not as bad as I imagined, and I have delivered many speeches to this particular group since that day. The point is that the speech would have been better with practice... Practice. Practice. Practice.

Four ways to practice to make you a better public speaker.

1) Don't wait until you have a speech or presentation to give. Hang a mirror in front of your desk and look at yourself while you are talking and listening on the phone.

Even sitting down you can observe your posture, hand gestures and facial expressions. Make a mental or written note of your natural speaking and listening habits and figure out which ones you like, which ones you dislike, which ones help you, and which ones hurt you.

2) Find a place where you are not distracted and read your speech out loud. Read it out loud a lot and concentrate on listening to yourself. Then, Put it down. Walk away. After a while come back and read it out loud again. Pay particular attention to how you read and voice the speech and make edits on the page. Your edits might be 'stage directions' like "LOOK UP AT CEILING" or "RAISE HAND AND WAIT FOR AUDIENCE MEMBERS TO RAISE HAND." Your edits might oratory in nature like "PAUSE FOR EMPHASIS" or "RAISE VOICE".

3) Give your speech to yourself in front of a full length mirror. Several times. More if you have time. Each time you do, you are practicing the speech and catching different physical traits you use and of which you may not be aware. Take note of the actions and facial expressions you like and use them again the next time you practice. Take note of the ones you dislike, or are distracting or damaging to your speech and work hard to remove them.

4) Get some help. Practice your speech in front of your friend, wife, kids, and significant other. These people will tell you if something needs tweaking (like needing to articulate more clearly, slow down or speed up). These people will be kind with their critique and help boost your confidence.

Public speaking is one of the top three fears listed on every survey I have ever seen. It's a career changer. And, it's one of the easiest fears to overcome... When you know the secret.


Mark H. Daniels: link

Subject: Public Speaking Skills Training