Have you ever thought about giving your own public speech? Or considered taking your passions and expressing them with the world so others can listen and respond?
It’s actually easier than you might think! You just need to know the formulas that great speakers follow and then use them.
There are many factors to take into account before the big day, and with dedication and practice, you can brilliantly plan your career or life-changing speech. Here are 5 quick tips for success.
1. Pick the perfect venue.
Landing the perfect venue is crucial.
Whether it be stadium size or a single training room, be sure to take your venue selection seriously.
What kind of vibe are you aiming to achieve?
Can everyone see you on the stage?
Is there even a stage? Will you have help with sound and lighting?
Think about: price, size, capacity, catering, parking, access.
2. Market your event well
Getting people to come to your speech is a great indicator of the effectiveness of your speech, and being transparent and simple can help boost the amount of people that decide to attend.
Take your event to the social and online atmosphere to get people talking about your speech! Use social media to create hashtags and stimulate conversations around the topic you’ll be discussing.
Try an event planning site to host your event’s details and information. Plus, this can help you, as an organiser, see how many people are RSVPing, talking about your speech in the event forum, and more.
3. Organise your speech
Great speakers follow a presentation formula to write their content. The formula that I suggest you might like to use when structuring your presentations was developed by Bernice McCarthy. McCarthy felt strongly that not all learners should be presented to in the same way. She created an instructional system that addresses the intrinsic needs of all audience types. Bernice McCarthy called her model the 4Mat System.
4Mat recognises that individuals need to have four key questions answered. In some cases the questions are explicit and known by the audience virtual’ in nature and therefore not yet conscious for either the presenter or the audience member.
4. Give your event/speech a meaningful title.
Now for the speech itself, remember it’s the reason everyone is showing up in the first place. After writing your speech and understanding what you wish for the audience to take away from it, it’s essential to give your event/speech a meaningful title.
Maybe it’s a powerful quote from your speech or a short summary of the topic. Whichever title you choose, this is how the audience will not only remember and it will affect how they talk about your event before and after the speech.
Try choosing a title that is catchy, and that can get a conversation going. Imagine being an attendee and try thinking, what’s in it for me? Or, what will be memorable? What will provoke me to be interested enough to start a conversation?”
Use Chat GPT if you’re struggling to be creative!
5. Practice your speech.
So many people say they are not a good at public speaker. When I quiz them I often find that they throw together their presentation at the last minute and rarely rehearse. Exceptional presenters rehearse. And they rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. “But,” said a participant in one of my programs, “Seinfeld doesn’t rehearse, he does those jokes off the cuff.” Really? Are you sure? Most comedians I know put an extraordinary amount of effort into their comedy and they rehearse the same skit or line over and over so that their voice, body language, and facial expressions are congruent and make it as funny as possible. They rehearse so that they achieve their objective. As presenters we should do the same.
Related article : Top Tips for rehearsing your presentation
If your content, presence, and delivery are all well executed, you have a great opportunity to make an impact on your listeners.
Additionally, if public speaking is something you’d really like to try, you may like to think about joining the peak body for speakers. This is where you meet other speakers, learn from them, and fast track your speaking career.
There is a peak body in nearly every country in the world. I live in Sydney, Australia so my peak body is Professional Speakers Australia.
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©2024 MICHELLE BOWDEN is an authority on persuasive presenting in business. She’s run her Persuasive Presentation Skills Masterclass over 1000 times for more than 13,000 people over the past 25 years and her name is a synonym for ‘presentation skills’ in Australia.
Michelle is a multi-million-dollar pitch coach to her client list that reads like a who’s who of international business: banking and finance, IT, pharmaceutical, retail, telecommunications plus many more.
Michelle is the creator of the Persuasion Smart Profile®, a world-first psychological assessment tool that reports on your persuasive strengths and weaknesses at work, the twice best-selling internationally published author of How to Present: the ultimate guide to presenting live and online (Wiley) and How to Persuade: the skills you need to get what you want (Wiley). Visit our website here
