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When you tell a story, you need to know how to bring the pages to life

Babe Ruth was great at baseball. Michael Jordan was fantastic at basketball. Joe Namath was a master of the game of U.S. football. As public speakers we’d like to be known as being the best at what we do. All of these sports stars had talents that made them better than everyone else. Guess what – there’s a speaking skill that can make you better than every other speaker out there!

Why Storytelling Matters

When you are giving a speech, you know that one of the benefits of public speaking is that you are in a position to both entertain and motivate your audience. The trick is finding a way to do both of these tasks effectively.

Speakers have a number of different skills that allow them to understand what their audience both wants and needs: listening skills, a presentation tip or two, and storytelling. Of these, storytelling is the most powerful.

The reason that spending your time developing your storytelling skills is well worth the investment is because stories are the way that mankind has been exchanging information since the beginning of time. As humans, we are hardwired to listen when someone tells us a story. This is exactly what you want your audience to be doing when you are speaking.

The importance of public speaking is that you can connect with your audience and, with a little luck, change their lives. If you have the ability to do a good job of telling them stories that make your point, then making that connection just got a whole lot easier to do.

3 Secrets To Telling A Story Well

Saying that you want to develop your storytelling skills is one thing, finding out exactly how to go about doing it is something else. Craig Harrison is a professional storyteller who has studied what it takes to tell a good story. He has three suggestions for how we can become better at this critical speaking skill:

1. Use Your Voice: When we are telling a story, one of our most powerful tools is our voice. When a story has multiple people in it (and what story doesn’t?), if you take the time to make each person’s part of your story sound different, then your audience will be able to follow along much easier. No, we may not be professional voice actors, but it doesn’t take that much of a change to create a unique “voice” for each character in your story.

2. Take Over The Stage: Your body is another important tool that can really help your audience get into the story that you are telling. In order to use this tool most effectively, you need to use the entire area that you’ve been given to speak in. Different parts of your story can take place in different parts of your stage. Moving from one location to another can show your audience that a change is happening in your story.

3. Don’t Say Anything: As speakers we often spend a great deal of time thinking about what we’ll say next. When you are telling your audience a story, you need to spend your time thinking about the next time that you are going to stop talking and pause. The silence that comes along with a pause is a powerful tool that allows your story to sink into your audience’s heads before you move on to the next part of your story.

What All Of This Means For You

In order to become a speaker that everyone wants to hear, you need to develop the skills that will make you want to be heard. One of the most important of these skills is the ability to tell stories well.

It turns out that storytelling is an art that can be learned. Three of the most important skills that you’ll need to develop include using vocal variety when telling your story, using your entire stage to support your story, and discovering how to use pauses to draw your audience into your story.

It’s not impossible to become a great storyteller, it just takes practice. By focusing your practice time on developing these three skills you can transform your next speech. You’ll become the storyteller that everyone wants to hear from so that they’ll be able to find out how the story turns out in the end!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that it is possible to use too much vocal variety while giving a speech?

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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

A quick question for you: are you afraid to fail? Would you be willing to get up and give a speech if you knew that it was going to turn out badly? Even though we all know the importance of public speaking, I’m willing to bet that a lot of us would say “no” – speakers who do a good job get asked to speak again, those who don’t are never asked back. However, I’m going to tell you that you’re wrong – get ready to fail if you want to succeed.

Related posts:

1. The 3 Keys To Telling A Good Story During A Speech Once you’ve found a way to overcome the fear that...
2. Video: Persuade An Audience Using 3 Secrets Used By Presenters http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUB0PYL7H9U Dr. Jim Anderson investigates how a speaker can persuade...

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In public speaking, as in sports, practice makes perfect…

Are you ready to kick your speaking skills up to the next level? If you are, then do you know how to become better? If you are thinking that you need to get one of those “fancy word of the day” calendars to practice with, that’s not going to do it. In fact, the secret to becoming a better speaker has nothing to do with learning a new skill. Rather, it has everything to do with becoming better at something that you should already be doing – practicing your next speech.

Why Practice Really Matters

For most of us, speaking in public is not the only thing that we do during a given day. What’s interesting is that we seem to understand that for most things in our life if we want to get better at them, then we need to practice.

However, when it comes to public speaking, for many people practice is not something that they do. Instead, all too often speakers seem to pull together a speech, glance at it before they take the stage and then go out and wing it.

Ouch, speaking as an audience member I can tell when you are winging it and it’s not pretty. In order to boost your speaking skill level, you’re going to not only have to practice but also practice right. It’s time to go over some advanced practice techniques.

5 Ways To Improve How You Practice Your Next Speech

Speaker Roena Oesting is a speaker who has taken the time to study the best ways to practice giving a speech. Based on her research, here are 5 advanced practice techniques that you need to start to use:

• You’re Perfect – Not!: The first thing that you need to realize about practice is that it’s going to make you a better speaker, but it’s not going to make you perfect. Don’t think that you’re going to have to keep practicing until you become perfect, you’re goal should simply be to become better every time you practice your speech.
• Learn From The Past: We’ve all given speeches in the past and based on these speeches you should have some feedback. Hopefully you have written evaluations that you can refer back to. In the worst case, give a call to someone who was in the audience last time you gave a speech and ask them what you need to change in your next speech.

• Practice! You are only going to become better by practicing your speech, take the time to run though it from start to finish. Don’t worry about mistakes you make – keep on going until you reach the end of the speech. You need to get a “feel” for how the whole speech fits together.

• Give It A Rest: After you’ve practiced the speech a few times and feel that you have it pretty well under control, back off. Put your speech away for the rest of the day and even a full day if you have the time. Getting some distance from your speech will allow you to come back to it with a fresh outlook later on.

• One More Time On The Big Day: The day that you will be giving your speech, make sure that you carve out enough time to practice the speech one more time fully from start to finish. Once you’ve got this taken care of, put it away and know that you are now fully ready to deliver a a great speech.

What All Of This Means For You

For some reason the thing that we know about sports, singing, and games that we play – that practice makes us better – seems to escape us when it comes to public speaking. As a group, we all seem to try to minimize how much we practice the speeches that we give – do we really think that we’re that good?

If you want to take your speaking skills to the next level, then you need to start to use the 5 advanced practice techniques that we’ve discussed. This includes realizing that you’ll never be perfect, using your notes to improve, practicing again and again, and taking a break in between practice sessions.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: When do you think you should practice your speech on the big day – early on or just before you take the stage?