A great and some might say an essential element that will help you succeed across several domains of life is communicating your ideas clearly while presenting them openly in a public forum.

Undoubtedly, being a good public speaker can help you advance your career, grow your business, and form strong collaborations. It can help you promote ideas and move people to action on issues that affect them directly or even society at large. In order to do these things well though, a significant amount of standing in front of an audience is required so you can either deliver a pitch, an idea, or a body of work. More often than not, the only thing that stands between you and your audience is fear.

“Public speaking” is one of most popularanswers given by people when asked “what terrifies you?”. Interestingly enough, the majority of human beings are terrified of the thought of public speaking because they want to make a great impression and are afraid that the stress and anxiety will not allow them to.

Thankfully, the Partners In Excellence networking conventions provide the perfect medium in order for you to reach the maximum possible number of relevant people and each speaker is provided with 90 seconds to successfully pitch their idea. Nevertheless, below are some key ways which can help you overcome the fear of public speaking and excel during the 90 – seconds – to – impress session.

 

A great advice is to firstly change the way you think of public speaking, Robert Dixon actually broke it down into four

straightforward steps:

  1. Accept that you are uncomfortable.
  2. Recognize that you have something of importance and value

for the audience. They are eager to hear from you.

  1. The audience wants you to be successful, [so] think of them

as friends.

  1. Stop thinking about it as a presentation. Instead, think about

it as telling a story.

PUBLIC SPEAKING IS A SKILL THAT CAN BE LEARNED.

Of course there are many talented speakers who make you think that either you have this innate ability of shining in front of a crowd either you are better off shying away entirely. Well guess again, public

speaking is a skill that can actually be learned – you do not have to be born with it. Anyone can be an effective presenter or speaker if they are willing to learn the skills. Skills are learnable. Thinking about something as a skill set allows the mind to believe it can learn how to do that thing. Just think back in time, the skills that you have now mastered, once you started you were clumsy and awkward, you simply mastered them because you believed that they were essential to your wellbeing – the same mindset is to be applied in this case as well.

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT.

Since public speaking is a skill that can be learned, it will take a lot of practice in order to achieve the wanted results. Practice in front of a mirror in order to be able to study your facial expressions, a great way

to further enhance your point is the emotions displayed on your facial expressions. Once you get comfortable with practising in front of the mirror then record yourself, this will enable you to have a clear image on how body language and your posture in general plays a key role in a presentation. By playing back the recording you can see all the areas you can correct but its also a great way to see the “before” and “after”. Boosting your confidence is essential and seeing all the progress you made from the first time you recorded yourself to the last is the best way to do that.

THE ILLUSION OF TRANSPARENCY.

The illusion of transparency is a form of cognitive bias that causes us to overestimate people’s ability to know our  emotional state. Remember, just because you are in direct contact with your thoughts and emotions does not mean that the audience is. You could be on the verge of a breakdown but if you control your voice tone for example, the audience will have no clue. Itamar Shatz explaines, “Research on the topic shows that simply being aware of this bias can help us reduce its influence, which could allow you to feel less anxious and more confident while you’re presenting. Before giving a talk, if you’re feeling nervous, try to remember that the people in the audience can’t tell how nervous you are, even if it seems obvious to you.”