Why Mastering Public Speaking Skills Will Improve Your Life – 4 Examples.
Public speaking skills are the most important skills for all those who intend to inspire, influence, lead, support and educate others. It’s perhaps the oldest and most respected skill in our history as a species, and that alone tells you how important it is to keep improving your public speaking skills.
Public Speaking Skills and Why It’s Important to You
Public speaking is a process of performing speeches to live audiences. When you master the art of effective oral communication with your audience, you master public speaking. Public speaking can be categorized in three general reasons; to persuade, entertain or to inform your audience.
Public speaking can be formal, done to a group of people, or face-to-face speaking to a single person. It is without a doubt that public speaking has changed over the years. Emerging platforms such as Periscope, Facebook Live streams, YouTube Videos, and TED Talks among others are all changing the way we receive and transmit information.
Days are gone when powerful communication had to be formalized ritual, and the speaker had to address their audience for hours with prepared remarks. Nowadays, the audience is embracing a more interactive, direct and casual form of public speaking. By adopting these methods, you will not only become a better speaker, but you will improve the experience of your audience and the success rate of delivering value for them.
There are several benefits of mastering public speaking skills, and in this post, I will be listing some areas of your life that can get a big boost from your mastering of speaking in public and influencing people.
You will be able to navigate the world more easily
Just like the quote goes “man is not an island,” you cannot live on your own, and you have to interact with other people. Whether it is marriage, politics, business, academia or any other major part of your life, you need communication. You cannot deny the fact that communication plays a significant role in determining the quality of life you have.
While communicating and connecting with a group of people, you gain confidence and skill set that applies to every aspect of your life. Whether it is presentation skills in College, salary negotiations, acing an interview, closing business deals and heated meetings discussions, interacting with family and friends, or inspiring your children; improving your public speaking skills will help you to improve all those areas in your life.
When you master public speaking, you become a more engaging person, it magnifies your character, and you end up having high-quality interactions with others.
Through public speaking, you learn how to have engaging eye contact, sincere tonality and present yourself with strong body language. When applied to your day to day life, these public speaking skills will enrich your everyday interactions which will result in better friendships, marriage and business relationships.
When you are in the corporate world, such skills can open the doors to unique opportunities, like quickly growing into management level positions, representing your company at large events as a keynote speaker, lead and inspire others, meet many people and with that improve your other technical or managerial skills, not just public speaking skills.
You learn how to control your emotions and thoughts
While presenting your speech to your audience, you will be aware of what is happening between your ears. You will be forced to notice your inner critic and internal thoughts. Even the best public speakers get nervous before getting on stage, but they know how to turn the nervousness into excitement by controlling their thoughts.
Before you get up to speak to your audience, it is natural for you to get butterflies but the way you learn how to manage your emotions and thoughts makes all the difference. It is vital for you to give your speeches from a place of joy instead of fear.
Through public speaking, you learn how to manage your emotions by letting things go. If the microphone screech as you speak or the projector fails while presenting something and forget an important point you wanted to make; you don’t panic, but instead you take a deep breath and let go.
You learn how to generate a positive state from within by being insightful and staying positive. It is through the way you respond and interprets things that happen to you that are outside your circle of influence that you can free yourself from everyday distress. Public speaking is, therefore, the best way to help you control your emotions and thoughts which you can later apply in your day-to-day life.
You learn how to understand other people
The best public speakers understand that their entire speech is supposed to benefit their audience. It will be your biggest mistake if you focus on yourself while giving a public speech. Your audience will quickly know when you focus on making yourself look more credible or intelligent. If you do that, you will make your audience unsatisfied and uncomfortable due to lack of authenticity. Instead, please share your stories that will connect with your audience as you inspire and entertain them. Below steps will help you to shift the focus from you to your audience.
Step One: Imagine someone close to you. The person can be your spouse, sibling or your best friend.
Step two: In your mind, place that loved one in the third row of your audience.
Step three: Ask yourself what you would like this person to gain from your speech.
Step four: Concentrate that message into 15 words or less.
Step five: Build your whole speech around that message.
The above steps help you to speak to your audience as if they know you and therefore you will focus on them and the message that you want to put across. When you practice this exercise into your daily conversations, people will become more engaged and enjoy your company. No one loves to listen to someone who is always talking about themselves anyway.
You get to learn from failure
Let’s say you will have a speech on Saturday morning and on Friday you decide to go party or have a social time with friends. On Saturday, you get on stage one hour late. Your host and audience will not be happy with you at all. To make matters worse, you will not present your speech the best way you could because you will not have prepared well and might forget some important points. From such a painful experience you will get to learn to put your audience before your desires and be getting full night rest before your presentation.
The above example is one of the failures that you learn from when you want to have the task of public speaking. Such failures will help you learn lessons that you will get to apply to your day-to-day life. It is through lifting yourself up after falling and learning from the failure that you will find the greatest success.
Becoming a better speaker is one of the most powerful skills you can develop since you will gain confidence that will improve every part of your life. The results of better public speaking skills will enhance your long-term relationships, career and business success.
In Summary:
You will learn to navigate the World more easily: We are social creatures, and it is our very nature to want to communicate, share and learn from others. Our ability to do so in the best way possible puts us in an excellent position to navigate the world we live in.
You learn to Control your Emotions and Thoughts: Overcoming the fear of speaking in public, handling tough negotiations, acing your interview, not getting flustered for things that are outside of your control are but a few examples of the benefits of becoming a better public speaker and controlling your emotions.
You learn how to Understand other People: I always like to say that even when you are talking about you, during a public speech, remember that it’s not about you it’s about the audience. If you understand that and cherish the time and attention given to you by them, then you will be sharing valuable information with them and picking the different reactions in their expressions. That way, you know what to improve, which leads us to the next point.
You get to Learn from Failure: No one is ever perfect, and that can be said about your ability to deliver compelling and engaging speeches. You will make mistakes and, that is fine. Learn from them, improve and keep growing your public speaking skills, this will lead to a future you who is a public speaking master.
These are some of how getting your public speaking skills to the next level can have positive impacts on your life. If you are interested in some tips to overcome the fear of public speaking or, perhaps delivering more engaging speeches, you can find here and here.
Thank you for reading this far, I really appreciate it.
If you are interested in improving your public speaking and oral presentations skills, please take some time to read our 2500+ long eBook, and learn the tips that I have used and shared with others in the past, and they have proved to be quite effective if applied and practiced enough to make you a memorable speaker. You can also click on the image below, it will redirect you to the landing page.
Please share your thoughts and comments below; I’d like to hear from you. How improving your public speaking skills helped you in life?
FURTHER READING
Virtual Speech. What are the benefits of Public
Cheryl, 8 Reasons public speaking can improve your life.
