Public Speaking

In order for the effort that we put into creating and delivering a speech to all be worth it, we need to get something out of the presentation. Yes, if you are being paid to speak, then you are getting something, but even then we speakers want more. What we want is for our audience ... Read more

As the person with the CIO job, we like to spend our time looking forward and thinking about the importance of information technology. Trying to detect IT trends and then positioning our IT department to be where it needs to be in order to take advantage of changes when they occur. What we generally don’t ... Read more

As speakers we understand the importance of public speaking and so we want the time and energy that we put into creating and delivering a speech to be worth something. There are a lot of different ways to measure just exactly how effective a speech that we give is, but it’s ultimately our ability to ... Read more

I don’t mind telling you that I’d like to become a better speaker. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that because of the importance of public speaking you pretty much feel the same way. However, we always face the big challenge – what do we need to do in order to become better? Should ... Read more

Once you get over the shakes and nerves that go along with standing in front of a group of people and delivering a speech, your next big challenge is going to be finding ways to get better in order to maximize importance of public speaking. Deep down inside, what each one of us would like ... Read more

Take it from me: giving a speech is hard work. When you are asked to give a speech, you’ll spend time thinking about what you want to say, you’ll go through multiple versions of creating your speech, and then you’ll actually end up delivering it. Now the reason that you did all of this was ... Read more

How much time do you think that you’ll be given to deliver your next speech? I’m willing to bet that the original amount of time that you are told that you’ll have will more often than not turn out to be more than what you actually end up with despite the importance of public speaking. ... Read more

I speak English. Unfortunately, all I can speak is English. However, the good news is that I do a pretty good job of speaking English. Whenever I have an opportunity to hear a non-native English speaker deliver a speech, I often find myself starting to think that despite the importance of public speaking how they ... Read more

So when was the last time that you did something that you had to apologize to somebody for doing it? If you are like most of us, it’s probably been awhile – we don’t really like to go to the effort of doing the whole formal apology thing very much. However, as public speakers, if ... Read more

No matter how happy (or scared) you might be when you are asked to give a speech to an audience, you are looking at a lot of work to get ready from the moment that you say “yes” to the moment when you take the stage. Since you are going to have to go to ... Read more

I’m pretty sure that we’ve all heard the old phrase “laughter is the best medicine”. What this means for us as speakers is that because of the importance of public speaking during our next speech we’d like to be able to get our audience to laugh with us one or more times. Although this may ... Read more

In a speaker’s bag of tricks, humor is one of the most powerful tools that any of us have to maximize the importance of public speaking. However, despite being powerful to use, humor is notoriously difficult to use correctly. It can be all too easy to come up with something that we think is outrageously ... Read more

One of the most difficult things for a speaker to realize when we are giving a speech is what will not be controlling the impact of our speech. We spend so much time working on exactly what words we want to say and then we seem to spend just as much time working on the ... Read more

When I give a speech, at the right spots in my speech I would like my audience to laugh. I must confess to never being quite sure how best to go about making this happen. I have spent a great deal of time studying how to add humor to a speech, but my attempts to ... Read more

In order to give a great speech, everything has to come together for us. We tend to spend a lot of time worrying about many of the easy-to-see details that contribute to the importance of public speaking such as lighting, microphones, etc. However, it turns out that the most important things that relate to giving ... Read more

Awhile back, writer Dave Zielinski got together with Marilyn Vos Savant and had a chat with her about the importance of public speaking and how we can all be more effective at delivering the benefits of public speaking. If you don’t know who Marilyn is, she’s been identified as one of the smartest people in ... Read more