Body and Mind in Public Speaking

The connection between mind, body and voice is beneficial for effective public speaking. Feeling confident and strong in both your voice and your body will free your mind to ensure a good performance.

The voice is an extremely powerful tool to establish a favorable outcome when making presentations or delivering speeches. The effectiveness of a good, loud and clear voice is undeniable.

TIPS FOR USING THE VOICE:

1. Make sure your audience can hear you. If your audience has a hard time hearing the words you’re saying, they can’t focus on the meaning behind the words. Articulate and project your voice. Good pronunciation establishes authority and trust. When you use acronyms or abbreviations, don’t assume your audience knows what you mean, so explain it to them.

2. Use a microphone. Practice with it, understand how to hold the microphone, change the position of the microphone stand, and make sure there is no feedback with a sound check. Ask someone if you can clearly articulate the words you are saying without hissing or clicking. Do not handle it as if it is a foreign object or if you are afraid of the microphone. He will look like an amateur and his audience will be focused on his glitches rather than what he is saying. Make it a part of you and forget about it once you’re ready.

3. Don’t lose your audience with monotony. Reading by heart or reciting by heart is inherently boring and will lose your audience to old bad memories of listening to boring teachers and putting them to sleep. Use pauses, variety in tone of voice, and eye contact to interact with the audience and make a point. Present an idea, ask a challenging question, and illustrate a thoughtful moment with a nod and direct eye contact followed by a smile. The impact and power of your statement will come. If you need to pause to collect your thoughts, do so. The audience will wait if you are confident and will add anticipation to your speech. Avoid filler words like ‘uh’ or ‘um’, silence is better than nervously filling the space. Practice in front of someone you trust who can point out fillers in your speech to safely draw your attention to your style.

4. Vary the volume of power in your voice. Strong projection can be effective, but since monotone is boring, being consistently loud is just another form of the same thing. Think about how effective a strong, calm, and controlled voice is. Often times, the idea behind emotional volume can be conveyed in a calm, powerful voice to illustrate a point. It is a theory of opposites. Saying something you really want to shout for attention can be most effectively driven home with calm, controlled security.

5. Make sure to gesture. A talking head standing on a podium like a stuffed corpse is not very interesting. Let your enthusiasm for your topic translate through your body. The use of hands, eyes, body movements, and the occasional grand gesture will add power to the speech.

BODY MOVEMENTS AND GESTURE TIPS:

1. Descriptive Gestures: Used to illustrate distance, location, size, shape, or any other physical description of what you are talking about, they will encourage and hold your audience’s interest and your own.

2. Emphatic Gestures: Emphasizing a point, phrase, or key word through emphatic hand or finger gestures directs the audience’s attention to PAY ATTENTION NOW. This should come naturally as your speech is delivered. Use it sparingly as anything repeated too often loses its power.

3. Express enthusiasm: Your tone of voice, gestures, and facial expressions allow you to physically share your enthusiasm for the topic with your audience. Your audience isn’t interested in seeing a robot, so act like a lively, excited human.

4. Vary your enthusiasm: Repetition is the death of your public speaking. High-level energy and enthusiasm become as boring as robotics, talking too low. Find where you want the biggest impact to be made in your speech, and express great enthusiasm where appropriate.

5. Use your eyes: In everyday interaction, eye contact is very important to understand what and who you are talking to. The eyes are the window to the soul and if you, as a speaker, can connect with the audience by looking directly at them, your character and conviction will shine through, making the audience trust what you are saying and that you are sincere. Lack of eye contact due to nervousness will appear distant or disinterested. Use your eyes to speak to everyone in the audience, land on one person’s eye pair, make a specific statement to them, and move to a general audience look and repeat with another person. This will also help with nervousness, speaking directly to one person is inherently less daunting than a large, impersonal group of hundreds or thousands.