You walk into a party, looking stunning and with a present in hand. It is a big box that you bought thoughtfully and spent hours wrapping. Will you give that beautiful box to the host? Or will you let fear hold you back?
Public speaking is similar.
If you break into a sweat when you need to speak to a group of people, you are not alone.
Psychologists have analyzed that one of the most common forms of anxiety is public speaking.
All the catastrophes that your mind has conjured, from forgetting your speech and people laughing at you or even hurling tomatoes at you, are irrational fears.
But if you can get the butterflies going crazy in your stomach to work for you, you can really start unlocking your full potential!
Why Is Public Speaking Important?
Public speaking is a critical tool in both personal and professional success. It empowers you to inform, persuade, and move people to action through everyday conversation. Delivering your message and forming connections with people requires you to talk to them. To do this skillfully, you need to master public speaking.
Professional Benefits of Public Speaking
Public speaking is a highly valued skill in the professional arena. It helps you to understand the organization well, become a better leader, and communicate your perspective effectively. Being an adept public speaker not only boosts your professional reputation but also gets your organization more business. Here’s how your skills can benefit you:
1. Career Advancement
If you want to be set apart from an ocean of resumes in the job market, your public speaking skills can play a significant role. Research shows, 70% of employers said that they tend to hire candidates who have good communication skills.
If you were asked for a sample presentation during the hiring process, you now know why. Interviews are also used as a means to evaluate a candidate’s potential for speaking in a public setting.
The higher you climb the corporate ladder, the greater the need to have proficient communication skills.
Your ideas for a new project, for instance, could be a game changer for your company. But to share them with others, you need to communicate with your audience efficiently.
In a situation whereby you are vying for a promotion, it can be useful to polish your everyday conversation skills through public speaking. Employers are often quick to notice “that person who gave that excellent presentation” and may put you forward for a salary raise.
Career and financial growth? Yes, please!
2. Builds Leadership Skills
When you exchange ideas with your team, your team members observe your style and professionalism. Confident speakers are seen as the ones taking charge and often turn out to be effective leaders and mentors.
To be able to speak clearly and succinctly is an essential skill for professionals. Your speaking style helps you to influence others, which is a crucial element of leadership.
Talking to a crowd is not optional. Strong leadership qualities can help you trust yourself in difficult times, and talk to others in a composed manner.
Like a teacher teaching a complex topic, you will be able to help people understand a problem and solve it proficiently. As a public speaker, you will nurture the giving attitude and take your mind off of yourself.
Public speaking is a talent developed over time. The confidence and critical thinking that it imparts can boost your leadership and hone your overall personality.
A good leader also provides constructive feedback to her team, which can be done by transmitting her message convincingly. A skillful speaker is thus seen as a leader who can assume responsibility and a mentor with a powerful effect on her mentees.
3. Gives Your Personal Brand More Exposure
While you have worked hard and spent sleepless nights building your product or brand, promoting it requires you to communicate clearly. Your book, music, painting, banking services, medical expertise, or any other unique product or service can benefit immensely from your public appearances.
A compelling speech can stimulate your audience to buy your products and services. You can talk on podcasts, attend in-person events, or even do a TED talk. For your audience to know that you bring something of value to them, you need to convey it adequately.
Similarly, a politician can sway the masses through the power of her words. If she loses the charm that her speech has, she may not be elected in the next term.
A powerful speaker puts this knowledge to good use and gains public attention, holding it for as long as possible. Oprah Winfrey is a leading example of how you can use your public speaking skills to build your brand and promote it to a global audience.
4. Generate Leads For Your Business
A business report loaded with data does not captivate people until an engaging presenter is explaining it. The ability to talk well can make you more confident and amiable.
When the audience understands your business, you start getting partners, expansion opportunities, and your customer base grows exponentially. It all begins with exposure and persuasive speech.
Successful sales lead generation is founded on promoting your business. You can utilize the opportunities that public speaking engagements, state conferences, and industry events provide to reach a large customer base.
5. Persuade More People to Say “Yes!” To Your Proposals
Public speaking teaches you how to read people’s body language.
When a speaker notices that her listeners are losing interest, she brings in a funny anecdote, a pause, or some persuasive words to grab their attention again. A rapt audience interested in listening to her ardently is what she gets as a consequence!
Public speaking can help you in gaining valuable insights into the feelings of your listeners and molding your presentation accordingly. This can be strategic in sales meetings and communicating the benefits of your products and services.
Public speaking can help you convert the leads that you get to a successful customer base that remains loyal to your business.
You need to win over your audience lest your competitors do it first or better. With your compelling speech and friendly body language, you can exude power and persuade people to say “yes” to your exciting pitches.
Personal Benefits of Public Speaking
The ability to talk effectively is one of the most empowering skills that you can have.
High in personal satisfaction, public speaking is a valuable asset that gives you self-confidence, helps you to understand others, and makes you a better listener.
It can help you cultivate your passion for a subject and build new friendships.
Here’s how your skills can give a facelift to your personal life:
1. It Will Give You More Confidence
Self-confidence is a fundamental trait that you can boost through public speaking.
It is not a cakewalk to take the stage and talk to people. But believing in yourself can force your harsh inner critic, fears, and anxiety to take a backseat.
Take the first step and communicate.
It is vital to understand that what you’re saying is valuable to people who want to listen.
It’s easy to have your self-worth and esteem shaken by negative self-talk and bad experiences. But this can be overturned by developing your communication habits.
Once you have learnt a rhythm that allows you to express yourself in an engaging manner, repeating will be second nature, to the point where speaking in public will not phase you.
The best part is you will be able to bring this confidence into your personal life and intimate relationships.
