Practice Makes Better
Like everything in life, when we practice speaking, we get better. We don’t get perfect, but that is not what we are striving for. Perfect sounds fake and looks impersonal. Better is about highlighting our natural talents and employing a few audience-engaging techniques such as voice variation, pauses, and meaningful body language.
We get the chance to practice written and interpersonal communication as a regular part of our job, but most of us do not speak formally to a crowd on a daily basis. When we do get the opportunity to speak, we need to set aside the time to practice in order be as effective as we are at our daily communication. Beyond organizing content, looking over slides, and thinking through talking points, there are ways to practice that help us improve.
Of course, I recommend working with a communication coach as that is my livelihood. In addition, there are several things we can do that help memorize the content and to condition our bodies to perform effectively. I categorize these into three groups of tips:
- Practicing in daily life
- Getting feedback
- Over dramatizing
Say Your Speech During Daily Life Tasks
Once we have a good sense of our talking points, we can incorporate practice into our daily life. That helps us find the best wording and get really comfortable with our content and flow. We can say our speech, or parts of our speech, out loud when doing the dishes, working out, going for a hike, or driving in our car. While we are doing this, we will not say the same things we wrote for our talking points and that is actually beneficial. We will find the words that are most natural for us and still get the concepts across. I also recommend practicing a speech right before bedtime as the brain solidifies knowledge while we sleep.
Get Feedback from Yourself and Others
Even when you are getting feedback from a coach, it is helpful to get additional feedback from other sources. Sharing your speech, or parts of your speech, with friends and family helps you to simplify your content for a general audience and gives you reactions from a variety of perspectives. It may feel awkward in the moment to practice in front of others, but it makes us more at ease on speech day. While we are our own worst critics, or maybe because we are our own worst critics, it is helpful to record and review our speeches. I recommend both audio and video recording. Capturing just the words, on Voice Memos or other devices gives, us information about our enunciation, pitch variation, pace variation, and pauses. Video gives us information about our body language and helps us get our verbal and nonverbal communication in alignment. We can see our facial expressions and note if our hand motions are adding to or detracting from our words. I also recommend practicing in front of a mirror so we can get instant input and can immediately adjust what we are doing.
Over Dramatize to Calm Nerves
Everyone gets nervous when speaking. Some feel that energy as positive and some feel it as dread. If you fall into the dread category, adding a bit of drama to your practice can lighten you up. Try taking your content and singing it to a tune from a toddler song, like the ABCs or Itsy-Bitsy Spider. It will make you laugh, and you will remember your talking points. If your voice is monotone or cracks when you are nervous, try saying your talking points in a whisper and then really loud. We can also do this dramatization with our body language, making big facial expressions and big hand motions, exaggerating our movements. Adding drama during practice makes us more comfortable with ourselves when we present.
Practice makes better. We can count on giving better speeches using these strategies. May you enjoy experimenting and feel more at ease giving audience-engaging speeches.