Why do we fail as public speakers?

Why do we groan inwardly at a party when we're introduced to someone who launches into a monologue about their day?

Why do we find it impossible to connect with someone who talks to us while looking down at their feet?

Why is it hard to follow someone who uses long, complicated words and phrases to describe simple things?

Why do we find it so hard to focus when someone answers a question by explaining that there are eight points they'd like to cover?

Why do we get so irritated when we're chatting to someone who keeps looking round to speak to someone else?

I'm sure I don't need to spell out the answers. Each comes across as rude, thoughtless or dull. Instinctively, we just don't like being at the receiving end of any of them.

And yet for so many of us, the moment we stand up to speak in front of an audience we fall into so many of those traps. Not deliberately, of course. We're desperate to be interesting and informative. To create the right sort of impact. To deliver some pithy messages. And to be liked. But under pressure we revert into something very different.

We write notes packed with too much detail. We speak for too long. We become self-conscious so we rush. We fear that our audience might be bored, so we try to avoid their gaze. We become over-formal and immediately less likeable.

It’s not just us. We all have a colleague who is charismatic over a coffee but stupefying on stage. We have friends who make us laugh in the pub but have bored an audience rigid at a wedding reception.

The good news is that it is completely possible to take ‘coffee shop’ you into a formal setting; to perform in front of a crowd at the very top of your game. It’s a question of working backwards. Understanding what your audience wants to hear and how they are most likely to be persuaded. It means understanding how to prepare relevant and clear content, and to deliver it with convincing body language and a compelling tone. 

Please let me know if you’d like me to send through links to articles on each of those three: Content, Body Language and Tone. The answer to every question posed at the top of the screen can be found in at least one of them.