Your speaking skill as a leader is your biggest asset. It is going to help you the most in your ability to create a result.

When you are good at one thing, others will assume that you are good at many things as well. Practice to speak in front of an audience, and people will see you and get a feeling of who you are as a person.

Rule number one

Remember who you are talking too. It is not about you; it is about the audience. Too many speakers try to impress the audience with what they have done or what credentials they have.

“People don´t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

You need to remember three things that the audience will ask themselves when you are entering the stage:

1. Do you care about them?

2. Can you help them?

3. Can they trust you?

If they in some way sense the opposite of these three questions, you might as well get off the stage.

Focus on the delivery

Try to create a conversational intimacy. Don’t think of yourself as the speaker and them as the audience, think of you chatting to your friends. What you say is still going to be great; it is the delivery that makes people remember you.

Practice again

Many people will consider speaking in front of an audience to be very frustrating. It´s a matter of the fact that the majority would rather die than go up on a stage.

You will not be perfect in the beginning. Here is an anecdote about the fear of speaking in front of an audience:

Back in the days of the Roman Empire during a circus in the Colosseum, a Christian was thrown to a hungry lion. As the spectators cheered, the wild beast pounced. But the Christian quickly whispered something in the lions´s ear and the beast backed away in terror. After this happened several times, the emperor sent a centurion to find out what magic spell could make a ferocious lion cower in fear. A few minutes later the guard returned and said, “The Christian whispers in the lion´s ear, ´After dinner you´ll be required to say a few words.´ ”

The more you practice, though, the better you are going to get. For every minute you will speak a good rule of thumb is that you should exercise 10 minutes.

Connect with the audience

After a couple of months, the audience will have forgotten over 80 % of what you have said during your speech. However, the thing that they most likely will remember is their feeling they and during the presentation.

Talk to the audience and stop worrying about the will like you or not. Many speakers are putting in too much information into their speech with the ambition to share everything they know about a subject.

Most likely, it will be an information overload.

Tell personal stories

We think in pictures, and that is why it´s so efficient to tell personal stories. If you mention your own story with a strong message, people will remember. Instead, if you only tell the facts without the story they will forgett.

In a good speech, personal stories should stand for about 50 % of the content.

In a personal story, you will also be able to be authentic and natural on stage because you are telling something you have experienced.

Pictures create emotions, and emotions drive actions, which in turn leads to results.

Remember not to be the hero. The audience will respect you for your success, but they will love you for your mistakes.

Entertain

People want to be entertained instead of educated and are willing to pay a lot of money for that as well.

Variation, humor, and asking questions are good ways to interact with the audience.

Sameness is the death of a speaker. Think of your speech to be like a roller-coaster, but do in a settled way of course. Here are some parameters that you can variate.

1. Speed

2. Volume

3. Tone

4. Spacing

5. Pausing

Body language

If you want to be good at public speaking, you need to practice body language. What you say with your words will stand for about 7% of the communication sent to the audience. The rest is the non-verbal that you send out with your body.

Learn more about the importance of body language in my blog- post here or in my video courses here.

An excellent way to make a strong point in your presentation is to be quiet after you and look at the audience and nod.

In general, it´s also essential to reduce the pace in your speech, and it´s better to have fewer stronger main points than too many.

Practice your speaker training, and you will stand out as a leader and grow yourself into opportunities because you will be able to influence more people, and they will follow you because they want to.