tips before giving a speech

10 Tips for Improving Your Public Speaking Skills

Few are immune to the fear of public speaking. Marjorie North offers 10 tips for speakers to calm the nerves and deliverable memorable orations.

Marjorie North

Snakes? Fine. Flying? No problem. Public speaking? Yikes! Just thinking about public speaking — routinely described as one of the greatest (and most common) fears — can make your palms sweat. But there are many ways to tackle this anxiety and learn to deliver a memorable speech.

In part one of this series,  Mastering the Basics of Communication , I shared strategies to improve how you communicate. In part two, How to Communicate More Effectively in the Workplace , I examined how to apply these techniques as you interact with colleagues and supervisors in the workplace. For the third and final part of this series, I’m providing you with public speaking tips that will help reduce your anxiety, dispel myths, and improve your performance.

Here Are My 10 Tips for Public Speaking:

1. nervousness is normal. practice and prepare.

All people feel some physiological reactions like pounding hearts and trembling hands. Do not associate these feelings with the sense that you will perform poorly or make a fool of yourself. Some nerves are good. The adrenaline rush that makes you sweat also makes you more alert and ready to give your best performance.

The best way to overcome anxiety is to prepare, prepare, and prepare some more. Take the time to go over your notes several times. Once you have become comfortable with the material, practice — a lot. Videotape yourself, or get a friend to critique your performance.

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2. Know Your Audience. Your Speech Is About Them, Not You.

Before you begin to craft your message, consider who the message is intended for. Learn as much about your listeners as you can. This will help you determine your choice of words, level of information, organization pattern, and motivational statement.

3. Organize Your Material in the Most Effective Manner to Attain Your Purpose.

Create the framework for your speech. Write down the topic, general purpose, specific purpose, central idea, and main points. Make sure to grab the audience’s attention in the first 30 seconds.

4. Watch for Feedback and Adapt to It.

Keep the focus on the audience. Gauge their reactions, adjust your message, and stay flexible. Delivering a canned speech will guarantee that you lose the attention of or confuse even the most devoted listeners.

5. Let Your Personality Come Through.

Be yourself, don’t become a talking head — in any type of communication. You will establish better credibility if your personality shines through, and your audience will trust what you have to say if they can see you as a real person.

6. Use Humor, Tell Stories, and Use Effective Language.

Inject a funny anecdote in your presentation, and you will certainly grab your audience’s attention. Audiences generally like a personal touch in a speech. A story can provide that.

7. Don’t Read Unless You Have to. Work from an Outline.

Reading from a script or slide fractures the interpersonal connection. By maintaining eye contact with the audience, you keep the focus on yourself and your message. A brief outline can serve to jog your memory and keep you on task.

8. Use Your Voice and Hands Effectively. Omit Nervous Gestures.

Nonverbal communication carries most of the message. Good delivery does not call attention to itself, but instead conveys the speaker’s ideas clearly and without distraction.

9. Grab Attention at the Beginning, and Close with a Dynamic End.

Do you enjoy hearing a speech start with “Today I’m going to talk to you about X”? Most people don’t. Instead, use a startling statistic, an interesting anecdote, or concise quotation. Conclude your speech with a summary and a strong statement that your audience is sure to remember.

10. Use Audiovisual Aids Wisely.

Too many can break the direct connection to the audience, so use them sparingly. They should enhance or clarify your content, or capture and maintain your audience’s attention.

Practice Does Not Make Perfect

Good communication is never perfect, and nobody expects you to be perfect. However, putting in the requisite time to prepare will help you deliver a better speech. You may not be able to shake your nerves entirely, but you can learn to minimize them.

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About the Author

North is a consultant for political candidates, physicians, and lawyers, and runs a private practice specializing in public speaking, and executive communication skills. Previously, she was the clinical director in the department of speech and language pathology and audiology at Northeastern University.

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How to Give a Speech: 10 Tips for Powerful Public Speaking

When we start preparing to give a speech, it can be a nerve-wracking experience. It’s completely normal—most of us feel a combination of excitement and nerves when we’re about to take the stage.

However, with some strategic planning and practical advice, you can make sure your speech is powerful and effective. In this blog post, we’ll explore how to give a speech that will leave your audience engaged and inspired.

We’ll examine 10 tips to help you build a powerful speech, from outlining your points methodically to crafting captivating introductions . Whether you’re a beginner or experienced public speaker, these nuggets of wisdom will help you take your next speech to the next level. Let’s get started!

Quick Review of Key Points

Preparing ahead of time is the key to giving an effective speech. Make sure to structure your speaking points, rehearse your delivery, and be aware of the needs of your audience for maximum impact.

How to Prepare for a Speech

Preparing for a speech is an essential step to public speaking success. It can help to build your confidence, create content that reaches the audience, and reduce performance anxiety.

Although it can be time-consuming in the beginning, preparation will ensure less stress and more comfort during delivery. Here are some tips to consider when preparing for a speech:

Practice : Before delivering a speech, practice it out loud several times. This will allow you to gain experience in speaking without an audience and increase your confidence when you do have one.

Practicing also helps to identify awkward moments in the speech or any difficult phrases which then can be changed or removed altogether. Additionally, it helps you determine where to pause for effect. Research : Depending on the topic of the speech , research should be done beforehand to gather information that is relevant and interesting for the audience. It is important to get acquainted with the language typically used by audiences to ensure a clear understanding of what is being said.

Additionally, relevant statistics and stories concerning the topic are a great way to draw in listeners and make the presentation more engaging .

Know Your Audience : When preparing your speech, be sure to consider who will be listening. For instance, if giving a presentation at work, include industry jargon that members would understand and include relevant topics from publications that might be familiar to the employees.

On the other hand, if consulting business professionals in their field then technical language may be easier for them to comprehend than laypeople or students.

By gathering valuable information about the topic and getting comfortable with a speech’s content and delivery through practice, speakers will gain more assurance during their talk as well as respect from their audience.

Preparing beforehand not only gives insight into how to engage listeners but also encourages more meaningful conversations after the event. Now that we have discussed how to prepare for a speech let us move on to creating an outline which will provide structure during delivery.

Create an Outline

After determining the audience and purpose of your speech, the next step to effective public speaking is to create an outline .

An outline serves as a roadmap to ensure that your speech has a logical flow and contains all important points. It also can help keep you on track during the speech itself, allowing you to stay focused and organized.

When constructing an outline, consider drawing up both a main point and sub-points for each portion of the speech. Both should be relevant to the goal of the presentation and backed up by facts and research.

Brainstorming can help in this process; try grouping your ideas together in clusters to make sure you cover all possible angles.

Furthermore, writing out exact quotations or figures can prove beneficial in forming a cohesive argument. At this stage, it is also wise to decide where transitions, humor, stories, or other engaging techniques will be included.

While there are differing opinions as to whether outlines should be memorized or simply used as a reference while speaking, many agree that they should serve their purpose – not only articulate the main thoughts of the speech but also assist the speaker with maintaining focus and preventing distractions.

The debate between those who advocate for memorization versus casual consulting touches upon issues such as rehearsal time, risk of errors in delivery, ease of practice versus actual performance and more.

Each side has valid arguments that should be weighed prior to deciding what type of approach best suits your needs.

Having a firmly constructed outline acts as a valuable tool when it comes time to deliver a powerful public speech. By actively utilizing this tactic, speakers may not only enhance their clarity and coherence, but also add structure and vibrance to their presentations.

Now that we have explored what goes into crafting an effective outline, let’s dive deeper into how we can best collect resources and research our topics for maximum impact.

Collect Sources and Research

Collecting sources and research is a crucial step for any public speaking engagement. It ensures that you have the necessary information to make strong points and back up your statements.

Before writing your speech, take time to research your topic to gain familiarity with different perspectives, facts, and counterpoints. This will help you to craft an argument that can stand up to scrutiny while also adding a breadth of knowledge to your speech.

Interviews can be a powerful source of evidence and anecdotes, so try to include one or two relevant interviews in your research process. Relying solely on secondary sources such as books and articles can lead to a narrow scope of understanding.

Interviews provide an opportunity to hear directly from an expert and create an interesting dynamic in your speech by adding personal experiences as well as commentary from a professional.

In research it is important to stay objective. Gather a variety of perspectives and be open-minded about their merits. Don’t forget to consider both sides of the argument when researching for your speech.

Doing this allows you to understand the opposing perspective and enables you to anticipate potential counter arguments from your audience.

By acknowledging them beforehand, you may increase the persuasive power of your speech by showing confidence in the points you make.

Once you have collected all sources, review them carefully and separate the most pertinent information from the less useful material.

Synthesising this information into concise yet impactful points is a critical part in delivering powerful talks without overloading your audience with too much data or going off track during your speech delivery.

Organizing Your Speech

Before you start putting your words together, it’s important to consider how the different parts of a speech fit together. By taking the time to organize the ideas in your speech , you’ll be able to deliver a presentation that is well-constructed and easy to understand.

One way to help with organizing your speech is to write an outline . An outline is like a map or plan that will provide you with a framework for each section of your speech.

Start by writing out your main points and then include additional details underneath each one. This will help keep your speech focused and provide direction for where you are going next.

Another approach for organizing your speech is known as the “inverted pyramid” method. This structure starts with your conclusion at the beginning of the speech, and then works backward by providing more explanation and detail as it moves toward the introduction.

This method can be helpful when speaking about topics that are unfamiliar to the audience since it doesn’t require them to wait until near the end of the presentation to learn what you’ve been talking about.

No matter which organization approach you choose, make sure to practice it before giving your speech so that you are comfortable with its flow. Lastly, remember that it’s ok to adjust things while you speak if they don’t seem or feel quite right.

Now let’s take a look at how we can use these organizing techniques to actually put our speeches together – starting with structuring our speech.

Structure Your Speech

Creating a strong structure for your speech will ensure that the audience stays engaged and understands your main points. As you are developing an outline, map out how you want to begin and end your speech.

Break up the information into smaller sections with either verbal or visual cues so that your audience can clearly see how you are transitioning between topics . Consider adding humor judiciously throughout your presentation as this could help engage the audience and lighten any tension.

The length of your presentation is also important. You will want to make sure that you include all of the necessary information without going over time.

Oftentimes less is more; if you can say it in five minutes why use ten? Make sure that you practice timed rehearsals so that you can gauge how long you’re actually speaking.

In contrast, avoid trying to pack too much content into one presentation as this could overwhelm both you and the audience. If needed, offer supplemental reading materials for those who may be interested in delving further into the subject matter.

Paragraphs can also be helpful when organizing large amounts of content within the body of your presentation. Utilizing paragraph breaks gives your audience a break and helps to highlight key ideas or summaries before moving onto a new topic area.

Finally, it is crucial to remember what your desired outcome is from the presentation; plan accordingly by ensuring that the beginning, middle, and end serve their respective purposes and adhere to that goal.

With careful deliberations, structuring a successful presentation can be achieved with relative ease.

Having established a solid structure for your speech, it’s important to focus on another key element: rehearsal. The next section will discuss the benefits of practicing before delivering a powerful public speaking performance.

Rehearse Your Speech

Rehearsing is integral to giving a successful speech. When you rehearse your presentation, you give your mind an opportunity to become familiar with the notes and concepts that you are presenting. It also increases your confidence and reduces anxiety or self-doubt.

In fact, studies have found that those who rehearsed their presentation had higher scores in public speaking performance and language proficiency evaluations.

When it comes to how much rehearsal is enough, opinions are divided. Some people believe that over-rehearsing can lead to a more robotic speech with less natural emotion and connection with the audience .

On the other hand, others argue that no matter how well-versed someone is on the topic, additional rehearsal time improves both the delivery of the speech and memorization of key points and facts.

Ultimately, it’s important to practice until you personally find the most comfortable level for yourself, as this will ultimately result in a more engaging delivery.

Finally, if at all possible, try to practice in front of a friend or colleague for honest feedback on any elements that need improvement before the big day. Rehearsal dedication may be tedious, but it results in big rewards on stage–enabling you to deliver your content with clarity, confidence, and poise.

With thoughtful preparation complete, it’s now time to step into the spotlight and give your speech!

Giving Your Speech

The key to success when giving a speech is to be well prepared and confident. Every individual’s preparation process will vary, but the basics should stay the same.

Start by studying your content, understanding the material and being able to repeat it in your own words. Clarify any potentially difficult points. Create visual aids like PowerPoint slides or handouts that supplement the key ideas in your speech.

Practice your public speaking skills with informal conversations with friends and family or rehearse it alone in front of a mirror. Use visualization; imagine yourself confidently delivering your speech. Consider addressing a practice audience if possible to become more accustomed to a live size group.

On the day of the event, arrive early and plan for any potential obstacles: What if my computer doesn’t work? What if I forget something? Allow sufficient time for setup and check-in.

When you are ready to give your speech, take some deep breaths, focus on the positives, and distract yourself from any anxious thoughts with positive affirmations. Remember you have prepared diligently for this moment, you are well prepared and you will succeed!

Start strong by engaging the audience immediately with an attention grabbing opening statement. Speak clearly and make sure that everyone can hear and understand your message.

Slow down and emphasize points as needed throughout your presentation. Be aware of pace, volume, and tone of voice: too fast/monotone can confuse/bore listeners while pauses add a dramatic effect that keeps their interest piqued.

Ultimately, giving a successful speech will depend on knowing your material well enough to speak confidently in front of your audience without hesitation or missteps.

When you do make a mistake (and they happen!) don’t panic – know that mistakes are inevitable but don’t be discouraged; get back on track as soon as possible and continue at the same energy level you had before the mistake occurred.

Having successfully given your speech, take a moment to reflect on what went well and what could be improved upon for next time before transitioning into the next step: mastering delivery.

Master Your Delivery

Mastering your delivery is the key to an effective speech. Without purposeful body language and careful emphasis on certain words , your speech may lack wow-factor and prevent listeners from tuning in. Following these simple tips can help you get started with delivering an engaging and memorable speech:

The most important part of delivery is practice. Rehearse and perfect your speech ahead of time – this allows for more natural flow and confidence during your presentation. It also helps to create pauses between sentences for clarity, emphasize key points, and not be too casual or stiff.

Practicing inflections and varying tones adds interest to your speech by keeping listeners’ attention.

Additionally, it’s important to project your voic e so everyone in the room can hear you; make sure you’re speaking loud enough but don’t feel pressure to shout or yell at any point unless that’s part of the atmosphere of the event.

It’s also crucial to maintain good posture while speaking – stand tall with both feet on the ground, keep your back straight, hold yourself up without gesturing too much or leaning against a podium if applicable.

To further engage listeners, use purposeful hand gestures as they help emphasize certain points and add visual interest – however, avoid overusing them as it can hinders communication.

Make meaningful eye contact with audience members throughout the presentation – otherwise you might come across as unenthusiastic or bored with what you’re saying which deters attention away from the content itself.

By mastering your delivery, you can boost the impact of your presentation considerably – providing a memorable experience for your audience that stands out from others’. As such, it’s worth investing time into practicing ahead of time until delivery feels comfortable and second nature.

Having said this, making use of visual aids such as PowerPoint slides can greatly improve the impact of a speech once delivery has been mastered – let’s look into that next.

Use Visual Aids

Using visual aids can help presenters express concepts more clearly and engage the audience.

Visuals are particularly useful when conveying complex information, such as data, trends, or statistics — they impart meaning at a glance. But some public speakers may wonder if visual aids can be distracting or unnecessary.

Even though visuals can attract attention away from a presenter’s verbal delivery, carefully designed visuals can actually support the speech and help provide clarity. If done well, visuals are effective for capturing an audience’s interest and helping them to better understand the content being presented.

For example, a graph or chart should relate to the points made in the speech and should be discussed in more detail during its appearance onscreen. The presentation can also include larger images that effectively reinforce the ideas conveyed in the speech.

Videos and sound clips are other powerful forms of multimedia that could be employed to make the speech more meaningful.

To ensure that visuals enhance the message of the presentation, key factors to consider include relevancy to topic, good graphic design or aesthetics, accurate size to prevent distortion or blurriness, and seamless integration into the keynote slides or printed handouts .

In this way, visuals offer an opportunity for presenters to demonstrate their creativity and keep their audiences interested in what is being said. Thus, used wisely and aptly, visuals can add tremendous value to speeches by presenting arguments more efficiently and driving home important points. Now let’s explore effective techniques for speech giving that will allow you to craft and deliver your speeches with confidence.

Effective Techniques for Speech Giving

There are a number of effective techniques for giving a speech that will help you deliver it with confidence and poise.

First, practice your delivery in advance. You should practice both in front of a mirror or recording device to check for any distracting habits such as talking too quickly or mispronouncing words.

Second, use simple, clear language and short, concise sentences. Avoid overly technical terms and jargon that may leave your audience confused.

Third, work to establish a connection with your audience by using appropriate facial expressions and hand gestures while speaking.

Fourth, utilize effective persuasive techniques such as presenting evidence, strong arguments supported by facts, personal anecdotes and vivid metaphors.

Finally, articulate an organized structure for your speech. Your speech should have an introduction, body and conclusion to clearly communicate the main point and provide the audience with the necessary context to understand it better.

While these techniques may sound intimidating at first, they can be learned over time with practice and will make all the difference in how successful your speech delivery is received by your audience.

To build on these skills further , the next section will provide tips on how to build confidence when giving a speech.

Building Confidence

Building confidence is key when giving a powerful speech, as it will enable you to deliver the speech in a more poised and credible manner.

To create this confidence , start by understanding that any hesitation or butterflies prior to your speech are completely normal and should not be feared. Instead, view them as natural states of anticipation for something exciting, knowing that you are about to give an amazing speech.

Next, understanding who your audience is and tailoring your speech to meet their expectations will help build your confidence.

Familiarizing yourself with their interests and knowledge on the subject matter ahead of time can equip you with the understanding needed to respond appropriately if questions arise or objections surface during the speech.

Further, practice is key when building confidence for a public speaking engagement . Rehearsing with friends or colleagues before hand will give you an opportunity to learn where problem areas are within the content of your speech, as well as help solidify your delivery by becoming more comfortable with each step.

Checking sound levels in the room you’re presenting in coupled with learning where exits/emergency locations are located within that space can also help alleviate stress levels and boost self-assurance while delivering the speech.

Finally, wearing comfortable clothing and dressing professionally adds an extra layer of confidence when speaking in public.

If possible, bring an additional outfit on hand during the presentation in case of spills or accidents that would require a quick change between sections of the talk. Having this back-up plan in place can aid in keeping peace of mind at ease throughout the speech.

In conclusion, building confidence prior to a public speaking event can mean the difference between a good and great delivery of your message.

By taking into account each of these tips you can ensure that this part of your preparation runs smoothly and sets you up for success when delivering powerful speeches.

With a well-crafted note card of talking points and strong sense of self-assurance, it’s time to start speaking with passion!

Speaking with Passion

As a public speaker, your audience expects you to engage not only with your words but also with your emotions. To share the most impactful message, it is important to speak passionately about your subject.

Doing so will make your speech more memorable and thereby more effective in convincing your audience of its legitimacy.

The power of speaking authentically with emotion lies in its relatability and connection. Showing feelings allows people to connect with you as a person rather than just a speaker. It opens the door to understanding through empathy and active listening .

Examples might include adding personal stories , telling jokes, or displaying your feelings openly during the delivery of your message.

However, not all topics lend themselves easily to expressing emotion. If the subject matter is overly complex or technical there may be less opportunity for emotional expression—but this doesn’t mean those conversations can’t incorporate emotion.

Even if faced with a difficult situation such as death or financial turmoil, emotions can still be conveyed in a respectful way that keeps audiences engaged.

Remember that how much emotion you show depends on the type of audience you’re sharing it with—using sensitivity when delivering passionate speeches helps avoid awkwardness or embarrassment for any attendees who may find opinionated language uncomfortable for whatever reason.

Striking the right balance between being straightforward and showing compassion takes practice, so take the time to develop a style that works best for you and improves upon each performance.

Finally, incorporating passion into a speech gives it life and makes it relatable and engaging—which are essential elements to speaking effectively.

Having passion means giving ourselves permission to take ownership over our stories, making them deeply personal in order to reach our goals and touch people’s hearts in meaningful ways. With that said, let’s move on to discussing how we should tackle dealing with challenges while giving a speech.

Dealing with Challenges

The process of delivering a speech can be challenging, but it is also rewarding. Difficulties can arise during the process that may threaten to derail your success. To ensure you are adequately prepared for these possible pitfalls it is important to consider strategies for proactively mitigating the risk of encountering these challenges. 1. Public Speaking Anxiety: Many people experience some form of anxiety when asked to speak in public. There are a number of techniques available to combat this fear and increase confidence, such as deep breathing exercises, mental rehearsal, positive self-talk and visualization of success.

Learning about the audience, creating an engaging presentation and using props or visual aids can also help reduce anxiety levels and create a better overall experience for both the speaker and the audience. 2. Unfamiliar Topics or Audiences: When presenting on unfamiliar topics or to an unknown audience it can be difficult to prepare effectively.

In this situation it is important to conduct research on the topic and familiarize yourself with the needs of your audience so that the content is tailored accordingly. It is also helpful to use humor or stories related to the topic in order to engage your audience and make them more receptive to your message. 3. Lack of Support: If you lack support from family, friends, colleagues or mentors, it can be difficult to push through difficult conversations or speeches without any additional motivation.

To overcome this challenge, seek out peer mentorship opportunities or find compatible online communities where people discuss similar topics or objectives. Here you can share ideas, provide feedback and learn from others who have experienced similar issues. 4. Time Constraints: One of the biggest challenges when giving a speech is managing your time effectively in order to deliver an effective message without going over allotted timeslots and boring your audience .

To successfully address this challenge try setting manageable goals for each section of your speech and practice regularly. Replicating real-time conditions as closely as possible will help you stay within time constraints when delivering your speech on the day itself. In conclusion, there are many potential challenges you may face when giving a speech or taking part in a public speaking event – but with proper preparation and practice they are easily managed if approached correctly.

With knowledge of techniques for dealing with such scenarios comes increased confidence when stepping up to the podium – further improving your chances of delivering an effective speech that resonates with your audience members.

Responses to Frequently Asked Questions

How should i end my speech to leave a lasting impression.

The best way to end your speech is by reinforcing your main point and summarizing the key takeaways. You should also encourage the audience to take action, whether it be to sign up for a newsletter, make a donation, or visit your website for more information. This final call to action will not only leave a lasting impression on the audience but will also help you achieve any goals you might have had when making your speech in the first place.

What techniques can I use to keep my audience engaged during my speech?

One of the best techniques for keeping an audience engaged during a speech is to keep it interactive . Ask questions throughout the presentation, as well as allowing for audience input and discussion. This can help to keep people’s attention and create a more engaging experience.

Another great tip is to use humor. Even if you don’t consider yourself a natural comedian, sprinkling in a few jokes here and there can break up the monotony of long speeches and keep people interested. Humor can also help to make points stick in people’s minds, making them easier to remember.

Finally, try to be enthusiastic about the content of your speech. If you show too much indifference or lethargic behavior, it will discourage your audience from paying attention and taking your message seriously.

Instead, be passionate about what you are saying so that the energy of your words carries into the room and engages your audience with excitement.

How can I use storytelling to make my speech more interesting?

Storytelling is a powerful tool that can be used to make any speech more interesting. Telling stories in your speech will help engage the audience and make your message stick. Here are some tips for using storytelling in your speech:

1. Choose stories that are relevant to your message and audience. Think about stories that will best illustrate the point you are trying to convey, or evoke emotions in your listeners. 2. Use vivid descriptions and visuals when telling your story. Be sure to include details such as setting, character descriptions, dialogue and plot points. This will help to bring the story to life for your audience. 3. Make sure the story you are telling has a strong conclusion or moral at the end. This will help add emphasis to your message and make it memorable. 4. Practice telling stories out loud before delivering a speech with them. Rehearsing will help you deliver your story more effectively and with more confidence in front of an audience. By using these tips, storytelling can be an effective tool to make any speech more interesting, engaging, and persuasive!

How can I prepare for my speech effectively?

