What is the most important thing you focus on when you have a date to speak? Is it your content? Perhaps it is your nerves. Maybe you focus on your delivery. What is important to recognize if you are interested in improving your presentation skills is that the reason for public speaking is not about you. It's about them. You may be excited about an upcoming speaking engagement or the mere thought of it may bring about debilitating fear. Whatever your physical and/or emotional feelings about addressing an audience, what is vital to understand is that you have a group of people who have gone out of their way to hear you. In most cases, those in attendance have a problem or an issue which is your job to solve. Let's say that your goal is to be a motivational speaker. Why will people be drawn to attend your speaking engagement? It should be because you have the answer to their problem. Therefore, it is necessary to look at public speaking from the point of view of your audience. What is there reason for being there? Too often novice speakers dwell more on their delivery, their content, their excitement, their product, or their nervousness and not on the true issue of communicating with an audience. You have a responsibility to deliver a message. It is the message which they have come to hear. If you are more concerned with your nerves than with what you audience came to hear, for example, your listeners will become aware of your nervousness as well. This is not the message you should be sending. If you are more concerned with your delivery than communicating your message, then your audience will perceive you as being insincere. Perhaps you have a book, a bootcamp, a CD or a DVD which you plan to sell following your talk. If you concentrate on their needs, you will sell more product than if you are more concerned with the sale of your product. By focusing on communicating your message so as to solve their needs and by learning to take control of your nervousness, allowing it to work for you and not against, you will discover the business of public speaking that much easier. Appreciate that your reason for speaking is each and every person in your audience. In doing so, you will find that you will concentrate more on addressing their needs than yours. And that is what will bring satisfaction to them and gratification for you! The Voice Lady Nancy Daniels offers private, corporate and group workshops in voice and presentation skills as well as Voicing It!, the only video training program on voice improvement. For more information on upcoming workshops, visit Nancy's Voice Training Workshops.
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speaking engagement, nervous public speaking, fear of speaking, communicate with audience, deliver message,
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