5 Principles To Improve Your Public Speaking

Over a year ago I decided to join Toastmasters in an effort to improve my public speaking skills. I was never a terrible public speaker to begin with, but I wasn’t terrific either. I understood that being an effective public speaker was an important part of being a man and a leader. After all, if you can’t string together coherent sentences in front of a large group of people, how will you ever be able to lead them? So I took action and decided to join a local Toastmasters group.

In my experience with Toastmasters, I have learned a lot of different things that make someone an effective public speaker. The following are five principles that I think will make anyone a better public speaker and communicator:

1. Avoid the use of filler words when speaking

I would say this is the most common error people make when speaking in front of a crowd. When people are speaking there is a tendency for them to use filler words (e.g. uhh, umm, like, so etc.) in an effort to buy their brains enough time to come up with another thought. Cut this out to immediately sound more polished. Next time you feel like saying “uhh”, pause instead. Wait until you get your next thought in your head and then continue speaking. This will create natural pregnant pauses in your speech that will make you seem more intelligent, poignant, and confident.

2. Maintain solid eye contact

When you are speaking in front of an audience, it is important that you make and maintain eye contact. Making and maintaining eye contact shows people that you are confident in what you are saying. Excessively nervous individuals will have a tendency to avoid eye contact (usually they will look straight ahead or to the side). Make sure to let your gaze linger just a bit longer than you feel is comfortable. Eye contact is very powerful in creating an intimate, seductive environment, and the best speakers know how to use this to their advantage.

3. Use your body

We all know the importance of body language in pick up. The same is true when we speak in front of a group of people. Next time you have to do a presentation or a speech, move around the room. Pace a little. Use the space. This will convey to the audience that you are relaxed and comfortable in your environment. Use your hands and body to make controlled, open gestures, which is another sign of high confidence. Just about the worst thing you can do is stand there like a stiff board with your hands in your pockets.

4. Alter your voice

This principle is a bit more advanced but it really separates the great speakers from merely the good ones. The ability to use your voice by altering its pitch and tone can dramatically improve your speaking. In fact, without this ability you will come off as flat and monotone (sort of like the teacher in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). People will tune you out. Furthermore, it’s important that your voice inflects to complement the emotion you are trying to convey. So when you are speaking about something sad your tone becomes more sombre, compared to when you are speaking about something exciting when your voices raises a few octaves.

5. Rehearse Your Material

This principle is a bit different from the others but is just as important. In order to be a good speaker, you need to practice. For example, think of the last time you watched a funny comedian on stage. Do you think he just thought up a bunch of jokes and jumped on stage to deliver them? Of course he didn’t—he practiced that material over and over again. He refined his delivery and honed his craft until he came up with something funny. You should treat your presentations and speeches the same way. Rehearse your material enough so that you feel comfortable with it. Once you get there, delivering it in front of your audience will be that much easier.

So there you have it, five principles that will immediately make you an effective public speaker. But take another look at those principles; do you notice anything about them? If you realized that these principles will also make you better at attracting women you would be correct. If you apply these principles to your game I guarantee you will also be more successful with women.

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About the Author

Mr. Honey Badger is a Canadian freelance content writer and fitness enthusiast.

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WhoCares

Or…… Jack off before going on stage
Martin F. Mayhem

Good quality, yet simple, stuff here. Anyone that disagrees with post should watch Jerry Rice on ESPN. The best WR in history is simply painful to watch on TV as an analyst and he fails on all five Mr. Honey Badger points. Look for Jerry to eventually go the way of Emmitt Smith (“He done good…”). Gee, can’t believe I just denigrated Jerry and Emmitt.
crash025

Couldn’t have said it better my self. I wrote a bit about it with a few more items that I noticed. http://theexceptioncatcher.com/blog/2013/02/a-skill-that-all-technical-people-can-use-system-administrators-database-administrators-developers-etc/
curiouser

I’m posting this here because I don’t have an account at Roosh V forum:

Can someone give me the background on the “Indian Race Troll”? It appears he’s an infamous troll on not just roosh’s forum, but other man-centric forums as well. Just curious what this guy’s deal is.
- anon1
  
  There’s one guy that keeps coming back in many forms who’s indian and has a deep seated inferiority complex about his race and being able to game women of other cultures, most specifically ‘white women’. there maybe other indian trolls, but this is the famous one. have a look through the ROK articles and you’ll see references to him and an alleged picture of the guy
  - http://twitter.com/llRajSll Raj Sandhu
    
    Hope forum won’t judge me on the basis of some disgrace to our race.
Mr. Mitchell

Good post. What will also help with your public speaking skills is to watch videos of great speakers who give/gave speeches….for example, barack obama, martin luther king jr., bill clinton, adolph hitler. All aforementioned men are of various backgrounds, but go to youtube and watch how they deliver their speeches….whether you agree or not with what they say is immaterial; you are looking at their gestures, listening to their tonal inflection, and gauging their confidence. One good book to read is The Columbian Orator, a book that frederick douglass used to read to help him with his speaking skills. You can find that book for free by googling it.
Kuriboh

Reading this post reminded me of the character Cary played by Jason Patric in the film, “Your Friends & Neighbors”

In the movie, their are scenes where he actually rehearses what he’s going to do to women when he gets them in bed with him. His eye contact, body language, voice and avoidance of the use of filler words are spot on as well.

