Would you like to enhance a feeling of confidence and being able to be in touch and on top of your audience?
Would you like to enhance your presence and charisma in front of your group in a way optimizing motivation and receiving applause?
Would you like to speak so engaging that in one moment your listeners go into pindrop silence, the next moment eliciting tears and thereafter breaking out into deep laughter.
Are you ready to do so? Then please read on.
Team leaders, supervisors and leaders of any kind are requested to speak in front of groups, but no one gave them any training or any help to do so. Entrepreneurs deciding to become a trainer are in the same situation. If you are required to do any public speaking and feel awkward about it, feel welcome to the club!
Standing up in front of a group and speaking is not supposed to be comfortable. This is because you are not interacting with one individual to which you could give your eyes, listening and personal touch. A group cannot be addressed as if one. You are all of a sudden in front of many and that moment of heightened adrenals is just a signal from your sub-conscious to do something to see everyone, be able to listen between the lines and the innate desire to be in touch with everyone.
In my research I came up with that the sub-conscious is simply afraid of being disconnected and more than the phenomenon of imagining all listeners will break out into the most dreaded “boo-response”. Have you ever thought about that it could be just one part deep inside yourself afraid of being disconnected, and wanting to be connected? Expecting to have no heightened heart-beat or discomfort when speaking in front of an audience would be just like asking a child to sit on the bike for the first time straight keep driving and not fall.
It is important to know this feeling of discomfort is normal. Yes, some of us are more prone to stage freight than others. Some of us naturally spoke to bigger groups already when we were young. However, I don’t know anyone who did not feel the butterflies when delivering a new topic and standing in front of an audience for the first time. I was not able to find psychometrics, generalizations or any reasons that satisfactorily would describe why someone does and someone else does not have such type of fear. It is certainly more to be found within people experiencing introversion. Someone who feels an automatic connection with others by default, of course, will have a much easier time.
Researching the phenomena of stage freight within public speaking made me believe that there is not such a thing called stage freight in not even 4 % of what people describe. I found, and continue to verify, that this phenomenon is directly related to this inner desire to connect and feel connected.
This ability to connect with a group of any size of people entails professional skills that must be learned and practiced. Feeling fully at ease, confident and even more than that, exhilarated, is a competency that comes through practicing.
Developing yourself through public speaking, presentation or train the trainer workshops you will get the time and practice to adopt the tips and tricks that make you feel confident at any time and with any group or audience. These are simply professional skills that should be offered in a corporate environment to everyone who is asked to deliver a speech and it certainly is something every trainer, technical or soft skills, or of any kind, should give to themselves as part of their education.
As a leader consider developing your people to improve motivation and persuasion with advanced interactions skills, conflict resolution, mediation and presentation skills consider it investment into glorifying your company’s image. If you would like to simply communicate more promptly and versed, if you would like to come across more congruent and competent, if you would like to up-scale your public speaking skills from average to amazing, I strong suggest doing something about this.