Preparing for a speech effectively is essential to delivering an impactful and memorable presentation. Here are some tips: 1. Have a clear goal in mind. Before starting to prepare, ask yourself what the purpose of giving the speech is: what message do you want to convey? Defining this will help to structure your content and focus your research. 2. Research thoroughly. Make sure you understand the subject matter well, so that your delivery sounds confident and inspiring. Using facts and data will strengthen your arguments and make your talk more convincing. 3. Outline your speech. Make a rough outline of how you want it to go – from beginning to end – well in advance of the actual presentation. This will give you a strong foundation upon which you can craft an engaging talk with an effective narrative arc that keeps audiences interested and engaged. 4. Practice regularly. Rehearsing your speech out loud several times is key to ensuring that you know it well enough to feel comfortable when delivering it live in front of an audience.

5. Time yourself. Record how long it takes for you to go through your entire speech, so that you can adjust the length as needed before delivering it live – remember that most speeches should last no more than 10-15 minutes. 6. Identify potential questions from the audience and prepare answers before hand. Knowing ahead of time what kind of questions people may ask can help reduce the anxiety of not knowing what comes next, enabling you to stay confident when speaking in public. 7. Work on building up confidence levels before delivering a speech. Visualize yourself succeeding in delivering a great presentation; practice relaxation techniques such as deep breathing or positive self-talk; or use props during practice sessions such as water bottles or stress balls if needed to remain calm during the real thing!

What strategies can I use to reduce my anxiety when giving a speech?

1. Plan Ahead: Create an outline of your speech beforehand and practice it multiple times to become familiar with the content. Doing a trial run with the audience can also help you get used to speaking in front of people.

2. Visualize Success: Positive visualization is a great way to reduce anxiety before giving a speech. Imagine yourself confidently delivering the speech while feeling relaxed and composed.

3. Get Organized: Make sure you have all the materials necessary for your presentation, including notes, slides, etc., to reduce any additional stress that may come from not having what you need when you speak.

4. Take Deep Breaths: Before and during the speech, take a few deep breaths as this will help calm nerves and make sure your breathing is regulated throughout the duration of your presentation.

5. Speak Slowly: It is common to feel anxious while giving a speech and try to rush through it too quickly. Speaking slowly helps maintain composure while delivering your message effectively and clearly.

6. Pay Attention to Your Body: Your posture, stance, movements , facial expressions can all influence how confident you appear to your audience and how nervous you may be feeling inside. Check in with yourself frequently throughout the presentation and correct any tense body language or physical actions if needed.

7. Focus on the Audience: If you notice that your anxiety levels are growing as you present, shift your focus onto the audience instead of yourself as this will help refocus your attention away from negative thoughts that may arise from fear or insecurity.

8. Make Eye Contact: Establishing eye contact with your audience is a key confidence-builder for public speakers—it shows that you’re strong, engaged with them, and receptive to feedback or questions they might have regarding your speech topic .

9. Practice Positive Affirmations: Positive thoughts will boost your self-confidence as well as your mood which can help increase performance quality significantly during speeches or presentations in general—so don’t forget to tell yourself “you can do it!” several times throughout the day leading up to the event!

10. Seek Support of Friends & Family: Many experienced public speakers suggest seeking support of close friends & family members prior and during their speeches—not only does it allow helpful critique regarding content but it also creates a more comfortable atmosphere while speaking which can reduce pre-speech jitters drastically.

17 Public Speaking Tips That’ll Help You Crush Your Next Presentation

It’s no easy feat to stand up and talk in front of people—whether it’s five or 50 or 500. In fact, surveys have found that public speaking has long been one of the things Americans fear most.

Unfortunately, in many professions, some amount of public speaking is necessary. It might be that you need to present in a small meeting, give an update to the entire company, or present at a conference or other event. No matter what it is or how daunting you find it, there are steps you can take to prepare and improve your skills.

• Understand the Expectations and Learn the Details
• Know Your Audience
• Plan and Structure Your Speech
• Don’t Overload Your Slides
• Practice, Practice, Practice
• Get Feedback
• Memorize Your First and Last Lines
• Join a Club or Go to a Workshop
• Get in the Zone
• Don’t Bury Your Face in Notes
• Make Eye Contact
• Repeat Yourself
• Let Some Questions Go
• Keep Talking
• Remember the Audience Is on Your Side
• Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself

Before You Even Get Up There

So much of what goes into public speaking happens way before you step up to the front of the room. Preparation and practice are key. Here’s what you can do in advance to make the actual speaking part as smooth as possible.

1. Understand the Expectations and Learn the Details

“Gather all of the information regarding location, technical setup, time you’ll be speaking, dress, topics to include/avoid, type of presentation, etc.,” says Tara Goodfellow , a Muse career coach and owner of Athena Consultants . Having all of this information ahead of time will help you prepare a presentation that fits the occasion and resonates with your audience.

It’ll also help you avoid technical or logistical snafus that can add unnecessary stress, Goodfellow says: “You don’t want any surprises as in realizing you were supposed to bring a laptop or handouts.”

2. Know Your Audience

It’s as important to understand your audience as it is to understand the subject you’ll be discussing in front of them. “Make sure you understand the level of knowledge,” Goodfellow says, and tailor your presentation accordingly. “You don’t want to bore them with details they already know nor do you want to overwhelm them.”

Josephine Lee , third place winner in the 2016 Toastmasters World Championship of Public Speaking , emphasizes that even if she’s giving the same speech to two different audiences, she’ll take the time to customize it. She always asks herself, “What is the specific audience and why are they there?”

So, for example, the toast you’d give at an engagement party among all your college friends might be pretty different from the speech you give at the same friend’s wedding in front of the whole extended family.

Or in a professional context, imagine you’re giving a presentation about the future of your company. That would look really different depending on whether you’re talking to a group of executives from your own organization versus a room full of college students who are interested in getting into the industry. For one, you might dive into the nitty gritty of last quarter’s performance and share your insights about what changes your organization needs to make to remain competitive. For the other, you’d probably zoom out a bit more, give an intro to your industry, and sketch out what your company does and where it’s going.

3. Plan and Structure Your Speech

So often the focus of advice about public speaking is about how you’re saying the words in front of an audience. Those things are unequivocally important (which is why we go into detail about them below!) but before you get there, you have to think about what you’re saying.

“You can have great diction and you can have great presentation skills, but if your words and structure are all over the place then people are not going to remember what you said,” says Lee, who credits Toastmasters with teaching her how to write a speech. “It is 100% about simplicity, because when you’re giving a speech in front of a live audience it’s so fleeting that if you have multiple points and if you go off on tangents and if you don’t stay on one simple path then people won’t remember what you were speaking about.”

Lee always picks one central point when she’s preparing a talk—whether she’ll be speaking for five minutes or 45. She’ll present her central theme, give supporting evidence and examples, and keep circling back to that main message. “So even if the audience forgets 99% of your speech, which they will, they will go home with that 1%,” she says.

Rajiv Nathan , a Muse career coach and founder and CEO of Startup Hypeman , takes a similar approach with a slightly different formula. His go-to structure for a talk is “inward, outward, forward.” He starts with a story that explains why he’s talking about this topic in the first place, zooms out to evidence that others are thinking about it as well, and ends with solutions.

In a workplace setting, this might translate into laying out a challenge your team is facing, zooming out to examine how other teams and companies are thinking about and handling similar issues, and end by proposing next steps for your team.

4. Don’t Overload Your Slides

If you’re using slides to accompany your presentation, make sure you avoid overloading them with too much text. “Think about how you like to be presented to,” Goodfellow says. “Very few of us like an 80-slide presentation where the person just reads everything to us.”

Beyond the simple fact that people will be distracted squinting at that teeny tiny type, you might be tempted to start reading off the slides and you’ll end up sounding a little too much like Ferris Bueller’s economics teacher (i.e. droning on and on and on in a monotone).

Instead, Nathan says, use slides primarily as visual complements to your words and a tool to emphasize your main takeaway.

5. Practice, Practice, Practice

Okay, pay attention, because if you absorb just one thing from this article it should be this: You have to practice. Not once or twice but over and over again.

“When you practice it enough you figure out the rhythm,” says Nathan, who estimates he practiced his TEDx talk about 100 times before he gave it. You’ll also feel more confident and comfortable speaking without reading off a piece of paper (or your slides) because the structure and progression will become so familiar.

Lee takes advantage of any opportunity to practice when she’s preparing to speak. “Practice of any sort can be very helpful. I practice in my room or in the shower or driving in the car,” she says.

6. Get Feedback

While practicing on your own is useful, it can be even better to do it in front of a live audience—even if that’s just your work bestie or your sister. The more you get used to speaking in front of actual humans the easier it’ll get.

Plus, you can get feedback from your trusted practice audience before you go out and do the real thing. Ask them if your words and points were clear, if there was anything that confused them, how your rhythm was, and if there was anything else they noticed.

You can also give yourself feedback. Use your phone (or whatever other device you have) to record audio or video of your practice sessions. When you play it back, you can become your own audience in a way and pick up on things you didn’t realize needed some attention.

“I have had clients astounded at their mannerisms and overuse of ‘um’ when we’ve played back video. Most of us have a nervous ‘go to’ sound or movement,” Goodfellow says. “Once you’re aware of it, you can work on it.”

7. Memorize Your First and Last Lines

You’ll want to have a pretty clear idea of what you’re going to say, of course. But you also don’t want to sound like a robot regurgitating a pile of words you wrote down.

By the time she was comfortable in front of an audience, Lee wasn’t reading her speeches or even memorizing an exact script. “If you memorize everything word for word, it’s not going to sound very natural,” she says. Instead, she plans the structure but keeps the words themselves a little loose with a couple of exceptions: “I generally try to memorize the opening sentence and the closing sentence.”

The goal is to ensure you start and end strong while still giving yourself the room to speak naturally in between.

8. Join a Club or Go to a Workshop

If you’re committed to improving your public speaking skills, then not only should you practice each speech or presentation before you give it, but you should also try to get as many of the real thing under your belt as you can so that you become accustomed to it.

“It’s the most important to get as much stage time in front of an audience” as possible, Lee says. “That’s why Toastmasters was such a useful organization for me because it gave me the grounds to practice on in front of a live audience.”

Toastmasters is of course one of the more well-known options, with more than 16,000 clubs all over the world, but you can also check out meetups, classes, and workshops. If those options aren’t available in your area or don’t appeal to you, try gathering a group of friends and/or colleagues who want to practice their skills and give and get feedback on a regular basis as well.

During Your Speech

Doing all of the prep work should help you feel ready and confident—at least, more than you would otherwise. Here’s how you can keep helping yourself in the moment.

9. Get in the Zone

For about 10 minutes before he gets on stage to give a talk, Nathan becomes something of a recluse. He doesn’t talk to anyone, he drinks some water, he crouches down somewhere, he focuses on his breathing, and he repeats this phrase to himself: “Use expression to create possibility.”

Now, that’s a very specific set of actions that works for him, but he recommends everyone figure out their own “stage mantra” or routine. Ask yourself, he says, “What do you need to be repeating to yourself beforehand? What, action-wise, do you need to do beforehand to get yourself in the zone?”

It might take some time to find the things that help you in the lead-up, whether you do them the night before, the day of, or in the moments just before you begin. If you’re not sure where to start, think back to some other reference point in your life when you were preparing for an important event, Nathan says. What did you use to do before a baseball game or piano recital or big exam? See if those things help now and iterate until you find the right combination.

10. Don’t Bury Your Face in Notes

When Lee first started giving speeches, she’d just read the whole thing word for word off a piece of paper. “It was terrible,” she says, remembering the early days before she became the accomplished speaker she is today. “Notes are like a crutch. So you just start to rely on [them] more and more,” she’s realized. “It’s more important that you’re connecting with the audience, making eye contact with the audience, and [having] a true conversation with the audience.”

She no longer uses notes at all—she just memorizes the opening and closing lines, as mentioned—but reaching that comfort level takes practice. If you’re still working up to that and need your notes, she says, go with bullet points. They’ll help you stay on track without tempting you to read everything from the page.

Notes can also block your face or torso, or draw your eyes down as you’re reading, says Nathan. So if you plan to bring some, try folding your paper or using index cards with just those few bullet points to serve as a reference.

11. Make Eye Contact

You’ve surely heard it before, but eye contact is key in public speaking. It helps you connect with the audience, Lee says, and it’s most effective when you focus on one person at a time. “When you are giving a speech, you should always sound like you are delivering to a single individual rather than speaking to the masses,” she says. “Direct eye contact with one person then moving to another is an effective way to do that.”

12. Use Pauses

“A lot of times people speak really fast. Their mind is racing and they want to make a good impression,” says Jennifer Sukola , a Muse career coach and human resources professional. “People tend to want to rush through and get it over with,” especially when they’re nervous. It’s something you might get feedback about or pick up on if you record yourself.

One of Sukola’s biggest tips for public speaking—using pauses—can help with overall speed as well as pacing. You can use pauses strategically, inserting them right after important points to let them sink in or right before to allow you to gather your thoughts and get the audience’s attention for what you’re about to say.

Sukola likes to follow a structure where she makes a point, pauses, provides support for that point and recaps, pauses again, makes a related point, etc. “If you follow that outline and pause in conjunction with the points you’re making,” she says, “the audience has a chance to let that simmer, to let your points settle and think through [them].”

13. Repeat Yourself

Remember that the people listening to you talk live can’t rewind to catch that important thing you just said or flip back a few pages to find that crucial point you made earlier the way they could if they were watching a video or reading a book.

So help them out by repeating the thesis or main takeaway of your talk, says Nathan. In his own talks, he might repeat that take-home line six or eight times. The repetition ensures that everyone hears it, realizes it’s important, and can process it and let it sink in.

“It’s got to be short and punchy,” says Nathan, and you can accentuate it with pauses before or after you say it. If you have slides, you might also want to put it up there once or twice. It’s like the chorus of a song, Nathan explains. It’s catchy and it’s the first thing someone will be able to repeat back to you.

14. Let Some Questions Go

You can do a whole lot of planning, but the truth is that you can’t anticipate everything, including questions that might come up. Goodfellow stresses that it’s okay to say, “That’s a great question, let me get back to you on that.” In fact, that’s far better than stammering through and making something up.

15. Keep Talking

Lee may now be an award-winning speaker who travels all over the world to give talks and feels comfortable ditching the notes, but even she still freezes and forgets her speech sometimes. You have to just keep talking until you find your way back.

“Get away from that mentality that you have to be perfect. It’s okay if you forget,” she says. “You learn to start to fill in the gaps. Start to speak until you remember. No one in the audience knows you forgot your speech,” she adds. “What you are feeling inside is not as apparent as you think it is. If you keep that in mind and keep talking, eventually you’ll come back.”

And if your talk has a clear, simple structure, it’ll be easier to find your way back in.

16. Remember the Audience Is on Your Side

For many people, public speaking feels like one of the scariest things they could be called on to do, Lee says. They’re terrified of failing and think they’ll be humiliated and ostracized. But the people on the other side don’t want to see you mess up—they’re eager to hear what you have to say.

“If you remember that the audience wants you to do well, that they’re on your side, it’s a much easier process,” says Lee. Focus on what you’re giving to the audience—as if you were giving advice or telling a story to your best friend—rather than on yourself and how you appear.

17. Don’t Be So Hard on Yourself

Finally, remember that everyone gets nervous. Those executives many levels above you whose presence is making you sweat? They probably get nervous when they speak, too, Goodfellow points out. “Give yourself a little bit of grace,” she says, and do the best that you can.

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• 11 Tips for Giving a Great Speech

Chances are you’ll be asked to give speeches or presentations in classes at school. If you get involved in volunteer groups, brief speeches to open events or thank participants are a must. Then there are the speeches at events such as weddings, as well as speeches that you might have to give in the workplace. That amounts to the average person being required to give quite a lot of speeches, even if they don’t get involved in an area such as politics where the ability to give a good speech becomes even more important. You might also have suffered through quite a number of bad speeches from other people – whether that’s at family events where the microphone squeaks the whole way through or a school presentation where the headteacher can’t quite make the jokes work. If you don’t want to inflict the same sort of experience on others, here are our top tips for giving a great speech.

1. Practise your microphone technique

2. Keep it short

Particularly at something like a party or a wedding, no one will be unhappy if your speech runs a little short; it’ll just give them more time to investigate the canapés. If you are giving a speech for a class in school, and it’ll be assessed, you need to prioritise keeping it within the required time limits. But even under these circumstances, if you’ve been tasked – say – with giving a 10-15 minute speech, it’s usually better to come in nearer the 10 than the 15 minute mark. Put simply, even if your speech is terrible, your audience can probably tolerate it for 10 minutes. Much longer, and they’ll be struggling. This shouldn’t limit what you can cover; in the film Up , the whole of Carl and Ellie’s heartbreaking love story is told in under 12 minutes. Do you really need longer to make your points? Achieve brevity by writing out the speech you would give if you had all the time in the world, and then cut anything that seems extraneous or boring.

3. Consider what your audience wants to hear

If you are giving a speech in class because it’s your assignment, what your audience wants to hear is likely to be “the bell ringing for lunch”; you can’t help them there. But under other circumstances, consider what your audience wants to hear and what you want to say, and strive for there to be as much overlap as possible. In the context of a political speech, for instance, what you want to say might be why your party should receive votes; what your audience wants to hear is what your party would do for them, if they won power. Hopefully it should be possible to write a speech that meets both sets of needs, rather than focusing solely on whatever it is that you want to say and leaving your audience disappointed.

4. Pick a theme and stick to it

Here’s a goal for giving a speech: someone sitting near the back, who’s messing around on their phone for at least two-thirds of it and focusing mainly on how long it will be until lunch, should nonetheless be able to give a reasonably accurate answer to the question, “what was it about?” If you’re supposed to be giving a speech in defence of the nuclear deterrent, for example, both the topic and your position on it should be clearly identifiable. This means – to stick with the nuclear deterrent example – not talking for a while about jobs, and then the wider economy, and then the North-South divide, and then Scottish independence, and then Ukraine with a brief digression into South Ossetia before rounding off by squeaking out “and that’s why we should renew Trident!” seconds before you run out of time – no matter how relevant that cornucopia of topics may feel (and they are all relevant, albeit tenuously). It means that even if you do have to take a while to explain a more complex idea, you need to be concise, and bring it back to your theme as quickly as you can.

5. Speak slowly

Most people speak more quickly than they realise when they’re on stage, especially if they’re nervous. But no one will be able to follow your speech if you’re jabbering it out. Thankfully, this one is easy to fix with a little effort and practise. First of all, figure out how quickly you’re actually speaking: do a word count for your speech and then time yourself saying it. A fast speaker will speak at maybe 160 words per minute, a slow speaker at 100 wpm and an average speaker at 130 wpm. For a formal speech, you want to be speaking on the slow side. While this will vary by culture and environment, 120 wpm is a reasonable target to aim for; slow enough that everyone should be able to understand you, and fast enough that you hopefully won’t be sending them to sleep.

6. Tell a couple of jokes

This is a tricky tip because there are lots of pitfalls in the world of telling jokes. For instance, there’s the temptation to include an in-joke that three of your friends will understand and find hilarious, that is utterly baffling to everyone else in the room. Avoid this – if you include any jokes, witty references or anything along those lines, make sure they are accessible to everyone present. All the same, if you can manage a joke or two, it can be a useful way to break up a speech and retain the audience’s interest. A little self-deprecation (not too much!) or the use of classic joke formats such as “the scene was chaotic; it looked as if a bomb had hit and we didn’t know where to start on repairs – but that’s enough about the hen party…” work nicely even if you’re not very confident. Don’t turn it into a stand-up comedy sketch if you’re not a comedian, don’t wait for ages for laughter that’s not showing up, and don’t make jokes at the expense of anyone who you don’t know for sure can take it.

7. Don’t be afraid to repeat yourself if you need to

If you follow US or UK politics at all, you’ve probably heard some of these phrases recently: take back control, make America great again, long-term economic plan, son of a bus driver. Three of these have already led the party or people they’re associated with to electoral victory; the fourth remains to be seen. To take the ‘son of a bus driver’ as an example, this refers to Sadiq Khan, now Mayor of London. There can be hardly anyone in London who doesn’t know what their Mayor’s dad did for a living. Meanwhile, many of them probably can’t remember his rival Zac Goldsmith’s name, let alone anything he said during the campaign. The point is that repetition works. In pursuit of point 4, if you want people to remember your key theme, you’re going to have to say it more than once. Don’t assume that everyone will have paid attention to everything you’ve said, unless you’re in a classroom setting where they’ll get told off if they don’t.

8. Only use the visual aids you need

This tip applies to two things: PowerPoints and notes. If you can do without either (and your assignment allows it), then do. Every time you’re glancing over your notes or up at the screen, fiddling with the laptop to get the slide to move on, fighting with a video that isn’t working or struggling to read your own handwriting, is time that you’re not spending engaging with your audience. A well-written, clear speech delivered without notes is always going to be better than someone awkwardly reading aloud the bullet points on their PowerPoint slides. If you must do a presentation – for instance, because there are photos that need to be included – have as little text on it as possible, preferably none. That way, if there are people at the back who can’t really see the screen through the sea of heads in front of them, they’ll still be able to follow what you’re saying.

9. Get a friend to check for awkward mannerisms

Mannerisms that are entirely fine in normal life become awkward and strange when you’re speaking in public. Perhaps you’re inclined to fiddle with your hair or your cuffs, you rock back and forth on the balls of your feet, or you have a habit of reaching your hand to your cheek when you’re talking. No one would notice in everyday conversation, but when you’re on a stage, it’ll become all they’ll see. Some of this is easily avoidable – for instance, if you have long hair that you’re inclined to twirl or otherwise fiddle with, tie it up. For other mannerisms, get the critical friend who helped you sort out your microphone technique to tell you what they are, and do your best to suppress the more annoying ones.

10. Look around the room

Talking about eye contact usually has the effect of making normal eye contact a lot harder, and so does giving a speech. All of a sudden, you’re up on stage, and you have no idea what a normal way to look at a group of people is. Some speakers deal with this by picking a point in the middle distance and speaking to it; others by picking a particular person near to the back and addressing their entire speech at them. This is obviously no fun for that person, who probably spends the whole thing feeling extremely uncomfortable, but it’s not too weird for everyone else. Better still, though, if you can manage it, is to look slowly and steadily around the room, trying to make eye contact with a decent range of people, before returning to the middle distance for a while, rinse and repeat. This needs to be slow and steady, or you give the impression that you’ve just smelled smoke and are casting about for a fire exit before the stampede beings.

11. Don’t be scared of a good reaction

If your speech is genuinely engaging, funny, inspiring or any of the other things you might hope it would be, your audience will react to it. There might be laughter, or applause, or even a bit of cheering depending on the setting. This can be daunting because when you’re practising your speech in front of your bedroom mirror, there’s no way to prepare for it. And it’s where even the best speakers can go wrong, by launching straight into what they were going to say next without waiting for the laughter or applause to stop, or by looking painfully awkward while it’s going on. It’s a pitfall that’s mostly solved by being aware it might happen. If your audience is applauding you or otherwise reacting well, it’s OK to smile, look up, wait for them to stop and then keep going with your speech – it’s as simple as that. You could even throw in a “thank you” before you continue in the knowledge that it’s all going well. Image credits: microphones ; audience ; boy with microphone ; clock ; winding road ; enjoy a joke ; sticky notes ; 

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101 Public Speaking Tips

• Fear of Public Speaking

Anyone Can Develop Good Presentation Skills

No matter what they tell you, people who have excellent presentation skills are not lucky. They didn’t win the lottery of life. Also, those of us who are not great at presenting aren’t doomed to failure. Anyone can develop presentation skills. I also believe that, with just a little practice, anyone can become a world-class speaker. Below are 101 public speaking tips that will help you reduce stage fright and become more self-confident. Don’t try to memorize all 101 tips, and don’t try to apply every single one before your next presentation. Instead, bookmark this page and pick one single tip to master during your next speech. Then come back over and over to try new ideas.

One of the challenges with tip pages (like this) is that readers are often embarrassed by their fear and try to hide it. If you have stage fright, chances are there are tons of others out there who need help as well. So, if you get value out of these tips, make sure and link to it or post it on Facebook or Linked-In . Help us help more people, please.

Public Speaking 101 – A list of 101 Public Speaking Tips!

Design a good skeleton of a presentation, create a clear and specific title or topic.

If you create a vague or general title, you will have a vague and general (hard to deliver) speech. Get specific and focused. For instance, instead of talking about “Last Year Financials,” talk about how “Cost-Saving Measures and Increased Sales Led to Higher Profit.” Remember in High School when you had to give book reports? It is tiresome to hear 32 versions of “Book Report about Julius Cesar,” but “Julius Cesar is a Metaphor for High School Peer Pressure” is much more enjoyable.

For additional details, see How to Design a Catchy Presentation Title .

Limit Your Support to a Few Most Important Points

Once you have a great topic, prove that your point or conclusion is valid by using just three, four, or five essential support items. Spend more time showing your few points versus adding more and more and more additional points. Your audience will only remember a few things that you cover, so make sure they are the most critical points. If you have trouble determining what points to use or narrowing down to just a few points, go back to tip number one and adjust your topic.

For additional details, see Write a Speech in Just a Few Simple Steps .

Add Stories

Stories are easy to remember and easy to deliver to an audience, so your nervousness will drop as you relay stories to your audience. Examples also help you prove your bullet points in a way that makes it easy for the audience to remember.

For additional details, see Storytelling in Speeches .

Use Stories as Facts and Figures

Most presenters like to create a long list of bullet points with facts and figures. Instead, give your audience the story behind the number. For instance, (1) revenue increased 10% (2) closing ratios went up 3% (3) advertising costs decreased 15%, and (4) profit went up 15% is quickly forgotten and will take up a whole PowerPoint slide.

However, “At the beginning of the last quarter, we changed our advertising strategy and focused more on repeat business from current clients versus spending money to attract new clients. We stopped sending mailers to the mailing list that we used in the past, and we sent multiple mailers to past customers instead. We were able to cut the mailing cost by 15%. The sales team had fewer leads and was able to spend more time developing repeat business. This allowed them to increase their closing ratios by 3% and total revenue by 10%. Since the cost was down as well, the combination of increased revenue and decreased advertising cost led to a 15% increase in profit.” Much easier to remember, much more comfortable to deliver, and no bullet points needed.

We jammed a lot of content into this tip page, so come back often to renew your focus. Remember that the Fearless Presentations ® class helps participants implement every one of these 101 puplic speaking tips! Our blog posts give these tips and more in greater detail.

Public Speaking Tips to Reduce Public Speaking Fear

Practice with a Partner

Now that you have a good outline and skeleton of a presentation practice delivering the speech with a friend or coworker. Practicing alone is a bad idea because you are your own worst critic. When you practice with a friend, though, you will get good verbal and visual feedback.

For additional details, see How to Reduce Public Speaking Fear .

Avoid Video Feedback

Video feedback can be a fantastic way to grow as a speaker, but it can also scare the gooey out of you. Avoid video feedback unless you have an excellent coach, professionally trained, to go over it with you. Going it alone can cause a lot of challenges.

Get Good at Delivering without Notes and Visual Aids

Since you are practicing a fairly simple speech right now, practice it without notes. Just write your three, four, or five key points on a slide or flip chart and practice delivering the presentation by really developing your stories. At this point, you will only really need to remember which story you want to use for each of your points. Keep it simple.

For additional details, see How to Memorize a Speech .

Butterflies are Normal

At this point, as you practice, you might start to feel butterflies in your stomach or other symptoms of public speaking fear. Don’t worry. Those symptoms are normal. However, as you practice once or twice, the nervousness should drop pretty dramatically.

For additional explanation of these and other ways to reduce nervousness, see this post. 10 Ways to Reduce Public Speaking Fear .

Lose Train of Thought?

If you lose your train of thought and feel some panic, then one of a couple of things might be happening. You likely have a bunch of bullet points that are difficult to remember. If so, go back through the earlier tips and design your speech differently. If you are feeling light-headed and confused, though.

When we get nervous, we tend to breath more shallowly. When this happens, the speaker will not have enough oxygen, which makes the panic even greater. Which alters the breathing even more. When you feel this happening, stop and take a deep breath from the diaphragm. To keep this from happening, take a nice deep breath before you say your first sentence.

Realize 90% of Nervousness Doesn’t Show

The audience usually can’t see the butterflies, or shaky hands, or sweaty palms. The problem occurs when we start thinking about these symptoms rather than focusing on the audience and our topic. By human nature, most people are focused on themselves, not on you. Focus on them, and two things will happen. First, they will like you more. Also, much of the nervousness that you feel will go away.

Avoid Writing Presentation Word for Word

Don’t fall into the trap of writing everything out so that you don’t forget something. You will be likely just to read it to the audience and probably sound boring when you do. Design your outline as we described above, and you will sound and feel more confident.

Avoid Memorizing Your Entire Speech

Most people believe that if they memorize their written speech, they will sound better than when they read it. It is possible, but not likely, though. More likely, the speaker will, at some point, forget something and panic. Instead, follow the guidelines above to design a good skeleton of a speech and memorize your stories.

Presentation Skill Tips to Add Energy to Your Delivery

Add Energy and Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm is the absolute most important public speaking secret. If you have energy and enthusiasm, your audience will love you. Be excited about your topic, and your audience will be excited about your presentation.

For more details, see 5 Turnkey Ways to Add Energy to a Presentation .

Talk with Your Hands

We all naturally speak with our hands, but for some reason, when we stand up to speak, we tend to lock up our body language and lose a lot of our natural energy. Drop your hands when you start a speech, then use them to explain your points. (By the way, if you tell a lot of stories, this will happen naturally.)

Make Your Gestures Bigger than Your Body

In a small room, try to make your gestures outside of your torso. Small gestures below the shoulders and close to your body make you look weak and timid. The higher and wider your gestures are, the more confident you appear. When we get nervous, we want a barrier between us and the threat, so the small gestures show the audience that they threaten you. Make the gestures bigger.

Exaggerate Gestures in Big Venues

As your audience gets bigger, so should your gestures. If you have a stand, (most people call it a podium, but the podium is the small stage that a speaker stands on), the audience will not see your gestures unless you exaggerate them. Make your gestures huge. They will look very normal for the audience.

Speak Faster

This tip goes against conventional wisdom in public speaking, but it is one of the most valuable tips. Speak faster! Really. When you talk faster, you add natural energy to your presentation. Think about the last time that you were excited about something. How did you tell people about it? We’re you slow and measured or fast and exaggerated? Talk faster, and the audience will get excited about you and your topic. I know what you are thinking.”Everyone else tells me to slow down.” Well, everyone else doesn’t get paid tens of thousands of dollars every time they speak and are probably pretty boring. If you want to be like them, do what they tell you. If you want to be a great speaker, speak faster.

Move Faster

So, not only do you want to move more and bigger, but also faster. For instance, when you walk to the front, don’t run, but take about a half-step faster pace than normal. If you walk like you are going to the gallows, you will suck the energy out of the room and leave the impression of being boring. If you move like you want to get to the front of the room, you will push energy into the room.

Your voice is your best tool when you present, so use it. If you are quiet, the audience will question your authority on the subject. Increase your volume a little to show the audience that you are in control.

Change Your Tone

What do they call boring speakers? Right, “mono-tone.” When we get nervous, especially when we memorize a presentation word-for-word, we tend to zoom through the presentation because we are afraid we will forget something. Most often, a speaker will sound very monotone when he/she does this. By the way, this is different from the “speaking faster” that I mentioned above. The reason why most coaches will tell a speaker to “slow down” is because most speakers zoom through memorized speeches with little or no emphasis on content, so the tone stays the same all the way through. Instead, design your speech as we talked about, and make a conscious effort to call attention to words or phrases that need emphasis. “It made a HUGE difference,” versus “It was a huge difference.”

Add Impact and Pizzaz to Your Presentation

Make Your Title Audience Focused

Go back to your title now and redesign it so that it has a significant “want” of the audience. Just look at the title as you have it and ask “why” does the audience need to hear this presentation? Whatever the answer to that question is should be added to the title. For instance, if your title is “Project Update,” and you followed tip #1 and made it more specific, you might end up with, “Smith Building Construction Project Update.” Now go one step farther. What is the actual result of the update? What conclusion do you want the audience to come to about the presentation? Now the title becomes, “Smith Building is Two Weeks behind Schedule, but Back on Track by the End of the Month.”

For more details, see How to Create a Great Presentation Title .

Make Your Bullet Points Audience Focused

Once you make your title audience-focused, your bullet points are likely to change. If your title is just “Smith Building Project Update,” then you’d likely have dozens of possible points that you could cover from personnel, schedule, budget, project map, client meetings, community outreach, etc however, if the title is about how the project is behind schedule and our plan to get back on schedule. You’ll likely spend point one on what happened to get us off track (and tell a few stories about it). Then, points two and three will probably be a few things that we will do to get back on track with examples of each.

For additional info, so Create Great Bullet Points in Your Presentation .

Add More Stories

I know that I gave this tip earlier, but stories are your Ace-in-the-Hole in presentations. The more that you have, the better your presentation will be, and the more that your audience will like you. I often hear statements from class members like, “But, presenters in my company don’t tell stories.” I always respond with, “Well, I can pretty much bet that meetings and speeches within your company stink, then.” And then almost always agree. After you have your skeleton presentation designed with a topic, a few key bullet points, and a story to prove each bullet point, go back and add a few more stories as proof. Below are a few ways to do this.

A Few Ways to Use Stories to Reduce Nervousness and Add Impact

Add a Moral or an Action

Your examples are great ways to teach the audience or persuade them. When you finish your stories, add a moral or call to action to the end, such as, “so, what I want you to get from this is.” When we tell people to do something or give advice, human nature is to play Devil’s Advocate, but when you tell a story first, they are more likely to agree. Try it around the office. Instead of giving advice right away, start with a story about the advice first and see if you get better results.

For more info, see How to Write an Effective Persuasive Speech .

Use Success Stories as Proof

Your successes are solid proof that your advice is sound, so anytime you offer advice or a suggested plan of action, always try to use a personal example as your proof that your input is valid. If you haven’t had personal success with the new idea, find some other group or person who has and use their success story as proof.

Learn from Mistakes

When you or your team has challenges, tell the story about the trial or mistake, and then add the moral at the end to show how you learned from it. A lot of times, this can add some self-deprecating humor, as well.

Give Contrasting Examples

A good way to use examples and stories is with a “good” example and a “bad” example. For instance, if you are giving a suggestion or advice in your presentation, give one example of a time when you or someone else didn’t take the advice, and the results were less than adequate and a second example when we used the advice and had success.

A Few Public Speaking Tips to Use Audience Participation to Add Impact

Add audience participation.

Audience participation is a fantastic way to break up the presentation and add energy and attentiveness to a presentation. The adage is that “People will support a world that they help create.” When your audience helps deliver your presentation, they will enjoy the presentation more and retain the information longer.

Avoid Rhetorical Questions

Never ask the audience a question that you don’t expect them to answer. Rhetorical questions aren’t interactive and have the potential to be annoying or even manipulative, so really avoid these types of questions.

Be Careful with Yes/No Questions

Questions where some people will answer “Yes” and some will answer “No” will divide the audience, so only use them if a division is what you want. For instance, “How many of you have been sexually harassed at some time in your career?” will likely cause a harmful division that you’d rather avoid, but “How many of you made President’s Club this year?” might give you a positive result. Just be careful, dividing your audience.

Avoid Single Answer Questions

Questions with only a single correct answer have only two possible results. Either one single person will answer the question correctly for one single success, or no one will answer the question, and the entire audience will feel stupid. If there is only one answer, avoid the question and tell the audience the answer.

Ask Open-Ended, Opinion Based Questions

The best types of questions are open-ended and “opinion-based” meaning that anyone with an opinion can, and most likely will, be correct. So a whole group of audience members is now the heroes of the room. The best way to do this is to make sure that your bullet points have gone to that “next level” where the result to the audience is added and ask it instead of telling it. “So we are two weeks behind schedule on the Smith building. What kind of things can we do to get back on track by the end of the month?”

Think/Write/Share

If your audience more introverted or less likely to interact, use Think/Write/Share. “Think about all of the possible ways that we can get back on track on the Smith project…” “If you would, write down two or three of your best ideas.” Then wait for everyone to write down at least one thing. “Tell me what you wrote down, and I’ll write them on the whiteboard.” You’ll get a lot more participation this way.

Use Sticky Notes to Get Input

If you have one or two overly vocal audience members who tend to overpower all other opinions, then try having everyone write their ideas on individual Sticky Notes instead. Collect all of the notes and read them out to the group and organize them into piles of similar ideas. That way, you can see where the real consensus is in the group without it becoming a popularity contest.

Another way to get a group to participate is to ask them to tell their best idea to a partner sitting next to them. Then have the partners volunteer to say to the group a single idea that their partner shared that was particularly good.

Have a Contest

Divide the audience into small groups and have a contest of some kind. This could be a test to see what they remember from the speeches from previous presenters, or it could be a contest to see who can come up with the most creative solution to a challenge or problem that you are experiencing. Get creative because people learn more when they are having fun.

My Favorite Ways to Add Impact to Presentation

Analogies are a fantastic way to make complicated information easier to understand and make your presentations more fun as well. An analogy is just a comparison where we are saying that something (complicated information) is just like (something less complicated). Or instance, a financial planner is trying to explain early retirement planning might compare planning your retirement to planting an orchard. If you only plant one tree and wait only one year, you aren’t going to get a great crop. But if you plant a dozen trees of different types of fruit and let them grow for ten years while nourishing them along the way, you’ll end up with a bountiful harvest.

Anecdotes Add Fun and Humor

They called Ronald Reagan The Great Communicator because he had an anecdote for everything. These are short, often funny, stories kind of like parables, that is used to teach a point and add levity. A good place to find these are at the end of articles in Reader’s Digest . Motivational speakers use this technique quite often.

Demonstrations

Demonstrations help audience members better understand processes and products by showing them in action. This technique is common at trade shows and fairs or exhibits. (It is also the most common selling technique on infomercials.) if you are explaining a step-by-step process or have a product that is impressive to the audience, then a demonstration might be a great addition to your presentation.

Offer a Sample

Give the audience something they can see, touch, feel, or experience. If you are talking about a product, bring one to pass around. If your topic is less tangible, give an example. For instance, when we teach public speaking skills classes, and we introduce how powerful stories can be, we give an example of a dry presentation without stories, and then we go back and add the stories in and show the audience the difference. Give a sample to reinforce your point.

Quote from an Expert

When you quote an expert, you are temporarily borrowing their expertise and credibility. Quotes should be short, and by someone, the audience will recognize, but when used properly, they can help the speaker have even more credibility.

If you don’t have a formal quote, but you know multiple famous people (or companies) agree with you or follow your advice, then you can name drop them. For instance, “405 of the Fortune 500 companies have sent people to Fearless Presentations including Microsoft, Apple, ExxonMobil, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte, and more.”

Add Showmanship

Remember that in addition to informing and persuading the audience, as a speaker, we also must entertain the audience. If you can “WOW!” the audience, you will be memorable. So do something different than what everyone else does. Below are a few ways to add showmanship.

A Few Public Speaking Tips to Add Showmanship

Use posters instead of pictures.

Adding a picture, or multiple pictures, to a PowerPoint slide can be effective in a pinch. However, you can go to printing stores and get a picture blown up into a poster that you can set on a tripod, and the poster will be much more memorable. Think of a trade show. The exhibits that have big posters are more eye-catching and attention-getting.

Add Some Magic

Quick and easy magic tricks can add some fun and energy to a presentation if it is appropriate. Since our instructors teach seminars and training classes, a quick magic trick used as an analogy to something that we are teaching can be entertaining and memorable. Doing a card trick in a boardroom presentation may not work as well, though.

Teach The Audience Something that will Surprise Them

When we teach team-building activities, we often start will a memory trick that helps the audience improve their memory very quickly. It is a simple technique that anyone can learn, so it is awe-inspiring to most audiences. When I was in school, a speaker showed us how to read faster by having us read a section from a book in our usual way for 60 seconds. Then, he had us read again, but this time pointing to the words in the book with our left hand as we read. The second time that we read, we gained as many as a couple of dozen extra lines of reading. It was really cool. Try it yourself.

Props can Add Showmanship

When legislators were trying to get people upset about the healthcare legislation in 2009; they just printed out the thousands of documents that made up the bill. The piles and piles of unreadable pages were pretty overwhelming and made a valid point. When I was starting out teaching leadership classes, I found a toy that was a tiny shipping box that, when I pushed a button, shook and said, “Let me out of here!” I used it as a prop when I talked about self-confidence, saying, “we all have that confident person inside of us who is struggling to get out and be seen.”

A Good Leave-Behind can Add Showmanship

A handout, book, or another type of reference item can make you more memorable. When we teach our leadership classes, we have a business card holder with a series of leadership principle cards that we give to every participant as a way to reinforce the crucial principles from the course.

Organizing the Presentation

Add at least one “impact idea” to each point.

Now go back to the skeleton outline that you created earlier and add at least one additional technique from the last ten or so ideas above. Add a question, analogy, quote, etc. to each of your original points. Give your presentation some meat.

Take a Break

If you have too much content to fit into five or fewer key points, consider taking a break in the middle to make the presentation more digestible.

Use Your “Impact Ideas” to Alter Time

If you are short on time, it is easy to shorten or cut a story or analogy, and if you are zooming through the presentation, just give more details in your stories, etc. or add an audience participation. This will allow you to hit exact time limits.

What If You have to Give a 10 Point or 20 Point Presentation?

If you have to give a content-heavy presentation, you can, but manage your expectations. Your audience isn’t likely to retain a lot of the content. A follow-up handout or another takeaway will be helpful.

PowerPoint Tips

Design your presentation first, then add visual aids.

Most presenters start with their PowerPoint slideshow, and later try to come up with words to explain the bullet points that they have written. Instead, start with the presentation, and the look for visual aids that will help you clarify your points.

Use Fewer Slides

An excellent way to do this is to practice your presentation a few times without any visual aids first and get good at your delivery. Then go back and add only the visual aids that help you explain your points better.

Less is More

The fewer slides that you have and the less content that you have on each slide, the more impact that your words will have.

A good rule is to have no more than six words on each line and no more than six lines on each PowerPoint slide. This way, everyone in the room should be able to read your slide content easily.

Avoid Overuse of Animation

Spinning bullet points with sound effects are just a distraction, so avoid frivolous animation.

Use Appropriate Animation to Clarify Your Points

Use animation that adds showmanship and clarifies your points. I had a client that had their animation team create a 3D animation of the terrain where they would be building an addition to an Army base that showed everything from the blacktops being poured to the final buildings rising on the horizon to the military tanks being rolled into the gates. It was an impressive piece of proof that the company understood the project.

Charts and Graphs are for Handouts, not PowerPoint Slide Decks

Charts and graphs are very hard to read and follow on a slide, so make a handout or put them on a big board instead.

Pictures for Decoration

If you use a picture (or pictures) for decoration, make the decoration the same on every slide and make it subtle. A single picture in the corner of the slide is usually enough. If your decorative picture changes, your audience will wonder what it has to do with the content of your slide.

Pictures for Clarity

If a picture help adds clarity to your bullet point, then add it in, but if it is just being used to make the slide prettier, leave it out.

Consider Boards Instead of Slides

Instead of putting a picture or chart on a slide, consider getting a board or poster made instead.

PowerPoint Slide Colors

A dark background with light text is most eye appealing.

Use Simple Fonts

Time New Roman or Arial are good choices for PowerPoint fonts.

Use Bullet Points

Although result-oriented, well-developed bullet points are essential when you design and organize your presentation, you might want to use shorter bulletins in your visual aid.

Reveal Your Bullets One at a Time

Reveal bullets one at a time to make sure no one reads ahead.

Point to Bullets when You Reference Them

Move toward the screen and point to your bullets as you read them. This lets the audience knows that you are covering something new and adds energy.

Stand Up When You Speak

The person who Stan’s and speaks carries authority. You will also have more energy.

Practice with Your Slides

After you have practiced without the slides and gotten good at your delivery, add the slides back in and practice in front of a group of people.

Avoid “Read… Click…”

If you design and practice your presentation based on these tips, you will never do this, but if you find yourself just reading and clicking, STOP! You are boring for your audience.

Design Your Own Slideshow

This tip is so important. If someone else designs your PowerPoint slide deck for you, it will increase the complexity ten-fold.

Places to Practice Delivering Your Presentations

Social clubs.

Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis, the Jaycees, Lions Clubs, etc. are great places to practice delivering speeches. Most of these organizations a weekly meeting that requires a guest speaker, so there are 52 opportunities every year for a slot.

Chambers of Commerce

Chambers often have committees where officers lead meetings and give presentations, so run for office. PS, most people avoid positions like this because they don’t want to have to speak in front of their peers.

Libraries and City Recreation Centers

City offices often have scheduled seminars and workshops that are easy to get a speaking engagement in as long as the topic is marketable to them and you will work cheap.

Lunch-N-Learns

If you are a salesperson and want to speak to employees at a specific client, you can buy them lunch and offer to teach them something about your industry.

Teleseminars or Webinars

Just by promoting a free (or paid) Teleseminars on your website, you can often get a nice following of people who will be happy to gain a little of your expertise.

Association Meetings in Your Industry

No matter what industry you belong to, chances are that there are one or more associations for companies like yours. Join one or more of these associations and look for meetings or events where you can speak and become an influential member of your industry.

Association Meetings in Client Industries

If you sell to specific industries, make sure and become a part of their associations and attend their trade shows and meetings. By speaking within these groups, you will be seen as a go-to person/company for their industry.

Trade Shows

If you attend trade shows and purchase booth space, consider purchasing the booth space adjacent to you and fill it with folding chairs. Then conduct a short seminar every half hour or so on topics related to the needs of the attendees.

Marketing Seminars by Reservation

In-person marketing seminars can be a great way to get in front of a lot of potential audience members. Financial planners will often offer free retirement seminars because they know that anyone who attends will likely be a good potential client.

Paid Seminars

Seminars that individuals can attend by paying a fee to you can be a great way to promote yourself because you are gaining income for your efforts. When individuals pay a fee to attend a seminar, they are much more likely to show up as well.

Paid Consulting Meetings

You can also charge individuals or groups to attend consulting or coaching sessions with you. This is a nice way to help customers implement your products/services without losing money. The meetings can be in-person, online, or by teleconference, so you have a lot of flexibility.

Radio and TV Shows

Although there is still a great opportunity to speak on traditional TV and radio programs, the Internet has opened a lot of doors for additional speakers. Internet radio is big and getting bigger all the time, and many hosts are looking for interesting people to interview.

YouTube and other online video services are a great way to make a single presentation get replicated over and over again. Make short, two to three-minute information videos teaching something about your industry and post them on YouTube. Post them once every week or so.

Podcast Your Videos

As you add more videos to your library, offer them as Podcasts (just Google “podcast” for a list of them) so that you can attract a group of “followers” who get access to your videos every time you post one.

Joint Venture Seminars

Partner up with other people or companies who are in the same market but who don’t compete for clients or customers. For instance, if you build websites, partner with a social media expert, a graphic designer, and a video person, and teach people how to build killer websites.

Public Speaking Tips for Sales Teams Delivering Group Presentations

Prepare your team ahead of time.

For many high-level sales presentations, purchasers want to hear from team members who they will be working with on the project. Please don’t let the first time that these folks speak in front of a group be when you have a big contract on the line. Get your team professional presentation training well in advance of the presentation.

Talk About THEM, Not You

Many presenters mistakenly cover a lot of detail about how great they (the presenters) are, how much experience they have, and how they are the best thing since sliced bread. The audience doesn’t care much about this stuff. They have a problem that they want you to solve. Show them how you can help solve their problems, and they will like you.

Show the Client that You are a Team

Edify each other when you introduce the next speaker. Build the next person up by sharing his/her expertise with the audience. Get the entire team involved in the presentation.

Use Showmanship

We covered this as one of the impact ideas above, but showmanship is vital to big sales presentations. You and your team have to be memorable and different. Before every presentation, come up with something new and different that you know others won’t do.

Question and Answer Sessions

Questions for clarity.

The easiest questions are those asked for clarity. The questioner is confused or curious and is looking for a simple answer. In these situations, answer the question quickly and add an example if you need to.

Questions to Test You

Sometimes, audience members may ask aggressive questions to try to test you or throw you off to see how you handle it. A great way to answer these types of questions is with an example or story related to the issue. Then, after you finish the quick tale, give the advice or solution.

