Public Speaking Tips: 10 ways to speak with confidence

The first words out of your mouth are the most important ones: that is how Dr. Rosenbaum sums up his rule number one. The open textbook Stand Up, Speak Out gives the opener a budget: the whole introduction should take only 10 to 15 percent of your talk, so the attention-getter itself must be short. Right after it, make your central message unmistakable.

What to do: write your opening in full and learn it by heart. Three openers that work: a surprising fact, a direct question to the audience, or a short story of 3 or 4 sentences. Then say in one sentence what your talk is about and what they will take home.

10 to 15%

Then limit your main points with the 3:2:1 rule: the three most important things you want them to remember, backed by two concrete examples. That structure cuts rambling and keeps an impromptu speech clear. How long: writing and memorizing a 30-second opening takes about twenty minutes.

Use keyword notes instead of a script: cards with key words and phrases, not full sentences. They are your safety net, because going blank is the most common speaking problem: 38% of the 1,851 people who told AmberWillo what goes wrong said their mind goes blank, and 46% in job interviews.

A visual aid is any object, image, slide or demonstration that reinforces what you are saying. Stand Up, Speak Out lists what good aids do: they improve understanding, help people remember the message, add variety and lift your credibility. They support your speech, not the other way around.

What to do: make every visual truly visual, with an image or a chart instead of paragraphs. Keep each aid organized and simple, limit the text and make every slide legible from the back of the room.

• One idea per slide.
• An image or a chart instead of text.
• Type you can read from the last row.
• Equipment plugged in and tested before you start.

Set everything up and test it before you begin, and have a backup plan if the technology fails. How long: arrive fifteen minutes early to plug in, project and look at one slide from the back of the room.

Practicing with realistic exposure is the most reliable way to improve. The skills of a good speaker are learned by doing the real thing, often. Reading over your notes in your head does not count: stand up and say it out loud, which is also how to memorize a speech. Giving your first one? Start with public speaking for beginners. It pays off at work: in one study, college graduates named oral communication the most useful skill in the business world (Stand Up, Speak Out).

Start small and start at home. Time every rehearsal: most new speakers talk too fast, not too slowly. Say your opening alone, then in front of a friend you trust, then to a small group: that is gradual exposure. A study in PubMed Central found that practicing in front of a supportive virtual audience improves how you rate your own confidence in real life.

6in 10

How long: 5 minutes a day out loud is a realistic, measurable goal. Start on your own with an app such as Confidently. Once that feels easy, AmberWillo lets you try it on actual people: online video rooms of up to fifteen, free to start, and after each round you get a confidence score, coaching notes and a milestone. A local speaking club works too. For a toast or a job interview, see these public speaking cards by situation.

Recording yourself is the fastest way to get better at speaking in public: talk out loud, watch the recording afterwards and fix one specific thing. Rereading your notes trains your memory. Delivery only improves when you speak in real time with a bit of pressure on you.

The gains show up sooner than most people expect. Confidently has scored 8,184 practice sessions, and by their sixth to tenth session people averaged confidence scores 6.6% higher than on their first attempt: from 6.22 to 6.63 on a scale of 10. Close to six in ten people who practiced at least six times beat the score of their very first recording.

Keep each attempt short. Clarity scores are highest in practice runs of 20 to 59 seconds and fall once a run goes past a minute. Five repetitions of a 50-second answer teach you more than a single long run-through you never watch back.

Feedback is the hard part. You are a biased judge of your own delivery. Your phone camera gives you the recording but stays silent on what to change. Confidently, a speaking-practice app for your phone, fills that gap. Its free practice mode gives you a random prompt and a minute to answer out loud, then shows whether you sped up, how many times you said um, how your face looks and where you trailed off, with a confidence score.

Your voice is your main tool. Slow down: nerves speed you up, so pace yourself slower than feels normal. Vary your speaking rate: slow down on a key point and speed up a little on the supporting detail. Eliminate filler words by swapping "um," "uh" and "like" for a short silent pause. Project your energy: speak loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear you.

The numbers help you calibrate. One recommended band runs from 120 to 170 words per minute. A study in the Journal of English for Academic Purposes clocked TED talks at an average of 169, against 145 in university lectures. Above 180 words per minute, comprehension drops. Record yourself for 1 minute, count the words and you know where you stand.

