(Or read: 3 Delivery Tips for Novice Speakers)
As with the tips for novice speakers, even advanced speakers can’t think about 100 different details at once. The difference is that advanced speakers, like advanced golfers, already have specific habits. Unfortunately, some of those are bad habits and need to be unlearned. The basic rules still hold: figure out what you are doing well and leave that alone. Then focus on the components that you know you need to improve.
Tip #1: Record Your Practice and Review It
The best way to improve both your content and your delivery is to record – and review – your live practices and speeches. I own both a digital audio recorder and a Flip™ video camera. Both technologies are easy to use and have become very affordable in recent years. I use my video camera when I want to critique my performance, including my gestures and movements. I use my audio recorder when I want to focus on my vocalizations, or on the audience reaction.
When you are refining a speech that you intend to give a number of times, listening to how the audience reacts to specific words and phrases can help you fine-tune your performance. When you compare the audience reaction across multiple performances, you can learn which phrases have the intended effect, such as highlighting a poignant moment or evoking a laugh.
If you are one of those people who protest that you can’t stand watching or listening to your own speech, ask yourself why you should be spared – your audience wasn’t!
Tip #2: Make Eye Contact
One of the best ways to connect with your audience is by making eye contact. Many speakers “look” at their audience, but they do not make eye contact. They often look over the audience to the back of the room.
Again, you have to know your material before you can focus on eye contact, but do make it a point to focus on making eye contact. It adds a personal touch that cannot be generated any other way.
The simplest technique is to remember to look at one person (or a small group sitting together) while you speak an entire phrase or sentence. Then move on and make eye contact with another while you complete another thought. If you repeat this process, moving from one side of the room to the other and back again, you will strengthen your connection with your audience. Individual audience members will feel that you are talking directly to them, even though each person only has your eyes for one thought or one sentence.
Tip #3: Be Yourself
This is deceptively simple advice. Most people have no idea how to do it.
Many of us are transformed into someone else when we stand up to speak. Instead of being the engaging conversationalists we are when talking with friends, when we stand up to speak we often pontificate, or struggle to carry on a (one-way) conversation, or become “Speakerman,” holding forth like Shakespeare’s Mark Anthony: “Friends, Romans, and countrymen, lend me your ear.”
Your goals should always be to: 1) be conversational, and 2) be yourself. This is easy to say and hard to do. There are some specific tips that can help with both these goals, but in general the only prescription is practice and experience.
As mentioned several times already, you have to learn your content before you can work on delivery. Until you are ready you can’t be comfortable, and until you are comfortable you can’t be yourself. It can take years to find and develop your own speaking style. The key is to practice and stick with it. Be yourself – because there’s no one else in the world who can do it better.