Set a Time Limit

Set a time limit for questions and keep it short. Two to five minutes is standard, but some presentations require 15 minutes. Regardless, set a time limit and keep to it.

Ask the First Question if Needed

Audiences are often hesitant to ask the first question so that you might need to prime the pump. “A question that I’m often asked is…” It usually works pretty well.

When Time Expires, End It

If you can have a few more question askers waiting when you end the session, it can work well. Just say, “I’m out of time, but for those of you who we weren’t able to get to, I will be in the back of the room as you leave.” This will create a crowd of energy around you after the presentation.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Presenting

(We know… This puts us at 103 tips versus 101, but we like to over-achieve.)

Thou Shan’t Not Go Overtime without Consent

To “uh” is human, but too many is annoying, thou shall not speak monotonally, avoid shop-talk. thine audience wilst be confused., thou shall not speak whilst the audience readests thy slide, you thou shan’t read endless excerpts to thine audience, thou shan’t dump endless data upon thine audience.

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19 Public Speaking Tips From Brian Tracy’s Professional Speaker Career

Whether you’re looking to pursue a career in public speaking or are simply trying to prepare for a presentation to your team, your ability to deliver a message that others can connect with is an invaluable skill that is useful in any industry.

I have been public speaking for over 40 years, and I’ve learned a lot of helpful tips along the way about the art of public speaking.

Read on to discover 19 public speaking tips that will allow you to become a strong speaker who can captivate any audience.

1. Pick A Topic You’re Passionate About

You always want to speak on a topic that you’re well educated on, have a strong interest in, and have personal experience with. Your passion will naturally shine through and will help your audience stay engaged.

2. Know Your Audience and What They Want to Achieve

While you want to pick a topic you are passionate about , you also want to make sure you’re tailoring your speech to resonate with your audience. The better you know your audience demographic, the better you’ll be able to deliver a speech that resonates with them.

Remember, there’s a reason they’re there — so make sure you speak directly to them, being as relatable as possible.

3. Practice Your Speech Regularly

The key to effective public speaking is surprisingly simple: practice, practice, practice. Rehearse in front of a mirror or recite your speech to a friend. Planning ahead will also help make your delivery much smoother and improve your overall presentation. If you really want to advance your presentation skills , attend public speaking courses to improve your techniques and strategies.

4. Clear Your Mind

Even the most seasoned public speaker can get a little nervous before speaking, even if it is a virtual presentation .

While there are lots of ways to overcome your fear of public speaking , the best thing you can do right before your speech to clear those jitters is to take a minute to clear your mind via meditation or visualization. Picture your speech going well to allow your subconscious mind to clear out any distractions and focus on successful delivery.

5. Intrigue Your Audience Right From the Start

The introduction of your speech  sets the tone for the rest of your talk, so it needs to be enthralling. Make a strong statement, ask a question, or refer to current events to get the attention of your audience right away.

6. Be Clear and Concise

Remember that less is more. Don’t over-inform your audience with unnecessary points. You want to ensure your speech is well-organized, easy to follow, and provides the listeners with exactly what they came there for.

7. Be Confident

Focus on your stage presence as you prepare for your speech so you can be as impactful as possible to your audience. Don’t overthink and get into your head — think positive to allow you to have confidence in yourself and your abilities.

8. Relate With Personal Stories

Incorporate personal stories and life experiences into your speech wherever possible. Doing so will help the audience relate to what you say and feel connected. Your stories remind them that you’re human, too.

9. Add Your Personality

Don’t be afraid to show the audience who you are. Make them laugh, share some quotes from other leaders that have inspired you, or use emotion to help hit your points home.

10. Speak Slowly

Speak slower than you think you need to. Frequent pauses during your talk will help draw your listeners in and ensure you can carefully articulate everything you’re saying. Talking slowly will also help you enunciate your words so they don’t miss a beat.

11. Take Deep Breaths

Take deep breaths before and during your speech. Inhale to the count of three; then exhale for the count of three. This will help with any nerves you have, plus it will enable you to incorporate pauses.

12. Make Eye Contact

As you deliver your talk, look at individuals in your audience and make brief eye contact. This will allow your audience to feel as if you’re speaking directly to them. Just be sure not to take too long of eye contact with one or more persons — steadily look from the back to front.

13. Move Around

Be aware of your body language. Don’t just stand in one place — if you have room, walk around as you speak, but don’t pace. Using hand gestures can emphasize important points in your speech and help you take control of the room.

14. Alter Your Tone Throughout

The best presenters have mastered their public speaking voice, which is the practice of utilizing different inflection points in certain areas of your speech.

You don’t want to sound monotone the entire time. Project your voice and build vocal power throughout so you can lead to a powerful final point.

15. Avoid Distractions As Best You Can

As much as you may try to prepare, distractions while on stage can interfere with your presentation. Do your best to stay focused during your speech so nothing interrupts your train of thought.

That said, sometimes the distraction is too noticeable to ignore. If this happens to you, direct the attention of the audience to it in a humorous way if possible and then continue speaking.

16. Incorporate Visuals in Your Presentation

Visual aids, such as pictures, charts, graphs, infographics, help engage your audience as well as reinforce your points. 65% of the population are visual learners. By including visual content, you’re increasing the percentage of people who will walk away from your speech and remember it well.  Read this article I wrote for more ideas on PowerPoint presentations .

17. Be Timely With Delivery

Don’t go over your allotted time. It may be seen as disrespectful if you exceed the time you’ve been given. Timing your speech beforehand can help you keep things short. You can also set up clear milestones in your speech. If you know about how long each section of your speech is, you’ll be able to keep track of time in your head while presenting your speech.

18. End With A Bang And Say ‘Thank You

As you end your speech , provide some inspiration for your audience to take away. Deliver a strong call to action that enables your audience to crave more from you. And, as always, thank your audience for joining and listening.

19. Have A Post-Show Meet And Greet

If you have the opportunity to meet with the crowd after your speech, this is a valuable way to get some feedback. See what their response was and look at possible areas where they want to hear more or less from you.

This is also a great networking opportunity. You might be able to make connections that will land you a future speaking event, or consulting opportunities if you provide a service.

Improve Your Public Speaking Skills Before Your Next Speech

Public speaking presents as a daunting skill to many, but with these tips, you’ll be able to improve your public speaking skills and conquer your next speech and captivate your audience.

Check out my 5-Minute Speech Formula Checklist to start your next speech.

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About Brian Tracy — Brian is recognized as the top sales training and personal success authority in the world today. He has authored more than 60 books and has produced more than 500 audio and video learning programs on sales, management, business success and personal development, including worldwide bestseller The Psychology of Achievement. Brian's goal is to help you achieve your personal and business goals faster and easier than you ever imagined. You can follow him on Twitter , Facebook , Pinterest , Linkedin and Youtube .

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How to write a speech that your audience remembers

Whether in a work meeting or at an investor panel, you might give a speech at some point. And no matter how excited you are about the opportunity, the experience can be nerve-wracking . 

But feeling butterflies doesn’t mean you can’t give a great speech. With the proper preparation and a clear outline, apprehensive public speakers and natural wordsmiths alike can write and present a compelling message. Here’s how to write a good speech you’ll be proud to deliver.

What is good speech writing?

Good speech writing is the art of crafting words and ideas into a compelling, coherent, and memorable message that resonates with the audience. Here are some key elements of great speech writing:

• It begins with clearly understanding the speech's purpose and the audience it seeks to engage. 
• A well-written speech clearly conveys its central message, ensuring that the audience understands and retains the key points. 
• It is structured thoughtfully, with a captivating opening, a well-organized body, and a conclusion that reinforces the main message. 
• Good speech writing embraces the power of engaging content, weaving in stories, examples, and relatable anecdotes to connect with the audience on both intellectual and emotional levels. 

Ultimately, it is the combination of these elements, along with the authenticity and delivery of the speaker , that transforms words on a page into a powerful and impactful spoken narrative.

What makes a good speech?

A great speech includes several key qualities, but three fundamental elements make a speech truly effective:

Clarity and purpose

Remembering the audience, cohesive structure.

While other important factors make a speech a home run, these three elements are essential for writing an effective speech.

The main elements of a good speech

The main elements of a speech typically include:

• Introduction: The introduction sets the stage for your speech and grabs the audience's attention. It should include a hook or attention-grabbing opening, introduce the topic, and provide an overview of what will be covered.
• Opening/captivating statement: This is a strong statement that immediately engages the audience and creates curiosity about the speech topics.
• Thesis statement/central idea: The thesis statement or central idea is a concise statement that summarizes the main point or argument of your speech. It serves as a roadmap for the audience to understand what your speech is about.
• Body: The body of the speech is where you elaborate on your main points or arguments. Each point is typically supported by evidence, examples, statistics, or anecdotes. The body should be organized logically and coherently, with smooth transitions between the main points.
• Supporting evidence: This includes facts, data, research findings, expert opinions, or personal stories that support and strengthen your main points. Well-chosen and credible evidence enhances the persuasive power of your speech.
• Transitions: Transitions are phrases or statements that connect different parts of your speech, guiding the audience from one idea to the next. Effective transitions signal the shifts in topics or ideas and help maintain a smooth flow throughout the speech.
• Counterarguments and rebuttals (if applicable): If your speech involves addressing opposing viewpoints or counterarguments, you should acknowledge and address them. Presenting counterarguments makes your speech more persuasive and demonstrates critical thinking.
• Conclusion: The conclusion is the final part of your speech and should bring your message to a satisfying close. Summarize your main points, restate your thesis statement, and leave the audience with a memorable closing thought or call to action.
• Closing statement: This is the final statement that leaves a lasting impression and reinforces the main message of your speech. It can be a call to action, a thought-provoking question, a powerful quote, or a memorable anecdote.
• Delivery and presentation: How you deliver your speech is also an essential element to consider. Pay attention to your tone, body language, eye contact , voice modulation, and timing. Practice and rehearse your speech, and try using the 7-38-55 rule to ensure confident and effective delivery.

While the order and emphasis of these elements may vary depending on the type of speech and audience, these elements provide a framework for organizing and delivering a successful speech.

How to structure a good speech

You know what message you want to transmit, who you’re delivering it to, and even how you want to say it. But you need to know how to start, develop, and close a speech before writing it. 

Think of a speech like an essay. It should have an introduction, conclusion, and body sections in between. This places ideas in a logical order that the audience can better understand and follow them. Learning how to make a speech with an outline gives your storytelling the scaffolding it needs to get its point across.

Here’s a general speech structure to guide your writing process:

• Explanation 1
• Explanation 2
• Explanation 3

How to write a compelling speech opener

Some research shows that engaged audiences pay attention for only 15 to 20 minutes at a time. Other estimates are even lower, citing that people stop listening intently in fewer than 10 minutes . If you make a good first impression at the beginning of your speech, you have a better chance of interesting your audience through the middle when attention spans fade. 

Implementing the INTRO model can help grab and keep your audience’s attention as soon as you start speaking. This acronym stands for interest, need, timing, roadmap, and objectives, and it represents the key points you should hit in an opening. 

Here’s what to include for each of these points: 

• Interest : Introduce yourself or your topic concisely and speak with confidence . Write a compelling opening statement using relevant data or an anecdote that the audience can relate to.
• Needs : The audience is listening to you because they have something to learn. If you’re pitching a new app idea to a panel of investors, those potential partners want to discover more about your product and what they can earn from it. Read the room and gently remind them of the purpose of your speech. 
• Timing : When appropriate, let your audience know how long you’ll speak. This lets listeners set expectations and keep tabs on their own attention span. If a weary audience member knows you’ll talk for 40 minutes, they can better manage their energy as that time goes on. 
• Routemap : Give a brief overview of the three main points you’ll cover in your speech. If an audience member’s attention starts to drop off and they miss a few sentences, they can more easily get their bearings if they know the general outline of the presentation.
• Objectives : Tell the audience what you hope to achieve, encouraging them to listen to the end for the payout. 

Writing the middle of a speech

The body of your speech is the most information-dense section. Facts, visual aids, PowerPoints — all this information meets an audience with a waning attention span. Sticking to the speech structure gives your message focus and keeps you from going off track, making everything you say as useful as possible.

Limit the middle of your speech to three points, and support them with no more than three explanations. Following this model organizes your thoughts and prevents you from offering more information than the audience can retain. 

Using this section of the speech to make your presentation interactive can add interest and engage your audience. Try including a video or demonstration to break the monotony. A quick poll or survey also keeps the audience on their toes. 

Wrapping the speech up

To you, restating your points at the end can feel repetitive and dull. You’ve practiced countless times and heard it all before. But repetition aids memory and learning , helping your audience retain what you’ve told them. Use your speech’s conclusion to summarize the main points with a few short sentences.

Try to end on a memorable note, like posing a motivational quote or a thoughtful question the audience can contemplate once they leave. In proposal or pitch-style speeches, consider landing on a call to action (CTA) that invites your audience to take the next step.

How to write a good speech

If public speaking gives you the jitters, you’re not alone. Roughly 80% of the population feels nervous before giving a speech, and another 10% percent experiences intense anxiety and sometimes even panic. 

The fear of failure can cause procrastination and can cause you to put off your speechwriting process until the last minute. Finding the right words takes time and preparation, and if you’re already feeling nervous, starting from a blank page might seem even harder.

But putting in the effort despite your stress is worth it. Presenting a speech you worked hard on fosters authenticity and connects you to the subject matter, which can help your audience understand your points better. Human connection is all about honesty and vulnerability, and if you want to connect to the people you’re speaking to, they should see that in you.

1. Identify your objectives and target audience

Before diving into the writing process, find healthy coping strategies to help you stop worrying . Then you can define your speech’s purpose, think about your target audience, and start identifying your objectives. Here are some questions to ask yourself and ground your thinking : 

• What purpose do I want my speech to achieve? 
• What would it mean to me if I achieved the speech’s purpose?
• What audience am I writing for? 
• What do I know about my audience? 
• What values do I want to transmit? 
• If the audience remembers one take-home message, what should it be? 
• What do I want my audience to feel, think, or do after I finish speaking? 
• What parts of my message could be confusing and require further explanation?

2. Know your audience

Understanding your audience is crucial for tailoring your speech effectively. Consider the demographics of your audience, their interests, and their expectations. For instance, if you're addressing a group of healthcare professionals, you'll want to use medical terminology and data that resonate with them. Conversely, if your audience is a group of young students, you'd adjust your content to be more relatable to their experiences and interests. 

3. Choose a clear message

Your message should be the central idea that you want your audience to take away from your speech. Let's say you're giving a speech on climate change. Your clear message might be something like, "Individual actions can make a significant impact on mitigating climate change." Throughout your speech, all your points and examples should support this central message, reinforcing it for your audience.

4. Structure your speech

Organizing your speech properly keeps your audience engaged and helps them follow your ideas. The introduction should grab your audience's attention and introduce the topic. For example, if you're discussing space exploration, you could start with a fascinating fact about a recent space mission. In the body, you'd present your main points logically, such as the history of space exploration, its scientific significance, and future prospects. Finally, in the conclusion, you'd summarize your key points and reiterate the importance of space exploration in advancing human knowledge.

5. Use engaging content for clarity

Engaging content includes stories, anecdotes, statistics, and examples that illustrate your main points. For instance, if you're giving a speech about the importance of reading, you might share a personal story about how a particular book changed your perspective. You could also include statistics on the benefits of reading, such as improved cognitive abilities and empathy.

6. Maintain clarity and simplicity

It's essential to communicate your ideas clearly. Avoid using overly technical jargon or complex language that might confuse your audience. For example, if you're discussing a medical breakthrough with a non-medical audience, explain complex terms in simple, understandable language.

7. Practice and rehearse

Practice is key to delivering a great speech. Rehearse multiple times to refine your delivery, timing, and tone. Consider using a mirror or recording yourself to observe your body language and gestures. For instance, if you're giving a motivational speech, practice your gestures and expressions to convey enthusiasm and confidence.

8. Consider nonverbal communication

Your body language, tone of voice, and gestures should align with your message . If you're delivering a speech on leadership, maintain strong eye contact to convey authority and connection with your audience. A steady pace and varied tone can also enhance your speech's impact.

9. Engage your audience

Engaging your audience keeps them interested and attentive. Encourage interaction by asking thought-provoking questions or sharing relatable anecdotes. If you're giving a speech on teamwork, ask the audience to recall a time when teamwork led to a successful outcome, fostering engagement and connection.

10. Prepare for Q&A

Anticipate potential questions or objections your audience might have and prepare concise, well-informed responses. If you're delivering a speech on a controversial topic, such as healthcare reform, be ready to address common concerns, like the impact on healthcare costs or access to services, during the Q&A session.

By following these steps and incorporating examples that align with your specific speech topic and purpose, you can craft and deliver a compelling and impactful speech that resonates with your audience.

Tools for writing a great speech

There are several helpful tools available for speechwriting, both technological and communication-related. Here are a few examples:

• Word processing software: Tools like Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or other word processors provide a user-friendly environment for writing and editing speeches. They offer features like spell-checking, grammar correction, formatting options, and easy revision tracking.
• Presentation software: Software such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides is useful when creating visual aids to accompany your speech. These tools allow you to create engaging slideshows with text, images, charts, and videos to enhance your presentation.
• Speechwriting Templates: Online platforms or software offer pre-designed templates specifically for speechwriting. These templates provide guidance on structuring your speech and may include prompts for different sections like introductions, main points, and conclusions.
• Rhetorical devices and figures of speech: Rhetorical tools such as metaphors, similes, alliteration, and parallelism can add impact and persuasion to your speech. Resources like books, websites, or academic papers detailing various rhetorical devices can help you incorporate them effectively.
• Speechwriting apps: Mobile apps designed specifically for speechwriting can be helpful in organizing your thoughts, creating outlines, and composing a speech. These apps often provide features like voice recording, note-taking, and virtual prompts to keep you on track.
• Grammar and style checkers: Online tools or plugins like Grammarly or Hemingway Editor help improve the clarity and readability of your speech by checking for grammar, spelling, and style errors. They provide suggestions for sentence structure, word choice, and overall tone.
• Thesaurus and dictionary: Online or offline resources such as thesauruses and dictionaries help expand your vocabulary and find alternative words or phrases to express your ideas more effectively. They can also clarify meanings or provide context for unfamiliar terms.
• Online speechwriting communities: Joining online forums or communities focused on speechwriting can be beneficial for getting feedback, sharing ideas, and learning from experienced speechwriters. It's an opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals and improve your public speaking skills through collaboration.

Remember, while these tools can assist in the speechwriting process, it's essential to use them thoughtfully and adapt them to your specific needs and style. The most important aspect of speechwriting remains the creativity, authenticity, and connection with your audience that you bring to your speech.

5 tips for writing a speech

Behind every great speech is an excellent idea and a speaker who refined it. But a successful speech is about more than the initial words on the page, and there are a few more things you can do to help it land.

Here are five more tips for writing and practicing your speech:

1. Structure first, write second

If you start the writing process before organizing your thoughts, you may have to re-order, cut, and scrap the sentences you worked hard on. Save yourself some time by using a speech structure, like the one above, to order your talking points first. This can also help you identify unclear points or moments that disrupt your flow.

2. Do your homework

Data strengthens your argument with a scientific edge. Research your topic with an eye for attention-grabbing statistics, or look for findings you can use to support each point. If you’re pitching a product or service, pull information from company metrics that demonstrate past or potential successes. 

Audience members will likely have questions, so learn all talking points inside and out. If you tell investors that your product will provide 12% returns, for example, come prepared with projections that support that statement.

3. Sound like yourself

Memorable speakers have distinct voices. Think of Martin Luther King Jr’s urgent, inspiring timbre or Oprah’s empathetic, personal tone . Establish your voice — one that aligns with your personality and values — and stick with it. If you’re a motivational speaker, keep your tone upbeat to inspire your audience . If you’re the CEO of a startup, try sounding assured but approachable. 

4. Practice

As you practice a speech, you become more confident , gain a better handle on the material, and learn the outline so well that unexpected questions are less likely to trip you up. Practice in front of a colleague or friend for honest feedback about what you could change, and speak in front of the mirror to tweak your nonverbal communication and body language .

5. Remember to breathe

When you’re stressed, you breathe more rapidly . It can be challenging to talk normally when you can’t regulate your breath. Before your presentation, try some mindful breathing exercises so that when the day comes, you already have strategies that will calm you down and remain present . This can also help you control your voice and avoid speaking too quickly.

How to ghostwrite a great speech for someone else

Ghostwriting a speech requires a unique set of skills, as you're essentially writing a piece that will be delivered by someone else. Here are some tips on how to effectively ghostwrite a speech:

• Understand the speaker's voice and style : Begin by thoroughly understanding the speaker's personality, speaking style, and preferences. This includes their tone, humor, and any personal anecdotes they may want to include.
• Interview the speaker : Have a detailed conversation with the speaker to gather information about their speech's purpose, target audience, key messages, and any specific points they want to emphasize. Ask for personal stories or examples they may want to include.
• Research thoroughly : Research the topic to ensure you have a strong foundation of knowledge. This helps you craft a well-informed and credible speech.
• Create an outline : Develop a clear outline that includes the introduction, main points, supporting evidence, and a conclusion. Share this outline with the speaker for their input and approval.
• Write in the speaker's voice : While crafting the speech, maintain the speaker's voice and style. Use language and phrasing that feel natural to them. If they have a particular way of expressing ideas, incorporate that into the speech.
• Craft a captivating opening : Begin the speech with a compelling opening that grabs the audience's attention. This could be a relevant quote, an interesting fact, a personal anecdote, or a thought-provoking question.
• Organize content logically : Ensure the speech flows logically, with each point building on the previous one. Use transitions to guide the audience from one idea to the next smoothly.
• Incorporate engaging stories and examples : Include anecdotes, stories, and real-life examples that illustrate key points and make the speech relatable and memorable.
• Edit and revise : Edit the speech carefully for clarity, grammar, and coherence. Ensure the speech is the right length and aligns with the speaker's time constraints.
• Seek feedback : Share drafts of the speech with the speaker for their feedback and revisions. They may have specific changes or additions they'd like to make.
• Practice delivery : If possible, work with the speaker on their delivery. Practice the speech together, allowing the speaker to become familiar with the content and your writing style.
• Maintain confidentiality : As a ghostwriter, it's essential to respect the confidentiality and anonymity of the work. Do not disclose that you wrote the speech unless you have the speaker's permission to do so.
• Be flexible : Be open to making changes and revisions as per the speaker's preferences. Your goal is to make them look good and effectively convey their message.
• Meet deadlines : Stick to agreed-upon deadlines for drafts and revisions. Punctuality and reliability are essential in ghostwriting.
• Provide support : Support the speaker during their preparation and rehearsal process. This can include helping with cue cards, speech notes, or any other materials they need.

Remember that successful ghostwriting is about capturing the essence of the speaker while delivering a well-structured and engaging speech. Collaboration, communication, and adaptability are key to achieving this.

Give your best speech yet

Learn how to make a speech that’ll hold an audience’s attention by structuring your thoughts and practicing frequently. Put the effort into writing and preparing your content, and aim to improve your breathing, eye contact , and body language as you practice. The more you work on your speech, the more confident you’ll become.

The energy you invest in writing an effective speech will help your audience remember and connect to every concept. Remember: some life-changing philosophies have come from good speeches, so give your words a chance to resonate with others. You might even change their thinking.

Understand Yourself Better:

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Elizabeth Perry, ACC

Elizabeth Perry is a Coach Community Manager at BetterUp. She uses strategic engagement strategies to cultivate a learning community across a global network of Coaches through in-person and virtual experiences, technology-enabled platforms, and strategic coaching industry partnerships. With over 3 years of coaching experience and a certification in transformative leadership and life coaching from Sofia University, Elizabeth leverages transpersonal psychology expertise to help coaches and clients gain awareness of their behavioral and thought patterns, discover their purpose and passions, and elevate their potential. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach.

How to not be nervous for a presentation — 13 tips that work (really!)

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How to Prepare and Give a Speech

Last Updated: August 18, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Deb DiSandro . Deb DiSandro is the Owner of Speak Up On Purpose, an organization dedicated to improving and teaching public speaking. Deb has over 30 years of experience as a national speaker and has presented at the Erma Bombeck Writer’s Conference and the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. She was awarded the National Speakers Association Member of the Year 2007 and has been published in Writer's Digest, Daily Herald, Women's Day, and Better Homes & Gardens. There are 17 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 1,155,394 times.

Being asked to prepare and give a speech can seem really intimidating when you've never done it before. Don't worry! You'll be a public speaking pro in no time if you follow these simple tips.

Planning Your Speech

• You may even be able to redirect or add points to your speech with a smaller audience if you notice a number of them are interested in a particular subject or niche.

Writing the Speech

• Try starting the speech writing process by free-writing. Write as much as you can about your subject as fast as you can. Don't worry about judgment or crafting perfect sentences. Once you have your points on paper, you can start refining them and putting them in order.
• Use an anecdote or a quote. Sometimes, someone else has already said it better than you ever will. A quote, provided it hasn't been overused, can help you get things started. Just be sure to look for a quote that is surprising or unique, and always credit your source. [5] X Research source
• Be cautious about opening with a joke unless you know your audience well. You may think that a joke is funny, but your audience may find it humorless or even offensive.

• You can start by looking at generic sources like an encyclopedia or Wikipedia, but you need to fact check your ideas with more authoritative sources after you generally understand your subject.
• Draw on your own experience. If you have a long history with your topic, your experiences and personal stories can be great resources. Just keep these stories succinct so that you don't ramble and lose the audience's attention.

• Use 1 card for the introduction. This card should include your opening statement.
• Use 1 or 2 cards for each supporting point. Then, create 1 card for the conclusion which ties back to the main idea of your speech.
• Write brief sentence fragments or even single words on your cards. These words or fragments should contain key phrases that remind you of what you want to say.
• If you feel insecure or don't know the subject well, write out the words of your speech exactly as you want to say them.

• Keep the visuals to a minimum. You want them to aid your speech, not to overshadow it. Always make sure your speech can stand on its own should technical problems occur.
• Make sure that the audience can read the content of your visuals. Too big is better than not big enough.
• Check the facilities of the room in which you will be speaking. If you need Internet or you need a projection screen, be sure that the facility has the equipment. Arrive to the room early to make sure everything is functional for your speech.

Practicing Your Speech

• If you drive a regular commute, you can also practice a memorized speech while driving. Don't look off of notecards while on the road, though.

• Make sure that your gestures are natural and not too frenetic. Alternatively, don't fix your arms at your sides or keep your hands latched to the podium.
• If you make the speech to a friend or colleague and they offer constructive criticism, try to be open to what they have to say. Make sure they are familiar with your topic or industry, though, or their criticism may do more harm than good.

Getting Ready the Day of Your Speech

• Try to arrive at your presentation well before your audience. Take the time to make sure the sound is good and run through your visual aids. If you're at a conference, you may have 15-20 minutes to prep. If you're the sole speaker, you could get there an hour in advance.

During Your Speech

• Make eye contact with members of your audience. If eye contact is too intense for you, look just above their heads at a point such as a clock or a painting. Remember to look to both sides of the room. Don't favor just the right or left.
• Move your eyes around your audience so that everyone feels included in the presentation.

• Never leave the stage if something goes wrong, even if you feel embarrassed. Make a joke if you can, shake it off, and move forward.

• Be sure to build time for any Q and A into your allotted presentation time. That way, you can control the flow of the Q and A. Then, after the last question, let your audience know, "I'd like to share one final thought with you," and deliver a powerful closer.

How Do You Practice a Speech Effectively?

Samples of Persuasive Speeches

Samples of Informational Speeches

Community Q&A

Reader Videos

• Right before you start speaking, squeeze your butt cheeks together. [15] X Research source Public speaking author Robin Kermode suggests that this can help reduce anxiety. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0
• It is better to select a topic you are comfortable with. By doing so, you will be less anxious and stressed. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0
• Be loud and clear. Avoid the feeling of inferiority. This will boost up your confidence. Thanks Helpful 1 Not Helpful 0

Things You'll Need

• Written speech or index cards
• Friend, teacher or family member for practicing
• Video recording device
• Computer or tablet for presentations
• Charts and easel for presentations
• Microphone for a large room
• Glass of water
• Appropriate outfit

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_business-communication-for-success/s14-02-choosing-a-topic.html
• ↑ https://www.apa.org/monitor/2017/02/tips-speaking
• ↑ https://www.comm.pitt.edu/oral-comm-lab/audience-analysis
• ↑ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/trial-practice/practice/2015/5-tips-for-engaging-opening-statements/
• ↑ https://open.lib.umn.edu/publicspeaking/chapter/9-2-the-attention-getter-the-first-step-of-an-introduction/
• ↑ https://www.comm.pitt.edu/structuring-speech
• ↑ https://www.comm.pitt.edu/visual-aids
• ↑ https://wmich.edu/career/personalcommercial
• ↑ https://www.toastmasters.org/resources/public-speaking-tips/preparing-a-speech
• ↑ https://www.edutopia.org/discussion/record-yourself-improve-your-practice
• ↑ https://www.purdueglobal.edu/blog/student-life/public-speaking-tips/
• ↑ https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ccc-spch-1080-1/chapter/chapter-12-nonverbal-aspects-of-delivery/
• ↑ https://www.hamilton.edu/academics/centers/oralcommunication/guides/tips-for-effective-delivery
• ↑ https://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2014/01/28/five-easy-tricks-to-make-your-presentation-interactive/#3b01c83d2586
• ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/careers/careers-blog/10-quirky-tips-beating-interview-nerves-job
• How to Write a Great Speech: 5 Secrets for Success
• How to Give a Great Speech

About This Article

To prepare and give a speech, start by thinking about the topic, audience, and location of the speech. Write a detailed outline that includes your main topics, supporting points, and facts. Then, transfer the speech to note cards or handouts if necessary. Remember to practice your speech a few times in front of a mirror or a friend, and set a timer to ensure that you aren’t taking too long. On the day of the speech, review your note cards and make sure your presentation, handouts, or other supplementary information is in order. For tips on keeping calm during the speech and examples of different speeches, read on! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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The Ultimate Speech Preparation Checklist

by Kolarele Sonaike

You’ll have heard it all before

“fail to plan. plan to fail”, “proper preparation prevents piss poor performance”, “success is what happens when opportunity meets preparation”.

There are lots of pithy pretty quotes that big talking experts like me and others like to trot out to make ourselves seem smart about speech preparation.

In almost ever article or guide on public speaking I’ve read or written, there is always something at some point about the importance of preparation.

It’s all great advice, of course. Preparation is undoubtedly the single most determinative factor in successful public speaking. But there’s one fundamental flaw in all this advice. No one ever tells you how exactly you should go about doing this great preparation.

“What should you do? Where should you start? How long should you spend?”

No one ever breaks it down. We all just operate on the assumption that the process of preparation is obvious. That we just need to say, and it will be done.

But as we all know, when we assume, we make an ass out of u and me, so all assumptions are out.

With apologies for not getting to this sooner, here now is: The Ultimate Speech Preparation Checklist

(It’s a long one so why not DOWNLOAD THE PDF SPEECH PREPARATION CHECKLIST HERE to read later)

• DON’T PANIC. PREPARE! – public speaking is nothing more than a conversation with your audience. If you can hold a good conversation in private with a good friend, you can give a great speech in public. The techniques are almost identical, which means it’s all doable if you approach it right.
• DATE OF MY SPEECH: this will make you think about how much time you have for preparation
• TOPIC OF MY SPEECH: what am I going to speak about?
• LENGTH OF MY SPEECH: how long will I speak for?
• LOCATION OF MY SPEECH: where I’ll be speaking?
• OCCASION: what’s the occasion of my speech? e.g. after dinner speech; presentation to the council; introduction speech at a conference
• TITLE: what is the title of my speech (even if no one will know it, it’s still useful to think about one so your speech has a focus).
• TYPE OF SPEECH: what type of speech are you giving? All speeches fall into one (sometimes two) of four categories: Informative (sharing information); Persuasive (seeking to persuade people to a particular point of view); Motivational (to get your audience to do something); Entertaining (to amuse your audience).
• OBJECTIVE (for your audience): what do you want your audience to get from your speech? What do you want them to know (informative speech), or think (persuasive speech), or do (motivational speech). If you are giving a purely entertainment speech, then your goal is simply to make your audience laugh. or i as a result of your speech (have one clear goal that you can describe in 15 words or less).
• GOAL (for yourself):  what do you want to get out of giving your speech? How do you want it to benefit you personally? e.g. I want to get the respect of the room; I want to be invited to present to the board; I want to be thought of as funny.
• VENUE: what is the venue like? What’s the layout? How far away from the audience will I be? Will I use a microphone? Are there IT facilities (for a slide presentation)?
• THEME: what theme can you use to tie your whole speech together? (often this will be the one thing that your audience remembers above everything else). Think Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ theme. As famous as that speech is, that is probably the only part you still remember. Or JFK’s ‘we choose to go to the moon’. A client of mine recently used the ‘marriage’ theme to give a great presentation about company mergers to a lawyers’ conference.
• AUDIENCE ANALYSIS: who is my audience (age, gender, ethnicity, financial circumstances, industry/profession, personality types etc); what is their attitude (what do they currently think/feel/believe about the topic of my speech); context – how many will be in the audience, how will they be seated, what state of mind will they be in (drowsy after lunch; agitated; uninterested etc).
• MY IMPRESSION: what kind of impression do I want to make? what tone will I take with my speech? how do I want to come across? (serious, funny, casual, meticulous etc).
• RESEARCH & BRAINSTORM:  identify the points you need to research & brainstorm to make sure you are an expert on your topic; find out everything you can about the topic of your speech. Work on the basis that you will only use the best 10% of what you know about the subject in your speech.
• STRUCTURE OF MY SPEECH: how will I open my speech? how will I introduce my audience to my speech topic? what are the main points I am going to make? what will my conclusion be? how will I close my speech?
• NOTES: what notes will I use? (full script; note cards; nothing at all)
• SLIDES/POWERPOINT: (if using slide presentation) are my slides ready? am I prepared to deliver my speech without them in case of an IT failure? have I practised using the slides?
• PROBLEMS: what problems could realistically occur? (not enough people show up; microphone failure; IT failure; my time is cut short etc) and how will I deal with this?
• APPEARANCE: what am I going to wear to help me give the impression I want to give?
• PRACTICE: how much practice will I do (practise as much and as often as it takes for you to familiarise – not memorise – your speech)

There you go: A step by step blue print of how to go about preparing your speech.

No way you can remember all that, so why not get it as a FREE PDF DOWNLOAD here .

Now, if you’ve got this far but you’re somehow still not convinced about the importance of preparation, I leave you with another pithy quote, this time from good ole honest Abe Lincoln.

There you are. Now you have no reason not to prepare. So go sharpen your axe!

[addthis tool=”addthis_relatedposts_inline”] Adieu!

Kolarele Sonaike

Founder, Elevator Pitch School

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Nervous About Public Speaking? Try This.

Contrary to popular belief, confident public speaking isn’t about getting rid of your nerves. The secret is to reframe your anxiety as excitement. Here are four steps you can take before your next big speech or presentation. First, take a few minutes to center yourself. Pause and breathe in through your nose and out through […]

Contrary to popular belief, confident public speaking isn’t about getting rid of your nerves. The secret is to reframe your anxiety as excitement. Here are four steps you can take before your next big speech or presentation. First, take a few minutes to center yourself. Pause and breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Next, ask yourself, “Why is this speech, this topic, or this audience important to me?” Say the answer out loud. Then, visualize the entire presentation from start to finish … and be sure to imagine it going incredibly well! What’s the best-case scenario? What did you do right? How did you carry yourself? How did you communicate the information? Finally — and this is the easiest step — listen to a song that gives you a little boost. Pick one that brings a smile to your face and fills you with positive energy (no matter how corny). Practicing these rituals before every presentation will help you make use of your nervous energy instead of being thwarted by it.

Source: This tip is adapted from "The Upside of Your Public Speaking Jitters," by Allison Shapira

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Planning Your Speech

Being confident in your speech making and your public speaking means that you should fully prepare for your speech! Here are some tips to write a great speech!

1. Determine the purpose of your speech.  Whether it is a persuasive essay, argumentative essay, or just an informative one you need to know why you are giving the speech. Generally you may be told what kind of speech to write for your assignment, but if you have a choice on what type of speech you need to give it's important to know what you want to tell your audience. 

2. Identify your audience.  This may depend on your assignment but you need to know your audience to know what type of the information you are giving to them. Are you giving a speech to people who don't have any knowledge on the subject? Experts in the field? Or are you just speaking in front of your professor and fellow classmates? Understanding your audience helps you determine the scope of the detail in your speech and how you can keep the audience captivated. 

3. Create your claim (or thesis).  Just like writing a paper, your speech needs a thesis. Your claim is the main idea for your speech, and you will spend your speech providing evidence that supports your claim. 

4. Collect your evidence.  You need to support your claim with evidence. Evidence may include: surveys, statistics, anecdotal evidence, or even your own experience. 

5. Start determining how you will organize your speech.  Just like an essay, a speech has a similar structure. Your introduction, body, supporting evidence, and conclusion. It's helpful to write down your speech in a similar way you would write an essay. 

Giving Your Speech

Glossophobia, or the fear of public speaking, is very common. Below are some speech-giving tips that can help reduce your anxiety!

1. Talk to someone if you are feeling stressed.  Talk to a counselor, your professor, or just a friend. It's always helpful to talk about your worries and get support from people around. 

2. Know what you're talking about.  You will be more comfortable reciting your speech when you have some knowledge on the subject. While you are researching and preparing your speech, get some preliminary background information so you feel more confident with the subject. This also helps if you get any surprise questions from your audience!

3. Practice.  Practice, practice, practice. In the mirror, in front of some friends, in front of your classmates. Be comfortable with the words, the structure of your speech, and knowing the order in which you will present your main ideas. 

4. Organize your materials.  Disorganization the day of your speech can worsen your anxiety! Prepare the night before by setting out all of your demonstrative items (poster, powerpoint, pictures), make sure any notecards are in order, and set aside your clothes if you are dressing up for your speech. It's also important to make sure the technology in the room you are presenting in has everything you need (check with your professor)!

5. Study other speeches.  You don't need to study the great orators of the world to learn how to improve your speeches. TED Talks, interviews from people you look up to, and even watching YouTube videos can help improve your public speaking skills. 

6. Don't rely on Powerpoints/posters.  Items like Powerpoints and posters that you use for your speech are meant to support you and not be something that you read off of the entire time. If you can do without visual aids or if they are not required for your speech, you may decide not to use any at all. Try to have as little text as possible on them--you won't be able to read off of them and your audience will not be distracted reading the slides. 

7. Focus on your message.  Don't get caught up in little details, your stories, or any jokes you may have in your speech. Focus on your claim so your message is understood by your audience. 

8. Don't apologize.  Everyone makes a mistake. Technical difficulties can happen to every one. Don't let minor issues such as forgetting a part of your speech or getting a little mixed up derail your presentation. Your audience may not even notice the small mistake. If you feel like you need to make an apology, make a small one and continue on. You've got this!

9. Look around the room.  You should always give your audience your full attention. It might be a small classroom of a few students or a massive auditorium but your audience is very important. Focus on different parts of the room that you can spend a few seconds on during the speech. If you can't decide where to look, focus on a specific person. 

10. Be yourself.  You can reduce your anxiety by just being yourself. Involved your personality in how you present information; use your pitch and create a style that's meaningful and allows the audience to relate to you. And don't forget to smile!

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14 Tips On How To Improve Speaking Skills (Speak Like A Pro!)

If you feel nervous or flustered when it’s your time to talk, use these actionable practices to be more articulate and well-spoken in the workplace and beyond.

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Whether you’re chatting with coworkers at lunch, having an important conversation with your boss, or giving a big presentation, speaking with confidence and charisma can transform your daily life.

Research shows that communication skills are strong predictors of your success in the workplace and relationships . Yet, so many people still struggle with verbally expressing themselves. Excellent speakers benefit from:

• Improved communication
• Getting their ideas heard
• Earning more respect
• Being interrupted less
• Having more loyal and deep connections
• Not being underestimated or overlooked

If you are hesitating or flustered when it’s your turn to talk, here are 14 actionable tips for improving your speaking skills.

Watch our video below to learn powerful presentation skills in person, on video, and in meetings:

How to Improve Speaking Skills at Work and Beyond: 14 Action-Packed Tips

Most kids learn to talk around 1 to 2 years old, but learning to express yourself verbally is a lifelong learning experience. You can excel in your career and get what you want by mastering the art of talking. 

Many tools are available to improve your speech, whether you’re a native speaker or an English learner. Here are the top 14 science-backed ways to speak better: 

#1 Stay in your zone of genius (only talk about what you know)

You may notice that the most professional-sounding people tend to stay in their zone of genius when speaking publicly. You won’t hear Oprah pretending she’s an expert in electric cars. Nor will you hear Elon Musk advising about spirituality and personal development.

They both stay in their realms of expertise, which naturally makes them sound confident when they speak. They’re not faking it— they know what they’re talking about!

If you struggle to speak with conviction, you may inadvertently talk about topics you don’t know much about. Instead, focus on your zone of genius.

Your zone of genius is the mental space where your skills and interests converge .

It includes the subjects, facts, and stories you know the most about. These things are easy for you to talk about with others because you’re knowledgeable and passionate about them. 

Avoid talking off the cuff about topics you’re not familiar with. Not only does this make you sound uninformed or untrustworthy, but it can send off the message that you are a “know-it-all.” 

Masterful conversationalists are usually not afraid to say, “I don’t know.” Similarly, a public speaker won’t add random facts or opinions that they can’t back up with authentic knowledge on the topic.

Pro tip: Not a master in your subject? No worries! Most people have limited knowledge in a particular field. Try learning from the Three Book Rule, which states that if you read 3 books on a specific topic (for example, tennis), you’ll be more knowledgeable than 99% of the population.

#2 Read books or articles out loud

Reading is one of the most underrated tools for becoming a great speaker. It can make you sound more articulate and smooth in your speech. Plus, you learn new vocabulary and better comprehend the book in the process. 

Unlike conversations or spoken speeches, written text tends to have a better structure for learning, as authors and editors have worked together to keep the text free of grammatical errors or awkward sentences. Reading books aloud helps you learn to speak more smoothly in day-to-day conversations. 

Repeat this exercise at least once per week (or every night before bed if you’re determined):

• Find a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted.
• Choose a book you enjoy, flip to a random page, or continue reading where you left off.
• Read the page out loud from start to end.
• Take note of words you had trouble pronouncing or sentences that sounded awkward out loud. Notice how fast or slow you read and the tone of your voice. Depending on the character’s speaking, you can also practice changing your voice if you’re reading fiction. This can help you practice vocal variety.
• Look up the pronunciation of specific words if needed. 
• Now read the page or passage out loud again. Change your performance based on what you noticed in the first round. Emphasize important points with a shift in volume or inflection (highness or lowness of your voice)  
• Optionally, use voice memos on your phone to record yourself reading.
• Listen back to your recordings and find places where your inflection, cadence (the rhythm of speech), and volume change. Do these align with the overall message of the piece? 

If you feel unsure about reading aloud, try listening to audiobook samples to hear how different speakers recite written words. You can also use a free resource like Librivox to listen to free audiobooks.

#3 Use tongue twisters to practice enunciation

Mumbling speech can make it challenging to understand what you’re saying. When people mumble, it sends the message that they don’t want to be heard or feel embarrassed by their speech. On the other hand, people who enunciate their words are seen as more intelligent. 

Eloquent speaking is undoubtedly an art, but it starts with the simple act of training your mouth to move in a certain way. Those silly tongue twisters from your childhood can be surprisingly useful. Repeating related sounds can improve your English speaking skills and articulation of specific words. 

Repeat these 10 times each or until you can say them over and over without fumbling: 

• Red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather.
• Sally sells shells by the seashore.
• Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?
• How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
• You know New York, you need New York, you know you need unique New York. 
• I saw a kitten eating chicken in the kitchen. 

Use tongue twisters regularly and as a vocal warm-up before you do a lot of talking. 

Bonus Tip: Learn the Art of Stage Presence

Did you know that public speaking is actually a skill? Many people struggle with stage anxiety because they feel they ‘missed the memo’ on public speaking or they are lacking because they do not have a natural stage presence. Not true!

Stage presence and public speaking are skills you need to be taught—very few people have them naturally. 

Watch our video below to learn the 7 steps to overcome stage fright and beat performance anxiety:

Here are all the aspects of public speaking you can master.

• How to make a first impression with an audience
• How to have stage presence
• Powerful body language
• How to speak with a commanding voice
• What to do with your hands while speaking

For every speaking skill you add to your toolbox, the less speaking anxiety you will feel.

If you want help really diving into your presentation skills, be sure to sign-up for our course…

Master Your People Skills

• Create a Memorable Presence
• Communicate with Confidence
• Achieve Your Goals

Have a question about the presentation or People School? Email Science of People support .

#4 Talk to yourself

One of the easiest ways to step into your power as a speaker is to start talking to yourself. People often dismiss those who talk to themselves as crazy when, in reality, talking to yourself is entirely normal. 

Scientists have found that talking to yourself is beneficial for enhancing your performance in sports, finding things you lost, and solving problems. A practice called mirror meditation combines neuroscience and self-reflection to overcome insecurities like physical appearance and public speaking. 

You can use self-talk with or without a mirror to achieve two primary goals:

• Build your confidence : Psychologists say that talking to yourself in a mirror can help externalize your inner dialogue and sort through your thoughts. Speaking positive things to your reflection is a form of positive affirmation. For example, you can calm your nerves before talking to someone important by telling your reflection, “You’ve got this! You are well-spoken, eloquent, and powerful with your words. You’re going to rock this conversation. I love you.” You don’t necessarily have to say these things out loud, but you want to signal to your mind that you are your number one fan (and you should be!).
• Rehearse before big moments (and sort through your thoughts) : For example, you can rehearse what you’ll say to your boss while you’re driving in the car on your way to work. Don’t worry about acting looking weird—nobody will be able to hear you. Use verbal recitation to gather your thoughts, so you can repeat the key points you want to discuss in the meeting. Similarly, before a big speech, you may want to walk around your room and go over a speech script in your head or out loud. 

Both methods can work synergistically to improve your speaking skills drastically. But the most important thing to remember about self-talk is: Avoid talking to yourself negatively whenever possible , especially before a critical communication event like a meeting, presentation, or important lunch. 

Listen to your internal voice and avoid internal statements like:

• “You sound stupid.”
• “I am horrible at public speaking.”
• “Your voice sounds embarrassing.”
• “You idiot, get it out already.” 

Replacing negative self-talk takes practice. Replace critical self-talk with positive affirmations ( here are 120 great ones ) and learn more about silencing your inner critic so you can feel more confident in your speech.   

#5 Learn from the best (& mimic them)

Humans are psychologically programmed to mimic each other. Mirror neurons are primal “monkey see, monkey do” parts of our brain that imitate the actions we see in other people. They explain why babies naturally smile when you smile or why you can learn to swim by watching others move in the water. 

Recent research has also revealed how these neurons are critical for learning language and communicating with others. You can even “hack” your mirror neurons to help you become a better speaker. Think about the best speakers you know and try a few of these simple practices to pick up on their best qualities:

• Watch a video of your favorite speaker three times in a row. Notice their tone of voice, stature, and vocal quirks. Learn a few sentences from the speech and try to re-enact them in a mirror. For example, if you want to mimic the conversational yet profound tone of Denzel Washington, watch this video of his speech at a graduation:

• Pretend you’re an actor and recite lines from a movie character you like. You can find specific scenes from movies on YouTube. Analyze how the script structure impacts your feelings about that character’s confidence and self-expression.
• Listen to a podcast of someone you admire and repeat things they say out loud. Podcasters are great speakers because they only have their voice to capture your attention. For example, Rob Dial of The Mindset Mentor is authentic, empowering, and energizing podcaster who speaks directly to the audience’s needs. 

Pro Tip : Speech mimicry helps you learn to speak more confidently in public or on stage, but remember to stay true to your unique qualities. You don’t want to copy other people’s words, or you will be inauthentic. Instead, take note of the specific qualities you want to adopt—such as a deeper voice, a slower pace of speaking, or a particular type of vocabulary—and integrate these into your existing communication style. 

#6 Always remember your MVP

An MVP isn’t just the star of a sports team. It’s the Most Valuable Point you need to make in any communication setting. If everything else you say was forgotten, what is one sentence that gets your point across?

Before you go into a meeting with your team, give a speech, or check in with your boss, think about your MVP. For example,

• I’m going into this check-in with my boss to ask for a raise of X dollars. 
• I want to sit down with my significant other tonight and resolve our miscommunication about X. 
• My main goal for today’s work lunch is to get to know 3 new things about each of my colleagues. 
• The key purpose of this article is to help people improve their speaking skills in various settings.  

Regardless of the communication setting, an MVP gives purpose to your words. 

Bonus: If you want to sound really convincing, practice turning your MVP into a specific sentence or two. Something like:

• “My performance in the past 6 months has doubled the company’s revenue, and, as a result, I believe I deserve a higher raise.”
• “There was a miscommunication earlier, but after some deep thinking, I realize it was my fault, and I am truly sorry.”

Having a concrete sentence or two memorized can help deliver your speech powerfully and convincingly.

#7 Sound more confident by speaking louder and lower

Speaking isn’t only about what you say but how you say it. A 2017 Yale study found that the sound of your voice is what makes people:

• Believe what you’re saying
• Feel certain emotions 

Think about it: How do you feel when you hear someone using filler words like “um” or “like” in every sentence? What about someone who talks softly? Or someone who raises their voice at the end of a statement to make it sound like a question?

You probably won’t perceive them as confident in what they’re saying. You may even be less likely to do business with them, believe their story, or give them what they’re asking for. 

There are three keys to sounding more confident when you talk:

• Speak louder (but don’t yell) : When you feel nervous, you may naturally talk more softly. But this can create a negative feedback loop that makes you sound (and feel) less confident. Instead, make your voice sound stronger by speaking at a moderate volume that you adjust based on the room and audience size. 
• Speak lower : Research shows that people who speak louder and lower are perceived as more dominant and authoritative. This is particularly important for women who talk in soft, high tones. You don’t need to change your natural voice completely; instead, practice speaking in the lower end of your range. 
• Talk at a moderately fast pace : If you speak too slowly, you could sound boring. People who drone on in a monotone don’t tend to keep our attention for long. On the other hand, if you speak too fast, you could sound annoying or difficult to understand. Studies have found that people who talk at a moderately fast pace (about 195 words per minute) seem more intelligent, persuasive, and attractive. Measure your voice with a Metronome app for Android or iOS and try to land in the 110-160 word per minute range.

Remember that your optimal vocal volume and pitch may change depending on your audience. Learn more tips about How to Speak with Confidence and Sound Better .  

Watch our video below to learn how to sound confident on the phone with 5 simple steps:

#8 Prepare your voice

Have you noticed your voice sounds groggy in the morning or strained after singing too loud on the drive to work? It’s not the best vocal state for negotiating a business deal or asking for a raise. 

Vocal care isn’t just for singers or public speakers. Proper preparation ensures your voice doesn’t crack when it comes time to speak up in a meeting. To sound better when talking, remember to:

• Use deep breathing : Shallow chest breathing can make you sound more jittery or nervous when talking. Deep belly breathing exercises can help improve your oxygen levels while simultaneously calming your body. 
• Exhale first : When it comes time to speak, most people breathe and start their sentences with an inhale. Instead, remember to exhale first. Blow out a strong breath just before you start talking.
• Stay hydrated : Your voice is directly affected by your level of hydration. Research even finds that hydrated voices sound better . If you are about to speak for an extended period in a speech or meeting, drink plenty of water in the hours leading up to the event.
• Use our 5 vocal warm-ups in our article and video below:

5 Vocal Warm-Ups Before Meetings, Speeches and Presentations

#9 Start and end with the best points

The serial-position effect explains why people remember the first and last things you say the most clearly. Whether talking to your coworkers about a project or giving a big pitch to a client, you should emphasize the best points at the beginning and the end.  

This is particularly important for presentations, but you can apply it to daily conversations. When preparing to speak, the first thing to do is brainstorm all your key points and ideas. It helps to jot them down on flashcards or digital slides. Arrange them so that the juiciest or most essential points come first. Then, reiterate them at the end as well.

For example, if you’re selling your marketing services to a client, the very first lines of the presentation may emphasize why your agency’s package is the best one available. This is sort of like a thesis. You might start with: “Top Level Agency is a one-stop shop for your marketing needs because we do all web design and digital production in-house (no freelancers or contractors!), offer 24-hour emergency technical support, and monthly payment plans.” 

Then, you can introduce yourself, explain the package offerings, and dig into more details. At the end of the presentation, repeat the key benefits they’ll get from working with your company. 

People remember the beginning and the end ! Avoiding burying your important points in the middle! Many people tell stories chronologically and accidentally bore their audience with background stories and foundational info that leaves a bad first impression. 

Pro Tip: Practice your opening and closing line the most. If you have these, you know you will start and end on a high.

#10 Master the art of presentations with 4 quick tips

From job interviews to congratulatory speeches to workplace meeting presentations, speaking in front of a group of people is a life skill that we all must practice at some point. It’s how you sell yourself, your ideas, or your products and services. Yet over 30% of Americans list public speaking (glossophobia) as one of their biggest fears. Fortunately, overcoming glossophobia can be as simple as preparation and practice. 

Here are four quick tips to transform your presentation skills:  

• Start with a hook : First impressions are everything! A sparkling one-liner, a fascinating story, or an intriguing question are the easiest ways to capture your audience’s attention before you dig into the details. Notice how Vanessa Van Edwards’ Tedx Talk starts with a funny phrase about her awkwardness: 

• Cut out excess info : A short presentation packed with information is far better than a long, boring drone full of fluff. Cut down your speech to the basics so that everything supports your main point. Avoid irrelevant facts or boring anecdotes. 
• Don’t just talk : The most captivating presentations use multiple modalities. Instead of just standing and talking, an engaging presenter will layer on the graphics, charts, videos, and visual demonstrations. 
• Pretend you’re a performer : In his book, Steal the Show , actor, and coach Michael Port says the quickest way to boost your confidence is to simply act like you’re giving a performance and you don’t have any stage fright. Transform your negative inner talk to something positive by tricking your mind into thinking you’re capable and confident in your speaking skills. 

Pro Tip : If you are planning for a big presentation and fear losing the audience’s attention, consider making your presentation more interactive by inviting the audience to participate. You can use non-awkward icebreakers , “raise your hand” questions or a social media poll on a related topic. 

Some presenters even invite an audience member to the stage for role-playing or a mini-case study. For example, in a meeting presentation about how you plan to improve upselling techniques in your stores, you may invite a coworker to act out a customer-salesperson scenario. 

Want more tips? Take your presentations to the next level with these 10 Presentation Ideas That Will Radically Improve Your Presentation Skills . 

#11 Use meaningful hand gestures

People who “talk with their hands” are naturally more magnetic. Studies show that gestures increase the value of spoken words by up to 60%! But you don’t just want to flail your hands around without purpose. Our analysis of the top TED Talks of all time found that there are specific movements that portray confidence.

These 7 powerful hand gestures include:

• Show the number : Any time you mention a number, use your fingers to add a visual element of that amount. 
• Increase or decrease : Spread your hands closer or farther away to demonstrate the intensity of a conversation point. For example, if you say, “this is a small problem,” you may close your hands together to show a small space. 
• Feel it in the heart : When discussing something emotional, gesture toward your heart or chest region. You may naturally put your hand over your heart when you say, “this means so much to me.”
• Guide your explanations : Use your hands to give a visual guide to a complex explanation. For example, suppose you’re discussing two opposing viewpoints. In that case, you might gesture to the right for Point 1 and to the left for Point 2.
• Bring things together : When you discuss the convergence of points or groups, bring your palms together in the center to demonstrate these two things merging. 
• Emblems : Cultural hand motions like thumbs up, A-OK, or pointing with an open hand can be used to highlight specific talking points. 
• You-me-we : Bring people into what you’re saying by gesturing towards them, yourself, and then between you. 

Watch this video with Vanessa Van Edwards to see how each gesture works:

Here are another 60 Hand Gestures You Should Be Using and Their Meaning . 

#12 Learn to decode body language (and use it to your advantage)

Have you ever wished you could tell what people are thinking? Decoding body language is an underrated social superpower. If you understand how to tell if your boss is being confrontational or your colleague is withholding information from you, you can have a major communication advantage. 

You’ve probably heard the statistic that 65 to 90% of communication is nonverbal. Unspoken cues often give us more insights into people than what they say out loud. Some of the most notable body language cues to look for include: 

• Lip pursing : People may be subconsciously holding something back. If you accidentally purse your lips during a speech, it may make you seem to withhold something from the audience. 
• Raised eyebrows: When someone is guilty, they might subtly raise their eyebrows to show fear. On the other hand, eyebrow raises can also indicate amusement or surprise. Take notice of your eyebrows while talking in the mirror and use them to emphasize your points.
• Touch : A light touch on the arm can be a thoughtful way to get someone’s attention or help. Combined with speaking in a soft or friendly tone, this can help you appear more kind and more compassionate.
• Firm handshake : A nice firm handshake can portray you as confident but not domineering. Deliver your handshakes with a well-rehearsed introduction like “I’m Joe. It is a pleasure to meet you.” 
• Laughing : In awkward situations, subordinates might laugh to appease the person in power, while superiors may refrain from laughing to uphold their status. As you speak, notice when you awkwardly laugh out of nervousness versus when you laugh because something is actually funny.  
• Sitting versus standing : A sitting person is physically lower than a standing person, making them potentially seem inferior or easier to reprimand. You almost always want to be standing when you are giving a speech or a presentation. On the other hand, sitting while having a tough conversation with your significant other can help create a level playing field for open-hearted discussion. 

Note how you use body language as you talk to others daily. There are so many ways you can combine speaking skills with a specific position or nonverbal cue to portray more confidence, kindness, or influence. Learn more about understanding Body Language In the Workplace: 15 Cues You Must Know . 

#13 Work on pronunciation with this app

Whether you are a native English speaker or learning the English language, countless words in the dictionary aren’t pronounced the way they are spelled. But proper pronunciation can make you sound more knowledgeable and well-spoken. 

The most commonly mispronounced words include:

• Desert vs. Dessert 
• Comfortable

Do you think you’re guilty of mispronunciations? Use the free app, Say It ( Android ) ( iOS ) to check your speech. Oxford University Press developed it to help practice sounds, words, and sentence pronunciation. 

Pro Tip : If you accidentally mispronounce a word in conversation or a presentation, don’t be afraid to correct yourself. It happens to everybody, and there is no shame in saying “excuse me” and repeating it. If you have an accent, embrace it! As long as people understand your words, pronunciation shouldn’t be an argument of tomAYto versus tomAHto. 

#14 Improve your listening skills

Paradoxically, the best speakers tend to be the best listeners. After all, communication is a two-way street. Listening is one of the most valuable social skills because it helps you:

• Understand other people
• Make deeper connections
• Demonstrate that you’re interested in what others have to say 
• Avoid dominating a conversation
• Learn how to speak better

Listening is particularly important if you feel shy or socially awkward . Next time you’re having a conversation, practice active listening with:

• Loud listening : When someone else is speaking, strategically use sounds like “oh,” “ah,” or “wow” to show you are engaged.
• Eye contact : Avoid using your phone or diverting eye contact when someone is talking. Instead, casually hold their gaze for 3-5 seconds to show that you care. But don’t be overbearing with eye contact , or you might appear weird.
• Asking questions : Show that you were paying attention to another person’s story or presentation by asking questions about what was said. Just be sure you don’t interrupt them or cut anyone off while inquiring.
• Wait for your turn to talk : A great conversationalist’s most obvious skill is knowing when to talk. Your decision to speak while someone else is still talking could send the message that you think your opinion is more important than theirs. Politely wait your turn and even leave a few seconds of pause after someone else finishes their thoughts. 

Stuttering and Language Processing Resources:

Do you struggle with stuttering or other language processing issues? You definitely can get help! Here are some great resources to check out:

• The Stuttering Foundation
• Find a Speech Therapist

Key Takeaways: Speak Better with Planning and Practicing

Nobody is born a masterful speaker, but the most charismatic people have cracked some communication code. Fortunately, the secrets to their verbal success are accessible to everyone. Start speaking better with these simple practices:

• Talk louder, lower, and at a moderate pace : If you find yourself speaking soft and slow, it can help to increase the volume, lower the tone, and speed up the rate of your words. This will help you sound and feel more confident while talking. 
• Mimic speakers you admire : Find people you want to sound like and listen to them regularly. Identify the characteristics you want to mimic, like their cheeriness, articulation, or authority. Learn lines from their videos and recite them as you watch.  
• Read out loud : Written words tend to be more edited than spoken ones. Practice reading your favorite books out loud so you can 
• Master pronunciation and enunciation : Avoid mispronunciations and mumbling. Instead, use the internet to learn how to pronounce words you’re unsure about and train your mouth to enunciate specific words with tongue twister exercises. 
• Use hand gestures: Your hands are among the most underrated tools for speaking. Use them to your advantage by emphasizing essential points. 

Whether you’re talking to an audience of 2 or 2,000, public speaking can catapult you to higher levels of self-development and professional success. To take your speaking skills to the next level, learn these 15 Science-Based Public Speaking Tips to Be a Master Speaker . 

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100 Top Public Speaking Tips: Master List

by Jezra on January 20, 2013

If you’re looking for public speaking tips, you’ve come to the right place! Here you’ll find advice and information on everything from overcoming fear of public speaking to connecting with your audience.

These Tips are also available in a beautifully-designed, fully searchable download called  100 Top Public Speaking Tips: The Book.   Coded around five major areas — Body, Mind, Skills, Audience, and Career — the book can go with you when you’re off-line.

So explore these Tips individually, or read them all. But whichever way you like your Top Tips presented, be sure to e njoy learning more about public speaking!

Public Speaking Tip 1: Lose that Scorecard in Your Mind

Don’t aspire to public speaking perfection. It’ll trip you up — plus, there’s no such thing! Lose that scorecard .

Public Speaking Tip 2: To Be a Better Public Speaker, Give a Small “Speech” Every Day

The line between public speaking and regular talk is thinner than you think. In fact, you can practice public speaking (and increase your skills) during regular conversations — and no one will ever know! Give your small speech.

Public Speaking Tip 3: Make Public Speaking Practice a Game

Public speaking is part of everyday life — and you can make public speaking practice part of your daily life, by playing this game. Make it a game .

Public Speaking Tip 4: Writing “Rules” Aren’t for Public Speaking

The rules for writing that you may have learned in high school are rarely right for public speaking. Instead, write to speak in a way that reflects your natural conversation style. Lose the rules .

Public Speaking Tip 5: Want to Be a GREAT Public Speaker? Be Yourself!

No one else can tell your story, or speak from your heart. That’s why the most powerful speeches always comes from people who are being themselves. Be yourself!

Public Speaking Tip 6: Don’t Worry, You WILL Make Mistakes !

Every public speaker makes mistakes! If you hate that reality (and even if you don’t), here are some strategies to quickly recover from the inevitable imperfections. Get ready to recover.

Public Speaking Tip 7: For Kick-Ass Public Speaking, Forget About Words

Words have their place in public speaking, but it’s a much smaller place than most people assume. So instead of worrying about individual word choices, focus on your ideas and your connection with the audience. Forget the words .

Public Speaking Tip 8: Want to Give a Powerful Speech? Start By Telling Yourself the Truth

It isn’t always possible to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” at work. But if you start by being honest with yourself, it’s easier to find a compromise you can live with. Tell yourself the truth .

Public Speaking Tip 9: It’s Just a Feeling, so Embrace the Stress

What, besides experience, is the biggest difference between veteran and newbie public speakers? Both groups experience stress, nerves, even fear; but the veterans aren’t thrown by those feelings — and you don’t have to be, either. Embrace the stress .

Public Speaking Tip 10: For Public Speaking Phobia, Get Help

Is your fear of public speaking a phobia? Or is it in the the mild-to-heavy anxiety range that most of us feel when we make a presentation? Here’s what to do when the fear is more than fear. Got phobia?

Public Speaking Tip 11: Ask for Information Before You Agree to Speak

Before you agree to give a speech, ask for information about everything. Time, place, audience size and composition, topic, your fee, of course. Everything!   Ask.

Public Speaking Tip 12: Listen to Your Audience (Part 1)

Great public speaking isn’t just — or even primarily — about what you say. Your ability to LISTEN is equally important. Here are some tips for listening better to become a better public speaker. Listen better .

Public Speaking Tip 13: Listen to Your Audience (Part 2)

Listening to one person can be hard work — and listening to an AUDIENCE can really seem daunting. But if you stop, look, and focus on their cues, you’ll find that the mood of your audience isn’t all that hard to “hear.” Listen even more!

Public Speaking Tip 14: Learn from Babies, the World’s Best Communicators

Adults often approach public speaking with fear, self-doubt, and inhibition, but babies just open their mouths and speak their minds. We could learn plenty from watching them. Learn from babies.

Public Speaking Tip 15: Know When to Lose Your Script

Public speaking situations can change, and when they do, you may find yourself having to choose between adjusting your speech, changing its context, or totally abandoning your script. Adjust your speech!

Public Speaking Tip 16: When It Comes to an Audience’s Reaction, Forget about Control

Wouldn’t it be great if we could speak with such mastery that a positive reaction was guaranteed? Unfortunately, things don’t work that way — people will respond as they see fit, not as we want them to. But the good news is that audiences are generally on the speaker’s side.  Give up control .

Public Speaking Tip 17: Savor Your Speech, Giving Every Moment It’s Due

Savor your speech, giving each moment its due, and the fear that made you want to sprint toward the finish line will dissolve.  Savor y our speech.

Public Speaking Tip 18: Your Accent Doesn’t Matter — Speaking Clearly, Does!

Many people who come to the U.S. from other countries are concerned that their accent makes them hard to understand. But if you organize your thoughts, speak slowly and clearly, and leave pauses so that people can absorb one idea before hearing the next, listeners will almost always understand you.  Accents are fine .

Public Speaking Tip 19: Master the Instant Speech (It’s Easy!)

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a simple and flexible five-sentence format that made every idea sound better? There is; and it’s called the Instant Speech.  Make Instant Speeches!

Public Speaking Tip 20: If You Make a Public Speaking Mistake, Don’t Explain

If you make a public speaking mistake, don’t explain. We all make mistakes, and your best move is to acknowledge, apologize if necessary, and move on!  Don’t explain .

Public Speaking Tip 21: For Great Public Speaking, Go To the Edge of Defeat

Public speaking always offers the choice of whether to present your material in a way that’s predictably safe, a little more flexible, or right at the high-risk edge of defeat. And sometimes, it’s worth taking a risk.  Jump!

Public Speaking Tip 22: For Public Speaking Power, Breathe OUT, Not In!

To get your fill of air — a critical element in any public speaking situation — learn to breathe OUT before you breathe in. Here’s how.  Breathe out.

Public Speaking Tip 23: For Public Speaking Success, Be Audible

Listening is hard work! But you can make it easier for an audience to understand and remember what you’re saying by being easier to hear.  Be audible .

Public Speaking Tip 24: Write an Email that Gets Read

It’s not enough to write a great email. You have to get the other person to open it up! Here’s how to get your email read. Get your email read.

Public Speaking Tip 25: Use a Simple Key Message to Make Your Most Important Point

A simple key message is the heart and soul of any speech. It will help you make your point with elegance, clarity, and confidence.  Keep it simple.

Public Speaking Tip 26: Uhm, Lose Those, Like, Filler Words, Y’Know?

Uhm, it’s clear that, people who, like, fill up every available space with sounds that, y’know, have no meaning are just sort of forgetting to add the silence. Add silence.

Public Speaking Tip 27: Know Your Dress Codes

Like it or not, we’re all judged on how we look. So when you’re interviewing for a job, or presenting to a business audience, be sure that you know what looks professional to them.  Look professional.

Public Speaking Tip 28: Use a Template for Public Speaking

Public speaking templates can save you time, effort, and anxiety, whether you’re making a speech or writing a thank you note.   Use templates.

Public Speaking Tip 29: The Word YOU Helps You Connect with Your Audience

The word YOU is magic. It helps you connect with your audience, and let’s THEM know that you relate to their needs, goals, and situation. Use the word YOU .

Public Speaking Tip 30:  Want to Be a Great Public Speaker? It’s a Process

The public speaking process — the process of becoming the public speaker YOU want to be — is mental, physical, social, and individual to you. Start the process.

Public Speaking Tip 31: Want People to Listen? Add Some Drama

If you’ve been practicing the flat, gray speech that’s standard in many businesses and professions, it’s time to stop! Instead, delight yourself and your listeners by adding a touch of drama when you speak.  Be dramatic!

Public Speaking Tip 32: For Great Public Speaking, Be Miserable (Not!)

Want to be a great public speaker? Be miserable! OK, not really; but thinking about how to be miserable as a public speaker can help you be the opposite.  Be miserable.

Public Speaking Tip 33: Don’t Panic about Public Speaking Panic

Most of us feel some level of public speaking panic from time to time. Don’t make things worse by assuming this means there’s something wrong with you. Don’t panic .

Public Speaking Tip 34: Lead Your Audience Through Your Speech

Lead your audience through your speech, just like a tour guide would — taking them from idea to idea until you deliver them at your conclusion.  Lead your audience.

Public Speaking Tip 35: Treat Your Speech Like a Five-Course Tasting Menu

Would you rather savor five-course tasting menu, or plow your way through a plate of hash? Well, it’s important to savor each “course” of a presentation, too!  Savor Your Speech

Public Speaking Tip 36: Use the “Three Audience Questions” to Make Sure People Know What You’re Talking About

We all get a little wonky in our own areas of expertise. So use the “three audience questions” to make sure people understand what you’re talking about.  Don’t wonk out!

Public Speaking Tip 37: At Every Stage of Public Speaking, Put Your Focus On The Right Thing

As a public speaker, you can focus on yourself, your content, or your audience — and putting the right amount of focus in the right place at the right time is important for your success.  Focus!

Public Speaking Tip 38: Tell Success Stories, Because If You Don’t Talk About Your Achievements, Who Will?

Lots of people hate to “brag” about their accomplishments. But you can tell success stories without being obnoxious about it! Tell success stories

Public Speaking Tip 39: Don’t Let Career Building Screw Up Your Public Speaking

As a young professional, you’ll feel lots of pressure to develop a bland public speaking style. But that could hold you back as your career develops. Build your  p ublic speaking style. 

Public Speaking Tip 40: Answer Questions Without Boring Your Listener, or Know When to Stop Talking

It’s easy to go on and on when you’re tired, nervous, or passionate about your topic. But try to stop talking before your listener stops caring!  Stop talking.

Public Speaking Tip 41: Repeat, Repeat, Repeat Yourself

Were you told in high school English class that you should never repeat yourself? For public speaking, forget that rule and repeat yourself a lot!  Repeat yourself.

Public Speaking Tip 42: When People Say Your Speech Was Great, Believe Them!

People often doubt the positive feedback they get when they’ve given a speech. Believe it!

Public Speaking Tip 43: Want to Minimize Negative Reactions? Vaccinate Your Audience

Just as we vaccinate against disease, you can vaccinate your audience against reactions that may stop them from hearing your message.  Vaccinate!

Public Speaking Tip 44: Make Small Talk in Business Settings Using the “Respond and Return” Technique

When you make small talk, you’re helping to build strong business relationships. Here’s an easy, two-step process for mastering the skill.  Respond and return.

Public Speaking Tip 45: Why You Should Answer the Question First (and Then Decide How Much More to Say)

Answer the question first to relax your listener, be concise, and give yourself flexibility in any situation.  Answer first.

Public Speaking Tip 46: How to Answer the Question, Even When That Feels Hard To Do

It’s not hard to answer the question once you decide that you really don’t have to know everything.  Go ahead, answer!

Public Speaking Tip 47: Fear of Public Speaking? Use YOU Language and an Avatar to Create Distance from Fear

Public speaking is scary. But you can manage fear of public speaking by distancing yourself from your emotions, with these two simple and highly effective techniques.  Manage your fear.

Public Speaking Tip 48: For Public Speaking Success, Keep the Glass Half Full of Honey, Not Vinegar

Whenever it’s possible to speak positively and appreciatively about your audience, do it! Criticizing their shortcomings won’t win you any friends; and even if you’re the boss, negative messages don’t generally lead to positive changes. Be positive.

