The Five Attributes Needed For Public Speaking Success
Public speaking success doesn’t happen by chance. Great speakers aren’t born that way, they have to adopt very specific attributes and learn a number of key skills.
If public speaking success is something you aspire to, here are five key attributes we’d encourage you to develop. Each of them are within your gift and grasp.
- Awareness
The first step to public speaking success is developing a high level of awareness. That means awareness of:
– Your strengths
What are your natural gifts as a presenter? What do you do easily and well?
Perhaps it’s your confidence or the ease in which you make eye contact. Maybe it’s how open and friendly you are. You may be articulate, passionate or simply comfortable in your skin.
It could be your sense of humour, empathy or ability to tell stories well.
– Your bad habits
At Mindful Presenter we have a very clear definition of a bad habit when presenting. It’s anything we say or do repeatedly to the point of distraction.
The journey to public speaking success involves identifying and overcoming anything you say or do repeatedly that may distract your audience.
– Your opportunities
What is helping and hindering you on your path to public speaking success? Once you’ve become aware of your key strengths and bad habits what opportunities do you have to present with greater impact.
What else do you need to do to stand out from the crowd and connect with your audience.
– Your message
Anyone can present with vary levels of confidence, clarity and impact. Public speaking success insists on the delivery of a clear, compelling and relevant message. It’s not enough to share data, knowledge and insights. Your public speaking success will depend heavily on how rich and rewarding your message is to your audience.
What is your message and why should your audience care about it?
– Your audience
Have you taken the time to get to know and understand your audience? Public speaking success involves knowing who your audience really are and how you can help them.
How much do they know already?
What else do they need to know?
Why would they care?
How can you make their lives better, easier, happier or positively different?
2. Belief
Belief plays a huge role in public speaking success. It requires you:
– Understanding and overcoming your limiting beliefs
When it comes to presenting and speaking in public here are a few of those that hold so many professionals back.
– No one will want to listen to me
– My ideas aren’t good/interesting enough
– I can’t speak well enough to engage an audience
– No one is going to find this interesting
– I’m a terrible/nervous/boring speaker
I’ve shared some helpful solutions to this in another article; ‘A Presentation & Public Speaking Phenomenon — I feel terrible but you can’t see it.
In his article ‘How to overcome your limiting beliefs’, Tony Robbins recommends four very helpful steps:
Identify them
Take responsibility
Let go of uncertainty
Change your self-talk
– Believing in your message
Another secret to public speaking success is believing so strongly in your message that you are fuelled with passion. The likelihood of you being able to connect successfully with your audience increases exponentially if your message is important to you.
If it’s not important, you’ll probably just go through the motions of sharing it as quickly as you can.
If you don’t believe in what you are saying, don’t rely on public speaking techniques to help your audience to; they won’t.
3. Trust
Armed with a high level of awareness and belief in yourself and your message, the next step to public speaking success is trust. The pathway to trust involves:
– A sincere desire to help your audience
If you’re speaking to simply inform your audience, demonstrate how much you know and how hard you work, or even sell to them it’s not enough.
The key to public speaking success revolves around putting your self-interests to one side and focusing exclusively on how you can help your audience.
– Approaching your audience with humility
Humility isn’t about subservience or a lack of self-respect. It’s having the courage and vulnerability to show your audience how much you care. Heavily aligned to the genuine desire to help your audience it requires you leave your ego at the door and focus on your audience’s needs.
– Crafting a conversation, not a lecture
Trust isn’t built through trying to impress your audience with corporate speak. It involves speaking, naturally, easily and openly as you would to friends or family. A good conversation normally involves eye contact, gesturing, being open and honest. That means you don’t read to your audience or deluge them with data.
4. Resilience
Part of understanding public speaking success is realising that anything can happen at any time.
– Your audience could ask you a questions you don’t know the answer to
– You may lose your notes on the train or your PowerPoint packs up
– Your audience may not agree with you
– You have far less time to speak than you prepared for
I could of course go on.
Whatever happens during your presentation, whether you are prepared for it or not you have to be ready to respond. You have to be able to breathe calmly through the situation, let it go and move on.
Easier said than done, I know.
Resilience comes from understanding and accepting:
– What you can and can’t control
– Your ability to stay calm and manage any situation
– Remembering that whatever happens, your sole purpose is to help your audience
Research suggests that, ‘individuals with higher mindfulness have greater resilience, thereby increasing their life satisfaction’.
You can practice the 5 simple steps to mindfulness in a previous article I wrote called: ‘Can Mindfulness Make You a Better Public Speaker?’
5. Vulnerability
Vulnerability is often perceived as a weakness in public speaking. The truth is, vulnerability can greatly increase your chances of public speaking success.
Being an effective public speaker isn’t about striving for perfection. No one really wants to listen to a slick, highly polished and memorised speaker. Your audience wants to hear someone speak who:
– Knows exactly what they are talking about
– Cares deeply about what they are presenting
– Will help them feel something too
Vulnerability can help you to:
– Connect emotionally as well as intellectually with your audience
– Break the ice and put your audience at ease
– Show your audience that you are real, honest and open
In a previous article I wrote, ‘Vulnerability in Public Speaking — Brené Brown’, I shared her view that speakers need:
‘The courage to be imperfect’
‘The compassion to be kind to themselves first and then others’
‘To be willing to let go of who you think you should be to be able to connect.’
Watch Brené Brown’s brilliant TedTalk here:
If you need help with your public speaking success:
– Book yourself onto a powerful public speaking course.
– Invest in some really good one to one public speaking coaching.
– Get yourself some excellent presentation training
If this article has inspired you to learn a little more about how effective your presentation skills are you may want to take a look at our presentation training and public speaking coaching pages to see
Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash
