Activities to Improve Your Public Speaking

The anticipation of a public speaking event may be rife with anxieties. Some people simply stress over the need to be adequately prepared while others suffer from full-fledged glossophobia - a fear of public speaking. Regardless of your specific qualms about speaking in public, certain activities can improve the experience for you and the audience.

Modeling Great Speakers

• Finding great speakers and modeling their behavior is one way to improve your public speaking skills. Bakari Aki II, Ph.D. in his April 2010 article, "The Science of Confidence," explains he advises students in his public speaking course to find speakers who are masters of their trade. According to Aki, when students view and analyze the videos of great public speakers, they raise their own personal standards. Through mimicry, they can begin to incorporate similar behaviors and improve their own abilities.

Look Within

• It's easy to clam up when trying to imagine how to address a large group of people. Oprah Winfrey, in her 2003 article, "How to Talk to a Crowd," advises readers to go within and figure out the thing they truly want to communicate. She uses the example of her acceptance speech for the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award at the 2002 Emmy's. Several hours before the show, she began to think about when she first connected to the meaning of the word humanitarian and she found a crowd-pleasing anecdote to open her speech. Connecting your topic to a memory can improve your speech and help you dig deeper into the purpose behind it.

Practice

• Most activities are improved with practice. In the case of public speaking, practice is especially valuable because it allows you an opportunity to hear your speech out loud prior to giving it. Practicing in front of friends or family can add further benefits because they can critique you and offer areas for improvement in addition to providing support and encouragement. Simply practicing in front of a mirror can also be helpful to get comfortable with the speech's flow and structure.

Classes and Groups

• Joining a public speaking class or group can help you improve your ability to speak in front of crowds. The 2010 article, "A Toast to Public Speaking," in Spin News Magazine, illuminates the benefits of joining a group like Toastmasters as a way to improve speaking. Toastmasters, which started in the 1920s as a group of people trying to improve their toasts at weddings and other events, now has more than 260,000 members. Other options are community colleges classes on public speaking.