Public Speaking Tip 49: For Public Speaking Success, Don’t Practice in Public (Shed on the Stand)

When you give a speech that you haven’t worked on, you’re subjecting your audience to a practice session. Don’t shed on the stand!

Public Speaking Tip 50: For Sustainable Success, Set a SMART Public Speaking Goal You Can Achieve

Want to become a better public speaker? Have a SMART public speaking goal.  Get SMART!

Public Speaking Tip 51: If You’re Reading a Speech, Read with Pride; Don’t Hide!

Today, many public speakers don’t want to read their speeches, and especially not from PAPER. But reading can help you give an even better speech! Read with pride.

Public Speaking Tip 52: Be an Entitled Public Speaker, No Matter What Social Class You Come From

The social class you come from can influence many things in your life, including whether you feel entitled to speak up and be heard by others. Be entitled!

Public Speaking Tip 53: Learn from Amy Cuddy, and Fake It Till You Become It

Amy Cuddy’s research could change how you feel about public speaking, and yourself!  Become your best self .

Public Speaking Tip 54: For Relaxed Public Speaking, Relax Your Throat

Public speaking can stress your voice. Here are some techniques for protecting your pipes, so that you and your voice can both go the distance.  Take care of your voice.

Public Speaking Tip 55: If Your Job Involves Serving the Public, Talk WITH Your Customers, Not AT Them (or: A Tale of Two Servers)

Build a relationship with your customers by engaging them, and listening to what they say. Listen to your customers!

Public Speaking Tip 56: When You Disagree with Someone, Rebut Their Ideas, Not  Them

When passions run high, it’s easy to slip into attacking your opponent. Instead, keep your tone friendly and light, and rebut their ideas,  not their value as a person.  Rebut ideas, not people.

Public Speaking Tip 57: How to Develop Executive Presence

It’s not enough to have great skills and a strong work ethic. You also need Executive Presence, the quality that telegraphs your strengths to others.  Develop executive presence.

Public Speaking Tip 58: For a Confident and Successful Presentation, Stand, Settle, Smile, Speak

A lot of public speakers are off-balance at the start of their talks. When you take the stage to give a speech, use the Stand, Settle, Smile, Speak method to make sure you start strong.  Stand, settle, smile, speak!

Public Speaking Tip 59: At the End of Your Speech, Stick Your Landing

It’s easy to lose energy after giving an entire speech, and let your ending (or your Q&A, or even your main message) dribble off or fade away. Don’t do that!  Stick your landing.

Public Speaking Tip 60: When You Practice Public Speaking, Say Inconsequential Things

As a speaker, you want to say things that matter. But when you’re PRACTICING your public speaking skills, it’s just as useful to say inconsequential things.  Be inconsequential.

Public Speaking Tip 61: How to Speak Up More in Meetings, Even If You Say Inconsequential Things

In a meeting, don’t wait for the most profound, perfect, or articulate comment to occur to you. Just talk!  Speak up .

Public Speaking Tip 62: Talk About Inconsequential Things When You Make Small Talk

It’s hard for many of us to talk about inconsequential, simple, silly, or obvious things. But small topics work best for small talk; here’s why.  Keep it small .

Public Speaking Tip 63: Keep Your PowerPoint Short, Sweet, and Simple

PowerPoint is a useful and effective tool, if you keep it short, sweet, and simple.  Keep it simple.

Public Speaking Tip 64: Don’t Listen to the Self-Critical Voice in Your Head

Is there a nasty little voice in your head that loves to criticize your public speaking skills? Here’s how to beat the NLV.  Don’t listen!

Public Speaking Tip 65: You Know You Should Practice, for Great Public Speaking! But HOW??

If you have trouble practicing a speech or talk, it may be because you don’t know HOW or WHAT to practice. These tips and tricks will help! So practice!

Public Speaking Tip 66: Choose a Networking Strategy that Works for YOU, Whether You’re an Introvert or an Extravert

There isn’t one right approach to networking. The best networking strategies, practices, goals, and actions are the ones that work best for YOU.  Go network!

Public Speaking Tip 67: Give Your Smile Muscles a Workout

Nothing helps you connect with an audience like a smile! To be sure your smile is always at the ready, give your smile muscles a workout.  Smile!

Public Speaking Tip 68: To Make Your Words More Memorable, Put Pauses In Your Public Speaking

Pauses are one of your most important, dramatic, relaxing, and versatile public speaking tools. Practice using pauses.

Public Speaking Tip 69: Copy Other Speakers, and Steal Their Secrets

Copy other speakers so that you can learn their secrets — how they pace, pause, build their ideas, and sell them. Then go out and speak like yourself!  Copy.

Public Speaking Tip 70: Use Pictures In Your Slides (They’re Worth Way More than 1000 Words!)

Even simple, silly pictures can make your slides engaging, when they’re personal. Use pictures.

Public Speaking Tip 71: To Get POWER from Your PowerPoint…Transition, Click, and Pause

A simple and fun way to add power to your slide decks is by learning how to transition, and taking your audience along with you.  Transition .

Public Speaking Tip 72: Small Talk? It’s Not Hard to Master When You Understand It

Small talk isn’t a conversation, it’s the warm-up for a conversation. Here’s how to master it.  Make small talk.

Public Speaking Tip 73: Build Your Confidence and Public Speaking Success in 15 Seconds, Twice a Day

What if you could build your public speaking confidence and success with an exercise that took 15 seconds? You would do that, right?  Build your confidence!

Public Speaking Tip 74: Millennials, Slow Down and Help Your Older Colleagues Understand You

Millennials speak quickly, and can leave older listeners in the dust. Here’s how to slow down so that your older colleagues understand you.  Slow down!

Public Speaking Tip 75: Learn How to Run Effective Business Meetings

What’s rarer than a unicorn? Effective business meetings. But you can learn to run them with these tips and a few minutes of advance planning.  Run effective meetings.

Public Speaking Tip 76: Public Speakers, Avoid Common PowerPoint Mistakes

It’s easy to avoid common PowerPoint mistakes and make your audience happy.  Avoid these mistakes .

Public Speaking Tip 77: Want to Be Relaxed, Consistent, and Effective Every Time You Speak in Public? Focus on the People You’re Talking To

To give a great performance every time you speak in public, focus on the person or people you’re talking to, not on yourself.  Focus!

Public Speaking Tip 78: To Know Your Audience is to Love Your Audience

If your audience seems very different from you, look deeper. You may have more in common than you think!  Learn about your audience.

Public Speaking Tip 79: Petite and Female? Your Size is No Obstacle to Being Heard!

Many petite women, like Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, have an outsized impact, proving that true power knows no size. Women, power up!

Public Speaking Tip 80: The Right Apology Makes Both People Feel Better (Even If You Don’t Think You’ve Done Wrong!)

We all make mistakes. Fortunately, it’s not hard to give an apology that helps BOTH parties feel better. Apologize.

Public Speaking Tip 81: Close With Your Key Message. And if Your Speech is Followed by Q&A, Do It Twice!

Every time you speak, remember to close with your key message — and if your speech is followed by Q&A, do it twice!  Close twice.

Public Speaking Tip 82: Don’t Let the TED Talk Style Intimidate You, or Stand Between You and Making a Good Speech

It takes tremendous effort to create the smooth professionalism of a TED talk, and it’s not fair to expect business speakers to reach the same bar.  Give a good enough speech .

Public Speaking Tip 83: Learn To Tell a Good Business Story (Part I)

Learning to tell a good business story isn’t hard, and it’s a a useful skill for growing your career.  Learn business storytelling.

Public Speaking Tip 84: Learn to Tell Good Business Stories (Part II)

Good business stories, like good wine, gain richness and depth as you practice and tell them.  Tell your business stories now.

Public Speaking Tip 85: Put Down that Editing Pen!

Editing your speech is helpful, up to a point. Then it’s time to stop editing and start practicing.  Drop that pen and practice!

Public Speaking Tip 86: Don’t Talk About Your Co-Workers on Facebook

Facebook can make it seem like a conversation is private, but IT’S NOT. So use extra restraint when discussing your colleauges, or better yet, don’t do it!  Watch out for Facebook .

Public Speaking Tip 87: Speaking Properly is a Game, Not a Measure Of Your Value As a Person

Speaking properly has nothing to do with being a good, smart, or valuable person. It’s a series of skills you can acquire, and a game you can master.  Master the game!

Public Speaking Tip 88: Three Questions to Ask BEFORE You Memorize Your Speech

Should you memorize your speech? That depends! Ask before you memorize.

Public Speaking Tip 89: Learn the Public Speaking Lessons of Orphan Black (Hint: It’s All About Your Avatar)

Orphan Black is outstanding entertainment, and it has surprising lessons to teach everyone who speaks in public (meaning, all of us!). Embrace your Avatar(s) .

Public Speaking Tip 90: Cultivate the Greatest Public Speaking Skill of All, Self-Acceptance

You can’t be a perfect public speaker (there is no such thing), but if you cultivate self-acceptance, you can be a great one.  Cultivate self-acceptance.

Public Speaking Tip 91: If You Work for Others, Learn How to Manage Up

Even the best bosses sometimes need a little help. You can teach them to manage you more effectively by learning how to manage up.  Manage up.

Public Speaking Tip 92: Communicating for Business is Like Talking to a Toddler (or, It Should Be!)

Most of us have some experience of talking to a toddler, which can come in very handy for business communications.  Talk like you’re talking to a toddler.

Public Speaking Tip 93: Use Gender Neutral Language in Your Public Speaking

Gender neutral language is a way of honoring difference, and the reality that we just don’t know how other people identify or want to be described.  Use gender neutral language.

Public Speaking Tip 94: Women (and Men), Watch Out for Upspeak — It Can Hurt Your Career

Upspeak can undermine your professional credibility, particularly if you’re female. That isn’t fair, but it’s a reality worth considering.  Lose the upspeak.

Public Speaking Tip 95: Find Out If You Have Unconscious Bias Against YOURSELF

Unconscious bias is bias that you’re not aware you have. It can affect how you see your audience, and just as importantly, how you see yourself.  Find out your bias.

Public Speaking Tip 96: Use the Rule of 3 to Speak Off-the-Cuff (and for Everything Else, Too!)

The Rule of 3 will help you shine in every public speaking situation, from media interviews… to off-the-cuff remarks… to knowing when to stop talking.  Use the Rule of 3.

Public Speaking Tip 97: Job Interview? Here Are the TOP 3 WAYS to Ace the Conversation

For job interview success, the top three things to focus on are not defending yourself, doing your homework, and having a conversation. Ace the conversation!

Public Speaking Tip 98: For a Successful Presentation, Get Your Attitude Together Before You Prepare Your Speech

Want to give a confident, successful presentation? Get your attitude straight, put practicing in your flow, and go for what you know with an audience! Succeed.

Public Speaking Tip 99: For a Successful Presentation, Practice Individual Ideas Throughout Your Day

Your speech isn’t a collection of words. It’s a series of individual ideas that can be practiced separately, as needed, during the regular flow of your day.  Practice.

Public Speaking Tip 100: For a Successful Presentation, Go for What You Know with Your Audience

You’ve worked hard to create and practice a speech that will help your audience succeed. Now, when you stand before them, it’s time to go for what you know!  Go for it.

Buy 100 Top Public Speaking Tips: The Book !

In 25 years of speaker coaching, I’ve helped my individual speaker coaching   clients develop their strengths and skills  become authentic and effective communicators. Along the way, I’ve developed tips for everything from small talk to speaking up in meetings, from managing fear to making an impact. And now, I’ve shared it all in 100 Top Public Speaking Tips: The Book . This beautifully designed PDF booklet is searchable, clickable, and categorized, so that you can find what you need, instantly.

A simple trick to help you speak in public without showing your nerves

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You don’t have to put up with a thin, shaky voice, says speech-language pathologist Jackie Gartner-Schmidt.

Every weekday for the month of January, TED Ideas is publishing a new post in a series called “How to Be a Better Human,” containing a helpful piece of advice from a speaker in the TED community. To see all the posts, click here .

Ever given a presentation and felt like your throat was closing up or that there was a big lump in it? Or made an important request of your boss but thought your voice sounded as shaky as Jello on a trampoline?

Turns out, you don’t suffer from some unexplained physical malady. There’s an anatomical explanation for what happens to our voices when we’re under pressure, says speech-language pathologist and University of Pittsburgh professor Jackie Gartner-Schmidt .

All humans have vocal cords — also called vocal folds since they’re folds of tissue — which sit on top of our windpipes, right behind the Adam’s apple. “The real reason we have vocal folds is to protect ourselves,” says Gartner-Schmidt. In fact, they do the very important work of preventing us from inhaling water into our lungs whenever we drink something.

But researchers have found “in experimentally induced stressful situations — be it public speaking, hearing a loud startle sound or having cold water put on your body — that the muscles around the voice box and the muscles actually inside the voice box [a.k.a. the vocal folds] react,” says Gartner-Schmidt. “They activate, and in some cases, they close altogether.”

Of course, no one wants to sound shaky, squeaky or choked up when they speak. As Gartner-Schmidt puts it, “We want our voice to reflect our strengths, not our weaknesses.” She says, “in study after study a high-pitched voice has been correlated with the perception of anxiety, not being competent, not being strong, and not being trustworthy.”

And this matters more and more now, as many of our meetings and interviews take place over conference calls or low-res video chats. As a result, says Gartner-Schmidt, “the voice is substantially taking over more and more of how we are perceived.”

To avoid this, she suggests doing this easy exercise (which she calls one of her favorites).

Hold up your index finger a few inches in front of your mouth. As you exhale steadily, make a “Wooooooo” noise (think: little kid pretending to be a ghost) for 5 to 10 seconds. Do this 5 to 10 times. (Watch her demonstrate it here .)

“This … essentially relaxes the vocal folds,” says Gartner-Schmidt. “It establishes breath and air flow and voice stability, which is the cornerstone of any strong, clear voice.”

Right before the next important occasion in which you have to speak — for work, for the toast you’re giving at a wedding, for a speech to a community board — take Gartner-Schmidt’s advice and “spend some time finding your best voice.”

Watch her TEDxPittsburgh talk here:

About the author

Mary Halton is a science journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. You can find her on Twitter at @maryhalton

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16 Public Speaking Tips for Students

Public speaking tips for students aim to reduce anxiety that can interfere with giving presentations or speeches in class. These tips can also be helpful for those with social anxiety disorder (SAD)   who have difficulty speaking in front of a group or telling a story among friends.

Public Speaking Tips

If you have SAD and need to give a speech  in elementary school, high school, college, or university, it helps to be as prepared as possible . Beyond preparation, however, there are strategies that you can use to reduce anxiety and fight the urge to stay home with a fake illness.

Even great speakers practice their speeches beforehand. Practice out loud with a recording device or video camera and then watch yourself to see how you can improve. If you are feeling brave, practice in front of a friend or family member and ask for feedback.

• Talk about what you know : If possible, choose a topic for your speech or presentation that you know a lot about and love. Your passion for the topic will be felt by the audience, and you will feel less anxious knowing that you have a lot of experience to draw from when other students ask you questions.
• Concentrate on your message : When you focus on the task at hand, anxiety is less likely to get out of control. Concentrate on the main message of your speech or presentation and make it your goal to deliver that message to the other students in your class.
• Grab the audience's attention : Most of your fellow classmates will pay attention for at least the first 20 seconds; grab their attention during those early moments. Start with an interesting fact or a story that relates to your topic.
• Have one main message : Focus on one central theme and your classmates will learn more. Tie different parts of your talk to the main theme to support your overall message. Trying to cover too much ground can leave other students feeling overwhelmed.

Tell Stories

Stories catch the attention of other students and deliver a message in a more meaningful way than facts and figures. Whenever possible, use a story to illustrate a point in your talk.

Being prepared to speak in public can also be important if you have social anxiety disorder. Feeling confident and prepared to give your speech may help lessen your feelings of anxiety. Some of the things that you can do to prepare include:

• Visit the room : If you have access to the classroom where you will be speaking outside of class hours, take the time to visit in advance and get used to standing at the front of the room. Make arrangements for any audio-visual equipment and practice standing in the exact spot where you will deliver your speech.
• Rack up experience : Volunteer to speak in front of your class as often as possible. Be the first one to raise your hand when a question is asked. Your confidence will grow with every public speaking experience.
• Observe other speakers : Take the time to watch other speakers who are good at what they do. Practice imitating their style and confidence.
• Organize your talk : Every speech should have an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. Structure your talk so that the other students know what to expect.

Manage Your Anxiety

Taking steps to deal with your feelings of anxiety can also make public speaking easier. Some of the things that you can do:

• Tell someone about your anxiety : If you are speaking in front of a high school or college class, meet with your teacher or professor and describe your public speaking fears . If you're in elementary or high school, share your fears with your parents, a teacher, or a guidance counselor. Sometimes sharing how you feel can make it easier to overcome stage fright.
• Visualize confidence : Visualize yourself confidently delivering your speech. Imagine feeling free of anxiety and engaging the students in your class. Although this may seem like a stretch for you now, visualization is a powerful tool for changing the way that you feel. Elite athletes use this strategy to improve performance in competitions.
• Find a friendly face : If you are feeling anxious, find one of your friends in class (or someone who seems friendly) and imagine that you are speaking only to that person.

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Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast shares a strategy to help you find courage when you need it the most.

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Maintain Perspective

Remember that other students are on your side. Think about a time when you have been an audience member and the student delivering the speech or presentation was noticeably nervous. Did you think less of that student? More likely, you felt sympathetic and wanted to make that person more comfortable by smiling or nodding.

Remember—other students generally want you to succeed and feel comfortable. If for some reason the audience is not on your side or you experience bullying or social exclusion, be sure to discuss this with a parent, teacher, or guidance counselor.

Be Confident

Sometimes just knowing what makes a good speech can help you feel more confident. Focus on some of the following elements and practice them before you have to speak in public.

• Develop your own style : In addition to imitating good speakers, work on developing your own personal style as a public speaker. Integrate your own personality into your speaking style and you will feel more comfortable in front of the class. Telling personal stories that tie into your theme are a great way to let other students get to know you better.
• Avoid filler words : Words such as "basically", "well", and "um" don't add anything to your speech. Practice being silent when you feel the urge to use one of these words.
• Vary your tone, volume, and speed : Interesting speakers vary the pitch (high versus low), volume (loud versus soft), and speed (fast versus slow) of their words. Doing so keeps your classmates interested and engaged in what you say.
• Make the audience laugh : Laughter is a great way to relax both you and the other students in your class, and telling jokes can be a great icebreaker at the beginning of a speech. Practice the timing and delivery of your jokes beforehand and ask a friend for feedback. Be sure that they are appropriate for your class before you begin.
• Smile : If all else fails, smile. Your fellow classmates will perceive you like a warm speaker and be more receptive to what you have to say.

Don't Apologize

If you make a mistake, don't offer apologies. Chances are that your classmates didn't notice anyway. Unless you need to correct a fact or figure, there is no point dwelling on errors that probably only you noticed.

If you make a mistake because your hands or shaking, or something similar, try to make light of the situation by saying something like, "I wasn't this nervous when I woke up this morning!" This can help to break the tension of the moment.

A Word From Verywell

It's natural to feel frightened the first time you have to speak in front of your class. However, if you fear continues, interferes with your daily life and keeps you awake at night, it may be helpful to see someone about your anxiety.

Try talking to a parent, teacher, or counselor about how you have been feeling. If that doesn't get you anywhere, ask to make an appointment with your doctor. Severe public speaking anxiety is a true disorder that can improve with treatment .

Spence SH, Rapee RM. The etiology of social anxiety disorder: An evidence-based model . Behav Res Ther. 2016;86:50-67. doi:10.1016/j.brat.2016.06.007

By Arlin Cuncic, MA Arlin Cuncic, MA, is the author of The Anxiety Workbook and founder of the website About Social Anxiety. She has a Master's degree in clinical psychology.

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15 Ways to Calm Your Nerves Before a Big Presentation

Banish public speaking nerves and present with confidence..

I've been doing a lot of presenting recently, and I have no problem admitting that it's tough. For those not born with natural eloquence, public speaking can be remarkably nerve-racking.

We can't all deliver the next Gettysburg Address, but there are several small things you can do prior to your next big presentation that will help calm your nerves and set you up for optimal oration.

1. Practice. Naturally, you'll want to rehearse your presentation multiple times. While it can be difficult for those with packed schedules to spare time to practice, it's essential if you want to deliver a rousing presentation. If you really want to sound great, write out your speech rather than taking chances winging it.

Try to practice where you'll be delivering your talk. Some acting strategists suggest rehearsing lines in various positions-standing up, sitting down, with arms open wide, on one leg, while sitting on the toilet, etc. (OK, that last one may be optional.) The more you mix up your position and setting, the more comfortable you'll feel with your speech. Also try recording your presentation and playing it back to evaluate which areas need work. Listening to recordings of your past talks can clue you in to bad habits you may be unaware of, as well as inspiring the age-old question: "Is that what I really sound like?"

2. Transform Nervous Energy Into Enthusiasm. It may sound strange, but I'll often down an energy drink and blast hip-hop music in my earphones before presenting. Why? It pumps me up and helps me turn jitters into focused enthusiasm. Studies have shown that an enthusiastic speech can win out over an eloquent one, and since I'm not exactly the Winston Churchill of presenters, I make sure that I'm as enthusiastic and energetic as possible before going on stage. Of course, individuals respond differently to caffeine overload, so know your own body before guzzling those monster energy drinks.

3. Attend Other Speeches. If you're giving a talk as part of a larger series, try to attend some of the earlier talks by other presenters. This shows respect for your fellow presenters while also giving you a chance to feel out the audience. What's the mood of the crowd? Are folks in the mood to laugh or are they a bit more stiff? Are the presentations more strategic or tactical in nature? Another speaker may also say something that you can play off of later in your own presentation.

4. Arrive Early. It's always best to allow yourself plenty of time to settle in before your talk. Extra time ensures you won't be late (even if Google Maps shuts down) and gives you plenty of time to get adapted to your presentation space.

5. Adjust to Your Surroundings. The more adjusted to your environment you are, the more comfortable you'll feel. Make sure to spend some in the room where you will be delivering your presentation. If possible, practice with the microphone and lighting, make sure you understand the seating, and be aware of any distractions potentially posed by the venue (e.g., a noisy road outside).

6. Meet and Greet. Do your best to chat with people before your presentation . Talking with audiences makes you seem more likeable and approachable. Ask event attendees questions and take in their responses. They may even give you some inspiration to weave into your talk.

7. Use Positive Visualization. Whether or not you consider yourself a master of Zen, know that plenty of studies have proven the effectiveness of positive visualization . When we imagine a positive outcome to a scenario in our mind, it's more likely to play out the way we envision.

Instead of thinking "I'm going to be terrible out there" and visualizing yourself throwing up mid-presentation, imagine yourself getting tons of laughs while presenting with the enthusiasm of Jimmy Fallon and the poise of Audrey Hepburn (the charm of George Clooney wouldn't hurt either). Positive thoughts can be incredibly effective-give them a shot.

8. Take Deep Breaths. The go-to advice for jitters has truth to it. When we're nervous, our muscles tighten-you may even catch yourself holding your breath. Instead, go ahead and take those deep breaths to get oxygen to your brain and relax your body.

9. Smile. Smiling increases endorphins, replacing anxiety with calm and making you feel good about your presentation. Smiling also exhibits confidence and enthusiasm to the crowd. Just don't overdue it-no one enjoys the maniacal clown look.

10. Exercise . Exercise earlier in the day prior to your presentation to boost endorphins, which will help alleviate anxiety. Better pre-register for that Zumba class!

11. Work on Your Pauses. When you're nervous, it's easy to speed up your speech and end up talking too fast, which in turn causes you to run out of breath, get more nervous, and panic! Ahh!

Don't be afraid to slow down and use pauses in your speech. Pausing can be used to emphasize certain points and to help your talk feel more conversational. If you feel yourself losing control of your pacing, just take a nice pause and keep cool.