2. Improves Your Communication Skills
You would have noticed that people with impressive communication skills hold power over their audience.
As if under a magic spell, the audience wants to listen more, learn more, and subsequently holds the speaker in high regard.
This doesn’t happen by accident.
When working on a speech, the best presenters put a lot of thought into the framework, body language, and pronunciation. They make efforts to understand the target audience and devise the best strategy for a good speech.
These efforts improve your communication habits and social interaction skills.
Public speaking puts a focus on communicating your ideas in a manner that the audience understands.
Being able to present your perspective calmly and coherently can allow you to communicate better with your loved ones particularly in times of conflict. You can learn to defend your opinions, listen to others calmly, and make sense of both sides of an argument.
3. Start To Change The World
Public speaking has been a catalyst for global change. A potent tool for uniting people, speaking to the masses has been used by leaders to usher change in society.
A mighty example of persuasive speaking is the “I have a dream” speech by Martin Luther King Jr. that continues to inspire people all over the world to this day.
Public speaking can boost your confidence enormously. It can teach you to trust yourself and help you in developing leadership skills.
In spite of your fears of tumbling down and the audience laughing at you, you should have faith in them. They are kind and will cheer for you as you would do if you were one of the audience members.
If there is an issue that needs more attention, you can talk to people about it and communicate why it matters to them. Your speaking skills will help a lot in bringing the matter to the public’s attention.
You can reach many more people by talking to them, rather than sending out one-to-one emails.
4. Entertain Your Friends With Your Storytelling
Public speaking can make you aware of timing, where to pause, and how to change your tone while communicating. All of which are the hallmarks of good storytelling.
If you happen to be somebody who shies away from giving impromptu speeches, public speaking could benefit you by eliminating the unnecessary worries of everyday life.
Having a better public speaking ability will improve your storytelling and acting skills across a large curve as you get in the habit of speaking in front of an audience.
You also develop better articulation and have a repertoire of anecdotes to use when you talk, you can entertain your family and friends with your performance skills.
The next time you are at a wedding and are called upon to say a few words, graciously accept the opportunity and talk about that time when the couple did something humorous, or a memory close to your heart. You will be able to captivate your audience as you charm them with your words and speaking skills.
5. Gain Stronger Deductive skills
When you have to give a speech, your research skills develop as you gather information. As you sit down to draft the speech, you also develop good writing skills.
This careful analysis and preparation can polish your critical thinking skills.
When you put yourself in your listeners’ shoes and work on the speech writing process, you learn to speak effectively. You learn how to shape your views in a manner that influences your audience and allows you to speak your mind fluently.
Public speaking makes you aware of how people perceive you. You can utilize this information to improve your performance. Repeated public exposure will help you work on your gestures and vocabulary.
As you work on tweaking these factors, you will observe that people place you in a more positive and confident light.
Writing a speech can also require you to listen to other speakers. As you listen and take notes, you learn to identify the crucial arguments. This refines your analytical and rational thinking skills.
The Benefits of Public Speaking Classes
Practice makes perfect. But for a professional like you, working smarter takes precedence over working harder.
You need constructive feedback that empowers you to identify what is holding you back from creating the life you have dreamed of. You need a flexible service that can help you to work on improving your public speaking skills in the little spare time that you have.
Big Impact University will provide all of this for you and more!
Our Online Speaking Made Simple Course enables you to develop your ơn signature talking style and teaches you how to sell your business ideas to grow your customer base.
Here’s how public speaking classes with Big Impact HQ will benefit you:
1. Develops Your Critical Thinking Skills
Public speaking classes can help you to build critical thinking skills. The feedback you get from professionals will enable you to recognize different viewpoints and form and deliver a verbal critique effectively.
You could be unsure about how to present your opinions and innovations, or fear that you may be deemed disrespectful if you oppose a popular point of view. Practising with professionals can help you to identify assumptions and beliefs and use these to develop well-reasoned conclusions.
At Big Impact University, you will learn to communicate your reasoning effectively by assessing relevant information. You will learn how to answer the vital questions that your audience may have.
2. Overcome Fear of Public Speaking or Performance Anxiety
Online Speaking Made Simple will also help you to overcome your fear and anxiety of speaking in public.
It is common to be nervous when you talk to a group of people. Your fears and worries can take the form of harsh criticism and intensify your anxiety.
To curb the anxiety monster from hurting your personal and professional life, it is useful to develop your public speaking skills. While practising by yourself can help you, hiring public speaking coaches to get feedback can be beneficial. Public speaking classes will help you to learn and hone your skills by observing professional speakers.
You will learn to embrace your own signature speaking style and eliminate distractions so that you can focus more clearly on your message.
3. Make Public Speaking Your Career
Many people have made careers out of public speaking. They are usually called upon for keynote speeches, motivational speaking, as public speaking trainers, among an array of other positions. You can start your public speaking career by speaking at your organization, rotary club, or an industry conference.
A public speaking class can help you in developing confidence and condition your body language for a long and rewarding public speaking career.
You will learn about your hair twirling, filler words, lack of eye contact, among other things that you should avoid, while completing this public speaking course. By being aware, you will be able to control these ticks and focus your attention and energy on connecting with your audience.
As people respond positively, you can start getting paid for your speeches.
Conclusion
Public speaking allows you to speak your mind about topics that excite you. It gives you the chance to share your ideas with the world, and to gain and trust yourself in difficult times.
It is time to stop letting your anxiety run the show, and take the reins of the opportunities that come your way.
Now that you’re sold on the life-changing benefits public speaking can have, let us coach you on how to speak on stage, and allow yourself to flourish. At Big Impact University, you will learn how to make a “big impact” on your listeners, attract them to your service, and deliver even more value to them.
