Conversational Skills Can Help Your Speaking Career

You have the necessary expertise to begin a speaking career, but how are your conversational skills?

A perfect (and free) way to practice your speaking skills is to strike up conversations with strangers. It’s a great opportunity to test your speaking skills.  In one-on-one conversations, you can closely judge how people react to your method and style. With a random audience, you have the chance to see what works and what doesn’t by observing responses to your voice, stance and topics.

Here are a few important conversation tips to help you improve your speaking skills:

Keep Your Topic Interesting

Imagine you’ve just met someone. They ask you what you do for a living, and you jump into a long-winded technical speech about your job. Although you’ve just told them all the things that you think are interesting about your job, they look around the room as though trying to find a way out of the conversation. If this happens every time you talk about yourself, you need to re-evaluate your approach.

How can you grab their attention and keep them asking questions? Genuine interest is essential to keeping a conversation flowing and making both you and your audience feel comfortable. Even if your topic isn’t exceptionally interesting, you can give it personality. Don’t just open with a joke or a bit of wit, find funny or interesting anecdotes that you can use throughout your speech. Give your information a non-traditional spin. Put control of the conversation in the hands of your audience and let them guide you.

Make Your Audience Feel Comfortable

Everyone has been in a conversation that made them extremely uncomfortable, either because the speaker was trying too hard or not trying hard enough. A speaker who is too intense or not engaged in the conversation leaves the audience looking for a way to get out of the situation. Do you know how to use eye contact and when you are using it too intensely? Speaking skills are all about the emotional connection that invites others into your dialogue. It’s always good to smile and appear friendly and harmonious.

Lack of eye contact can destroy a conversation as quickly as too much eye contact. Body language is also very important. Keep your body signals open and relaxed.  Crossing your arms in front of your chest can be very uninviting, will appear condescending and create a defensive reaction in your audience. If you are quick on your feet, you can pick up the cues and adjust your speech to incite a more favorable response from your audience.

Give Your Audience Time to Think

In order to truly listen, the audience needs to have time to hear, process and retain the information you are giving them. This takes time.  And they can’t do it properly if you talk at an impossible pace. Your speech is not a monologue, it’s a dialogue, and although your audience isn’t saying anything, if you have followed the preceding advice you know that you can get significant clues to how well they grasp the information. So, after you have talked for a minute or two, make sure to pause and give the audience time to catch everything you’ve said.

Just as you would in a conversation, take some time to feel the energy of your audience. Don’t speak again until you feel you’ve given them enough time to absorb your words and concepts. If you feel the need to keep talking when there is a silence, not only do you miss the non-verbal cues of the audience, but the speaking time is actually much shorter as well. You’ll run out of material before you run out of time. Just as in a one-on-one conversation, you can make your audience more comfortable by giving them a chance to express themselves.

Just as in one-on-one interactions, the skills you use in your speaking career should create a dialogue with your audience. The best speakers are engaging and sweep the audience into the speech with their energy and body language. Practicing your speaking skills in close situations will help you tailor your presentation into more of a dialogue to make the audience more interested, feel more comfortable and allow them time to process the information you give them. Take the time to personalize your presentation and you’ll be amazed at the results.

Pamela Weir

Pamela Weir is a Small Business Marketing professional specializing in Promotion Development, Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Content Copywriting. If you would like to hire a copywriter for your next project, contact her today to see what she can do for you.

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