How to Build Your Confidence for Public Speaking

Public Speaking might probably be one of the most difficult things because you need to take care of many little things in front of the public. You need to choose strong words, good gesture and posture, formal dress etc. But one thing that can fail/pass all those things is your confidence. While public speaking, confidence is the most important factor that you must have. You must not shiver at any cost because shivering may cause several bad things to happen like forgetting your speech or presentation, confusion etc and you give up on presenting or speech before time. This does not leave a good mark on your audience and you end up embarrassing on what you have done. Well it happens most of the time with most people. But this problem can be overcome and my purpose of writing this blog is to abduct that public apprehension from you. So let’s get started…

1.    Believe in yourself:-

Many people just sit idle hoping that they don’t get chosen for public speaking. Because they simply think that they can’t do it. Seriously, they can’t, because we know ourselves better and we know what we can do and what we can’t. Right? Well in some extent right but how we become aware of ourselves? We become aware of our own selves by experiencing things. For example if we are offering some work like writing a blog. We may first think we can’t write a blog it’s difficult or something like that without even trying. But once we try we might end up proving ourselves wrong. Similarly in public speaking we first have to experience that then we have to decide whether we can do it or not and for that we have to believe in ourselves. Most of the time believing in yourself results in success because if you think you can, you certainly can. So the first point that you must do is to believe in yourself.

2.    Practice before you Speak:-

Practice makes a man perfect. We have often heard or read this famous quote. This quote gives us the idea that by practicing we can do anything. For public speaking you certainly need a good practice.

a.     First of all prepare your presentation, proof read that and then pick those points that you can further elaborate while speaking in public. But remember those points should cover the main idea of your whole presentation.

b.     Next try to memorize those points in order to lessen your chances of forgetting those.

c.      Present yourself in front of your own. You can take help from a mirror. Lock your room and present yourself in front of a mirror by assuming that you are your audience. Keep your voice loud and proper; keep your pronunciation proper like you intend to do in front of your audience.

d.     If you feel hesitation, congratulations you have finally caught your weakness.

e.     Keep trying until you get rid of your hesitation.

3.    Work on your Weaknesses:-

While practicing in front of mirror you might recognize your weaknesses other than hesitation. Like forgetting words, giggling, mumbling, looking at the sky to memorize etc. Well these all factors can be counted as your weaknesses. You need to work on them. You need to totally get rid of them in order to impress and get good remarks from your audience. For that you need to keep practicing in front of yourself.

4.    Present yourself in front of someone else:-

You can prepare yourself for public speaking in front of someone else as well. That someone can be your siblings, your parents, your friends, your teachers etc. They might point out your mistakes and give you suggestions on how to overcome those mistakes. But you have to present yourself formally like you will in front of your audience.

5.    Be Confident:-

Confidence will be major part to play a major role. You need to have confidence on yourself. You need to maintain eye contact with each and every individual. You need to stand still like a gentleman and you have to be attentive. There might be some people in your audience who make you laugh during your presentation but you need to have a proper control on yourself. During presentation you can do certain things to maintain your confidence like:

a.     You can stand in your specific chosen space. Many people feel comfortable like that.

b.     You can hold a pen or a marker in your hand.

c.      You can move here and there not so frequently.

And one more thing, be ready for the rapid fires. I mean questions that your audience may ask from you regarding your topic.  They might complicate you by asking off the topic questions but you can excuse them in a well mannered way. If you know the answers spit them out but if you don’t know any answer you might pardon them but you shouldn’t feel embarrassment because everyone makes this mistake.

Those are the points that I followed because once I was a coward as well. But once I started to catch my weaknesses I simply worked hard on removing them and now I am able to speak in front of the public and I am sure you can do that as well. Good luck for your future and good luck for your public speaking career.