But for those of you who have already seen the movie, note how he tells the story of the best sexual experience he ever had.

SPOILER ALERT!:
Here’s the link to the scene I’m talking about;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ4LNIshI4o
American Yogini

“This principle is a bit more advanced but it really separates the great
speakers from merely the good ones. The ability to use your voice by
altering its pitch and tone can dramatically improve your speaking.”

It can be difficult in the beginning because we are so used to be “natural” with our voices. I am a very clear, concise, and vocally strong speaker but I found that for some reason some people think I come off “angry” or “harsh” when I’m just talking naturally and presenting logical facts. In my field there’s a lot of new agey types and they, both male and female, are all about the “soft tones” and sort of raspy or airy faux mystical persona. I have found that when I have consciously made my voice softer (not audibly lower or lighter, just softer) and when I smiled a lot, I could say they exact same things I said before but no body thinks I’m “angry” or “harsh” anymore.

Of course I keep reverting back to my natural way of speaking mid-speech, but at least they got the soft, sweet, ethereal goddess in the first 1/3 of my speech.
- Stuki
  
  Man, after watching the Oscars, I’d say just try to sound like Seth McFarlane. Damn, he’s a good presenter, with a wonderful Baritone voice.
Percy Ruxman

If you wear glasses or contacts, here’s a tip, don’t use them. Faces and environment of the room will become blurred disconnecting you from the audiences expressions. This is good for the beginner when you get used to it put the glasses back on or contacts. That benefitted me when I played in a band.
- lurker
  
  If you do that, you can’t see the girls in the audience dropping IOIs as you speak.
- Stuki
  
  Reminds me what I call the “Bill O’Reilly” technique for “overpowering” others i a public debate/shouting match: Pipe whitenoise to earbuds when you speak, so that you simply cannot be interupted. Then, when you have finished your sentence on your own merry time; turn the noise off and listen for a response.
  
  Not that Bill O’Reilly does this, but he’s just such a natural at completely tuning out opponents, that he always ends up setting the frame in every debate; no matter how wrong and misguided he may be. Which, given what hundred years of publicly funded universal indoctrination have done to Americans’ critical facilities, lead 90% of the audience to believe he “won” the debate regardless.
  
  The whitenoise earbud is simply a way for us less naturally obnoxious to keep up with the O’Reillys.
Turbo the Drycleaner

Another good one to remember: speak ‘in time’.

buy a metronome, set it to some time youre confortable speaking at, then practice. You can take pauses and whatnot but when youre speaking dont break the time by speaking slower or faster than the metronome is counting. This will give your speech a very pleasant, almost musical quality that will make people want to listen.
The Private Man

I also covered some of this. To fix the vocalized interruptions, check out the solution in item three. It really works.

http://theprivateman.wordpress.com/2011/07/06/fix-your-damned-voice/
MaleDefined

I’d imagine many guys don’t have the experience of speaking in front of an audience of 1000+ so I’ll give my two cents when I have to do it.

Speak from your diaphragm. When giving a speech to a large number of people, you’ll be using a microphone so you don’t necessarily need to speak louder, but you’ll need to speak deeper to catch and command attention. To practice this, stand up straight and speak as if you were gathering the words from deep in your stomach or chest.

Also, tell a very brief but funny anecdotal at the beginning. A large majority of the people at a large speaking engagement are bored and want time to pass as quickly as possible. As a result, they will latch onto and laugh at anything remotely humorous. Use this knowledge to your advantage.

If all else fails, take a half of Xanax.
manjackdavey

Here is a very simple trick to improve your speaking voice: yawn. Do it right now. Fake a nice big yawn, then another one, then another, until you naturally yawn for real. This opens up your throat, deepens your voice, and improves your ability to project. I learned this from my high school drama coach, and using this technique as a warm-up before speaking I am able to be heard clearly at the back of an auditorium without a microphone. Practice yawning from time to time until you know the feel of it in your throat muscles, and your speaking voice will improve dramatically. From there it is a small step to learn how to control your intonation to reflect the mood you want to express, as suggested in point #4.

As a bonus, teach this technique to your girl, if she wants to learn to control her gag reflex.