169wpm

Pace is also the signal that carries the most weight: across the 8,184 sessions scored by Confidently, average confidence rose from 5.52 in the lowest pacing band to 6.68 in the highest. For volume and pitch, use the five Ps of the voice: pitch, pace, pause, projection and passion. Match your volume to the size of the room and lift it on the sentences that matter.

Feedback is your compass. Ask the people who watch you practice to be honest about what could be better, and an article in PubMed Central defines feedback seeking as information you ask for with the goal of improving your performance. Getting better at public speaking is an ongoing process, and the goal is progress.

What to do during the talk: read the audience's signals and adapt as you go. What to do afterwards: ask someone you trust for one concrete comment on one thing (your pace, your eye contact, your filler words).

4

What to do when you are on your own: record yourself and score yourself. Confidently does exactly that: answer a random prompt out loud and see whether you sped up, your ums, your face and where you trailed off. Repeat after every block of practice and compare.

Your body speaks before your mouth does. When you stand up straight, you tell the audience something without saying a word. Open, friendly body language, an unhurried pace and steady eye contact are what make you look credible.

What to do: stand up straight, shoulders back, arms loose. Use open gestures with your palms visible when you want to underline an idea. Rehearse in front of a mirror to see your posture and your gestures, a habit that coaches such as Shola Kaye keep recommending. Open posture is one of the visible habits behind public speaking confidence. Use purposeful movement too: take a few steps when you move from one idea to the next.

50/70

For your eyes, use the 50/70 rule from Michigan State University Extension: make eye contact about 50% of the time while you speak and 70% while you listen. Hold one person's gaze for 3 to 5 seconds, roughly one sentence, then move systematically around the room, as AmberWillo's eye-contact guide recommends.

Your audience is the group of people who will hear your message. Knowing them is a pillar of public speaking: an article in PubMed Central notes that knowing your audience makes the message more relevant and more personal.

Stand Up, Speak Out calls this audience analysis: learn what you reasonably can about who is listening, from their demographics to their beliefs, attitudes and values and what they already know about the topic. An open course from Texas splits it into five categories: situation, demographics, psychology, culture and prior interest in the topic.

5

• How many people will be there, and where will they hear you?
• What are their ages, jobs and cultural backgrounds?
• What do they already know about the topic?
• What do they hope to take away from your talk?
• What attitude do they bring to the topic: for, against or neutral?

What to do: before you pick persuasive speech topics or write anything, spend ten minutes on the five questions below. Then talk with them, not at them: inclusive pronouns such as "we" build a bond from the first sentence.

Stories and humor are the most direct way to make your message stick. Both are on the list of attention-getters in Stand Up, Speak Out, which defines an anecdote as a brief account of an interesting or humorous event. Letting your personality show adds a personal touch.

What to do: pick a personal story that connects with something your audience has lived through too. Tell it with a beginning, a problem and an outcome, in under a minute. Put the humor inside the story, in an observation that makes people smile, rather than a stand-alone joke.

How long: one story of about a minute for each key idea. With the 3:2:1 rule from tip 1, your two examples per idea can be two short stories.

Nerves are normal: even experienced speakers and performers feel some communication apprehension, the textbook name for this fear. The typical symptoms, according to Stand Up, Speak Out: shaking hands, sweating, a dry mouth, a pounding heart and a quivering voice. Close to 77% of people feel this fear, and between 15% and 30% have public speaking anxiety as such, according to studies in PubMed Central. When the fear of public speaking feels bigger than ordinary nerves, a step-by-step plan helps.

What to do with your body: slow, deep breaths counteract the effects of excess adrenaline, before you start and during the talk. If you want a count, use 4-7-8: breathe in through your nose for 4 seconds, hold for 7 and breathe out through your mouth for 8. AmberWillo's breathing guide suggests starting 10 to 15 minutes before you speak.

15% to 30%

About 77% of the general population fears public speaking.

What to do with your head: picture it going well and focus on your ability to handle the situation, as the ADAA advises. If practice alone only gets you part of the way, talk to a therapist: a meta-analysis in PubMed Central found a large effect for psychological interventions (Hedges' g of 0.74).

Reframe adrenaline: in studies that included public speaking, people who said "I am excited" out loud felt more excited and performed better than people who tried to calm down. Accept minor mistakes: if you stumble or lose your place, pause, breathe and keep going. Audiences do not perceive the level of nervousness that speakers report feeling.