12. Use a Power Stance. Practicing confident body language is another way to boost your pre-presentation jitters. When your body is physically demonstrating confidence, your mind will follow suit. While you don't want to be jutting out your chest in an alpha gorilla pose all afternoon (somebody enjoyed Dawn of the Planet of the Apes a bit too much), studies have shown that using power stances a few minutes before giving a talk (or heading to a nerve-racking interview) creates a lasting sense of confidence and assurance. Whatever you do, don't sit-sitting is passive. Standing or walking a bit will help you harness those stomach bats (isn't that more appropriate than butterflies?). Before you go on stage, strike your best Power Ranger stance and hold your head high!

13. Drink Water. Dry mouth is a common result of anxiety. Prevent cottonmouth blues by staying hydrated and drinking plenty of water before your talk (just don't forget to hit the bathroom before starting). Keep a bottle of water at arm's reach while presenting in case you get dry mouth while chatting up a storm. It also provides a solid object to hurl at potential hecklers. (That'll show 'em.)

14. Join Toastmasters. Toastmaster clubs are groups across the country (and the world) dedicated to helping members improve their public speaking skills . Groups get together during lunch or after work to take turns delivering short talks on a chosen topic. The more you present, the better you'll be, so consider joining a Toastmaster club to become a top-notch orator. Just don't forget, it's BYOB (Bring Your Own Bread).

15. Don't Fight the Fear. Accept your fear rather than trying to fight it. Getting yourself worked up by wondering if people will notice your nervousness will only intensify your anxiety. Remember, those jitters aren't all bad-harness that nervous energy and transform it into positive enthusiasm and you'll be golden. We salute you, O Captain! My Captain!

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15 presentation tips for captivating your audience and commanding the room.

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Public speaking can be a daunting task, especially when addressing a large audience. Whether you're giving a presentation in the boardroom or delivering a keynote speech at a conference, holding your audience's attention and maintaining command of the room is paramount. The ability to captivate your audience and leave a lasting impression not only enhances your message's impact but also builds your reputation as a confident and effective speaker.

Here, Forbes Coaches Council members share invaluable tips and strategies to help you conquer your fear of public speaking and ensure that your next presentation or speech is a resounding success.

1. Be Confident

Be grounded and confident to be yourself and then tell great stories. Use your voice and the stage to bring the stories alive. Your audience will connect to the emotion of the story but make sure that it is relevant for your audience and related to the topic. - Cath Daley , Cath Daley Ltd

2. Find A Way To Actively Engage The Audience

Be prepared with ways to get your audience engaged and keep their focus. Whether that's relating to your audience, telling a joke or asking questions, actively driving engagement will make for a more effective presentation or speech. - Luke Feldmeier , Online Leadership Training - Career and Leadership Accelerator for Engineers

3. Create An Emotional Connection

Creating an emotional connection with the audience and involving them in your session fosters active participation, and ensures your audience stays engaged throughout. This also serves to enhance your presence and to create memories that stay with them long after your presentation ends. - Kristin Andree , Andree Group

4. Put Your Unique Take Front And Center

Do you have something unexpected to say about your topic? Something that goes against the mainstream opinion in your industry or is maybe even slightly provocative? If so, putting your unique take front and center in the title and the beginning of your talk and explaining or resolving it later keeps your audience engaged and interested. - Micha Goebig , Go Big Coaching & Communications, LLC

5. Remember That The Audience Doesn't Know Your Planned Speech

No one wants to see you fail as a speaker. Remember that the focus shouldn't be on whether or not you can recall verbatim every word of your planned speech. The focus should be on how to connect to your audience with a few key points using a combination of storytelling and facts. - Sheri Nasim , Center for Executive Excellence

6. Adapt Your Language To The Audience

Talk about something they are interested in or include elements that will keep them interested. Start by asking why your topic matters to each and every one of them. Use language adapted to the audience. Keep the key messages to two or three maximum. Show them what you think and why you care about the topic. - Isabelle Claus Teixeira , Business and Human Development Consulting Pte Ltd

7. Try To Incorporate An Element Of Surprise

Engagement is the key to keeping the audience's attention. Invite participation, tell stories, walk around, have visuals, include humor, raise your voice and ask questions. Think of a comedian who points at someone in the audience: "Hey, you with the red shirt?" Everyone pays attention. What element of surprise can you present? - Susan Jordan, MBA, MSODL, PCC , Sphereshift Coaching and Consulting

8. Know Your Audience

Doing research ahead of time to ensure you're providing the subject matter in a personalized manner will keep their attention. The topic will dictate the necessary vibe. Based on that, providing opportunities for the group to engage, such as shouting out a word, raising a hand, etc., will also help maintain their interest. - Lindsay Miller , Reverie Organizational Development Specialists

9. Use The Problem-Agitation-Solution Approach

Don't just give a presentation — share a story. It must be a story-audience fit though. Use the P.A.S. — problem-agitation-solution — approach. Start with introducing a problem, follow by agitating the problem via telling a relevant anecdote and conclude by offering a solution by giving an audience a clear, direct way to avoid the pain and learn the lesson. - Alla Adam , Alla Adam Coaching

10. Tell The Audience What They Need To Hear

Instead of trying to figure out what to say, figure out what the audience wants and needs to hear. This shift in perspective allows you to tailor your speech in a way that keeps audiences actively engaged because it's good content that they want to hear. - Robin Pou , The Confident Leader

11. Go All In

To command your audience's attention you have to get into the spirit of what you're teaching and go all in without second-guessing yourself. People want to be led, but they'll be unwilling to follow someone who isn't confident in what they are communicating. - Arash Vossoughi , Voss Coaching Co.

12. Use A Compelling Opening

Start your speech/presentation with a compelling opening that grabs the audience's attention. This could be a surprising fact, a relevant story or a thought-provoking question. This initial engagement can help you establish a strong connection with the audience and set the stage for a captivating presentation. - Moza-Bella Tram , Moza-Bella LLC

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13. Be Authentic

Connect deeply with your essence and purpose. Radiate authenticity. When you're centered in genuine passion and truth others feel it, creating an unspoken bond. It's not about performing; it's about being present and real and offering value from the heart. That's magnetic. - Anna Yusim, MD , Yusim Psychiatry, Consulting & Executive Coaching

14. Let Your Audience Talk

There is nothing worse than stealing everyone's craving for autonomy and speaking the whole time. The person who does the talking does the learning. So, give some autonomy to the audience. Let them talk. Even if it's thinking time and talking to themselves, or to their neighbor or table group. This gains trust and they will lean into what you have to say even more. - Alex Draper , DX Learning Solutions

15. Leverage Non-Verbal Cues

My top tip is to engage your audience through storytelling. A compelling narrative captures attention, evokes emotion and makes complex ideas more relatable. Additionally, use body language and eye contact effectively. These non-verbal cues can significantly enhance your connection with the audience. - Peter Boolkah , The Transition Guy

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How to Write and Deliver an Encouragement Speech: 13 Practical Tips

• The Speaker Lab
• August 18, 2024

Table of Contents

Creating an encouragement speech that resonates and motivates requires more than just a message. It demands an understanding of your audience, the right tone, and impactful delivery.

This post will guide you through crafting speeches that not only uplift but also connect on a personal level. You’ll learn how to weave storytelling into your narrative for greater relatability, choose words that empower, and employ techniques to emotionally engage with listeners. Additionally, we dive into the significance of body language in enhancing your speech’s effectiveness.

We also offer strategies for tailoring your message across different contexts and overcoming common hurdles such as nervousness or lack of engagement. Finally, we stress the importance of feedback in refining your approach to ensure every word counts towards uplifting others.

Crafting Your Encouragement Speech

It’s not just about what you say but how you say it. When it comes to giving an encouragement speech, it’s important to know how to do both.

The Power of Storytelling in Encouragement Speeches

Stories are the heart and soul of any encouragement speech. They transform abstract concepts into relatable experiences. Think back to a time when someone’s personal anecdote lifted your spirits or motivated you to push through a challenge. That’s the power you want to harness. By weaving in stories from your own life or those around you, you create a connection with your audience that facts alone cannot achieve.

To make storytelling effective, focus on moments of overcoming obstacles or achieving something against the odds. Narratives like these illustrate resilience and possibility.

Language and Word Choice

The words we choose can build up or tear down. In crafting your encouragement speech, opt for language that empowers and uplifts. Phrases like “you can,” “you will,” and “believe in yourself” aren’t clichés—they’re battle cries for those needing a boost.

Avoid negativities even when discussing challenges. Instead, frame these challenges as opportunities rather than roadblocks. This approach doesn’t deny difficulties but reframes them as part of the journey toward success.

Techniques for Emotional Engagement

Rhetorical devices such as repetition emphasize key points while questions prompt self-reflection among listeners. Use these tools sparingly but effectively to punctuate crucial ideas within your message. Such techniques not only grab attention but also ensure they linger long after you’ve concluded speaking. Tamsen Webster , for instance, details strategies speakers can use to maintain engagement throughout their presentation.

Varying tone, pitch, and pace help convey passion which is contagious. Your enthusiasm becomes theirs, motivating action beyond mere contemplation.

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Think about the last time a story really grabbed you. It wasn’t just the words, but how they made you feel, right? That’s the magic we’re aiming for in encouragement speeches.

Why Stories Work Wonders

We’ve all been there—sitting through a speech that feels more like a lecture than an inspiring talk. But then comes a story, and suddenly everyone perks up. Why? Because stories are relatable. They let us see ourselves in others’ shoes, making their victories feel possible for us too.

This isn’t just fluff; it’s backed by science. When we hear stories, our brains light up—not only processing language but also feeling emotions and visualizing scenes. This makes messages stick with us longer and encourages action.

Making It Personal

To harness this power in your speeches, start with personal anecdotes. Your own journey can be incredibly powerful because it’s authentic—you lived it. Share challenges you’ve faced and how you overcame them to inspire your audience to do the same.

But remember: authenticity is key here. If your story doesn’t ring true or seems exaggerated, it loses its impact and—worse yet—it could damage trust with your audience.

Finding Universal Themes

Your personal anecdote might not resonate with everyone on every level—that’s okay. The goal is to find universal themes within your story that anyone can connect with: perseverance against odds; finding joy amidst struggles; embracing change as growth opportunities. These themes speak to shared human experiences and create deeper connections between speaker and listener.

Language and Word Choice in an Encouragement Speech

The words you pick in your encouragement speech can make or break the impact. It’s important to choose just the right words so that you can leave your audience energized and inspired.

Empowering Your Audience with Positive Language

Selecting positive, empowering language is crucial. Words have power—they can lift people up or weigh them down. To motivate someone, use language that sparks hope and enthusiasm. Instead of saying “Don’t give up,” try “Keep pushing forward.” It’s about framing challenges as opportunities rather than obstacles.

This approach not only helps listeners see the glass half full but also encourages them to take action towards their goals. A study by the University of Pennsylvania showed that positive language significantly influences motivation levels in individuals facing challenges.

Rhetorical Devices: The Secret Sauce

To really connect with your audience, sprinkle some rhetorical devices into your speech like metaphors or analogies. They help simplify complex ideas and make messages stick.

Anaphora—the repetition of a word at the beginning of successive clauses—can be particularly powerful when used sparingly for emphasis on key points during your speech. Consider how Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech uses anaphora to unforgettable effect.

Emotion is the secret sauce that makes messages stick. But how do you bottle this elusive ingredient in your encouragement speeches? Let’s explore some tried and true techniques.

To hit the emotional chord, understanding your audience is key. Are they seeking motivation, comfort, or a rally to action? This insight shapes everything from your tone to your stories. Start by setting a clear goal for what emotion you want to evoke—be it hope, courage, or determination.

Tone matters more than you think. It’s not just what you say; it’s how you say it. A warm and sincere tone can turn even simple words into powerful motivational tools.

The structure of your message also plays a crucial role in its impact. Begin with an attention-grabbing opening that speaks directly to the heart of the audience’s concerns or aspirations before leading them on a journey towards empowerment and resolution.

Stories are empathy machines—they let us walk in another’s shoes without taking off our own. Integrating personal anecdotes makes your speech relatable and memorable because we’re hardwired to remember stories better than facts alone. As we at The Speaker Lab know, a  well-chosen story acts as an emotional anchor that listeners can hold onto long after they’ve forgotten other parts of your speech.

Selecting empowering language injects energy into your encouragement speech like nothing else. Words have power so choose those that inspire resilience and confidence. Avoid negative phrasing that might deflate spirits. Instead, opt for positive affirmations that uplift and motivate.

The Role of Body Language in Your Encouragement Speech

When it comes to delivering an encouragement speech, the words you choose are crucial. But there’s another player in the game that often flies under the radar: body language . This silent partner can make or break your connection with the audience.

Non-Verbal Cues Speak Volumes

Your posture, gestures, and facial expressions do a lot more than just add flair to your delivery. They’re key components of how audiences interpret your message. Standing tall conveys confidence, while maintaining eye contact builds trust. On the other hand, crossed arms might suggest you’re closed off or defensive—even if that’s not what you feel.

A smile can be a powerful tool as well . It not only makes you appear more approachable but also has been shown to positively affect listener perception, making them more receptive to your message.

Mirroring for Connection

Mirroring—the subtle art of matching someone else’s body language—can create a sense of empathy and understanding between speaker and listener. When done correctly during an encouragement speech, mirror neurons fire up, letting your audience know “I’m with you.”

This doesn’t mean mimicking every move someone makes—that would be weird. Instead, focus on capturing the general vibe of their energy level and enthusiasm through similar gestures and vocal tones.

Cultural Sensitivity Is Key

Different cultures have different norms when it comes to non-verbal communication. What’s considered respectful eye contact in one culture may be seen as challenging or rude in another. Educating yourself about these differences is essential for ensuring your message is received as intended across diverse groups. Becoming aware of cultural variations not only helps avoid misunderstandings but also strengthens global connections—one gesture at a time.

Tailoring Encouragement Speeches for Different Contexts

When you’re tasked with giving an encouragement speech, the setting can range from a high-stakes corporate boardroom to a lively sports team locker room. The secret sauce? Knowing how to adapt your message to fit these diverse environments seamlessly.

Crafting a Unique Encouragement Speech

First off, understanding your audience is crucial. A pep talk for a sales team chasing their quarterly targets will differ vastly from motivating volunteers at a charity event. It’s about hitting the right notes that resonate with your listeners’ current experiences and aspirations.

Setting the tone comes next. For instance, in a corporate environment, weaving in success stories relevant to business growth can inspire action. Contrast this with addressing athletes where tales of resilience and teamwork often strike deeper chords.

The structure of your message also needs careful consideration. An effective approach might involve starting with acknowledging challenges faced by the audience, followed by inspirational anecdotes or data supporting why they can overcome these hurdles, and concluding with a clear call-to-action.

Using Specially Tailored Stories

Incorporating personal stories or anecdotes not only makes your speech relatable but also memorable. This technique proves especially powerful when adapted correctly for different contexts—whether it’s sharing success stories within similar industries during corporate talks or highlighting individual achievements in sports team pep talks.

Overcoming Common Challenges

Nervousness, authenticity, and keeping the audience engaged are big hurdles in delivering an encouragement speech. But they’re not insurmountable! Here’s how you can leap over these obstacles with grace.

Dealing with Nervousness

Facing a sea of faces can make your palms sweat and heart race. Remember, it’s okay to be nervous; it means you care about delivering value to your audience. One way to ease those jitters is by practicing your speech multiple times beforehand. You might also try deep breathing exercises or visualization techniques to calm down right before taking the stage.

Another trick is to focus on why you’re there—to help and inspire others. This mindset shift can reduce pressure because you’re not focusing solely on yourself anymore.

Ensuring Authenticity

Your audience can spot a fake from miles away, so don’t even think about being someone you’re not up there. Sharing personal stories or anecdotes that connect with the core message of your speech makes you more relatable and trustworthy.

If sharing doesn’t come naturally, start small by incorporating bits of personal experiences relevant to your topic until it feels more comfortable for you.

Maintaining Audience Engagement

To keep everyone hanging onto every word, use dynamic language and involve them through questions or callouts if possible. This approach turns passive listeners into active participants.

Varying your tone and pace throughout also helps maintain interest. It’s like adding different spices as you cook; too much of one thing gets boring quickly.

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Incorporating Feedback for Improvement

In some cases it’s possible to get feedback on one’s encouragement speech. Should the opportunity present itself to you, take it. Not matter their expertise, speakers can always use audience reactions and critiques to refine their speeches. But where do you start? Let’s dive into the specifics.

The Power of Constructive Criticism

First off, embracing constructive criticism is key. It might sting at first, but think of it as an investment in your future performances. Ask fellow speakers or mentors who have been in the trenches what they think. Their insights can be goldmines for improvement.

Moreover, consider anonymous surveys from your audience. Tools like SurveyMonkey let you gather honest opinions without putting anyone on the spot.

Use Feedback to Improve Your Encouragement Speech

Now that you’ve gathered all this valuable feedback, what next? Start by identifying common themes—these are areas needing immediate attention. If multiple people point out that your opening lacks punch or your message gets lost mid-way, there’s a pattern emerging that needs fixing.

Create a plan of action for each piece of consistent feedback received. If it’s about improving engagement, research techniques used by successful speakers to keep audiences hooked from start to finish.

Remember: improvement doesn’t happen overnight. Practice these adjustments during smaller gatherings before taking them onto bigger stages again.

Evaluating Progress Over Time

To really measure how far you’ve come, set specific goals directly related to some of the critiques you originally received. After subsequent speaking engagements, reassess using the same criteria. This continuous loop ensures not just temporary fixes but long term growth in your speaking skills.

FAQs on Encouragement Speeches

How do you motivate someone in a speech.

Connect deeply, share stories that resonate, and show them the path from where they are to where they could be.

What is the best motivational speech of all time?

The “I Have A Dream” by Martin Luther King, Jr. stands out for its powerful vision and timeless call to action.

What is a positive motivation speech?

A talk that uplifts spirits, sparks hope, and encourages folks to chase their dreams with relentless optimism.

What should I say in a motivational speech?

Talk about overcoming obstacles and taking concrete steps towards achieving one’s goals. Make it personal and inspiring.

Giving an encouragement speech is about connecting, inspiring, and moving your audience to action. To engage your audience, try telling stories that make your message stick. As for the words you use, choose positive phrasing and aim to uplift with every sentence. Non-verbal cues are your silent cheerleaders; use them wisely to add depth beyond words.

Tailor your message to match your audience. After all, context matters as much as content. Tweak your speech to touch hearts in any setting.

Nervous? Everyone is at first. Authenticity beats anxiety every time, so be real, be you. Feedback will fuel your growth, so listen, learn, then lead stronger than before. Improvement never stops in crafting a compelling encouragement speech that truly transforms lives.

• Last Updated: August 7, 2024

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Election Highlights: Harris and Walz Rally in Las Vegas to End Their Introductory Tour

Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota were in Nevada for the final rally of their tour of battleground states. Former President Donald J. Trump tested a new attack at an event in Montana.

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Chris Cameron Michael Gold and Simon J. Levien

Here’s the latest on the presidential race.

Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, campaigned in Las Vegas on Saturday night, the final stop on their introductory tour of battleground states that began in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

Earlier on Saturday, new polls by The New York Times and Siena College showed Ms. Harris ahead of former President Donald J. Trump by four percentage points in the critical battlegrounds of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. The surveys of likely voters in each state were conducted from Aug. 5 to 9.

The polls were the latest sign of Ms. Harris’s political momentum since she announced that she had chosen Mr. Walz to be her vice-presidential candidate. The new ticket has been drawing large crowds, including at a rally in Glendale, Ariz. , on Friday that the Harris campaign claimed had more than 15,000 people in attendance, which would have been its biggest rally yet.

Mr. Trump was scheduled to attend fund-raisers in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Aspen, Colo., on Saturday. On Friday, he unveiled fresh attacks against Ms. Harris during a campaign event in Bozeman, Mont., twice interrupting his speech to play compilations of some of her past remarks that his campaign hopes will portray her as overly liberal and inept.

Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, rallied near Las Vegas last week , denouncing the vice president’s role in the Biden administration’s border policies. At her Arizona rally, Ms. Harris said she supported “strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.”

Here’s what else to know:

A twist on that helicopter tale: Mr. Trump spent Friday doubling down on his story of nearly crashing during a helicopter ride with Willie Brown, the notable Black politician from California. Another Black politician from California, Nate Holden, said in an interview with The New York Times that he had been on a helicopter ride with Mr. Trump around 1990 when the aircraft experienced mechanical trouble and was forced to make an emergency landing in New Jersey.

A first-time endorsement: A Latino rights group backed Ms. Harris , breaking with its 95-year history of abstaining from formal presidential endorsements. The League of United Latin American Citizens, known as LULAC, said its members were stirred to action by concerns over the potential negative impact on Latinos if Mr. Trump were elected again.

Not an endorsement: Joe Rogan, the world’s most popular podcaster, backpedaled on comments he made on Thursday that seemed to throw his support behind the independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. After backlash from Mr. Trump’s supporters, Mr. Rogan, the podcaster with a large, devoted following that leans young and male, posted on X that what he said was not “ an endorsement. ” Another podcaster, Tim Pool, also expressed his support for Mr. Kennedy before quickly switching his support to Mr. Trump in the face of withering criticism from Trump supporters.

A tale of two very different bank accounts: Mr. Vance and Mr. Walz both came from modest backgrounds in the Midwest, but their personal fortunes have wildly diverged since then. Mr. Vance is a multimillionaire. Mr. Walz has much less than that, and is already emphasizing that contrast on the campaign trail .

Generating buzz: A high school class lesson that Mr. Walz gave 31 years ago is getting new attention online . As a geography teacher in Nebraska in 1993, Mr. Walz asked his students to take what they had learned about the Holocaust to predict which nation was most at risk for genocide. “They came up with Rwanda,” Mr. Walz said, talking about the project at a conference last month . “Twelve months later, the world witnessed the horrific genocide in Rwanda.”

David E. Sanger and Michael Gold

David E. Sanger reported from Wellington, New Zealand. Michael Gold reported from Bozeman, Mont.

The hacking of presidential campaigns begins, with the usual fog of motives.

For the third presidential election in a row, the foreign hacking of the campaigns has begun in earnest. But this time, it’s the Iranians, not the Russians, making the first significant move.

On Friday, Microsoft released a report declaring that a hacking group run by the intelligence unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had successfully breached the account of a “former senior adviser” to a presidential campaign. From that account, Microsoft said, the group sent fake email messages, known as “spear phishing,” to “a high-ranking official of a presidential campaign” in an effort to break into the campaign’s own accounts and databases.

By Saturday night, former President Donald J. Trump was declaring that Microsoft had informed his campaign “that one of our many websites was hacked by the Iranian Government — Never a nice thing to do!” but that the hackers had obtained only “publicly available information.” He attributed it all to what he called, in his signature selective capitalization, a “Weak and Ineffective” Biden administration.

The facts were murkier, and it is unclear what, if anything, the Iranian group, which Microsoft called Mint Sandstorm, was able to achieve.

Mr. Trump’s campaign was already blaming “foreign sources hostile to the United States” for a leak of internal documents that Politico reported on Saturday that it had received, though it is unclear whether those documents indeed emerged from the Iranian efforts or were part of an unrelated leak from inside the campaign.

The New York Times received what appears to be a similar if not identical trove of data from an anonymous tipster purporting to be the same person who emailed the documents to Politico.

Either way, the events of the past few days may well portend a more intense period of foreign interference in a race whose sudden turns, and changes of candidates, could have thrown the hackers off their plans.

Russia has so far played a relatively minor role, investigators and cybersecurity experts say, focusing instead on seeking to undermine both the Olympics, from which it was barred from fielding its own team, and support for Ukraine. And while American intelligence officials say they have little doubt that Russia wants to see Mr. Trump return to office, Chinese hackers, they say, seem uncertain how to play the election; they have reason to dislike both Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

There is little doubt, investigators say, that the Iranians want to see Mr. Trump defeated. As president, he withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal, reimposed economic sanctions on Iran and then, in January 2020, ordered the killing in Iraq of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani , the commander of the Quds Force, a clandestine wing of the Revolutionary Guards responsible for foreign operations.

Four years later, the Revolutionary Guard Corps appears still determined to avenge Suleimani’s death, and just last week the Justice Department announced it had charged a Pakistani man who had recently visited Iran, accusing him of trying to hire a hit man to assassinate political figures in the U.S. , most likely including Mr. Trump. (There is no evidence that Iran was involved in the July 13 attempt on Mr. Trump’s life in Butler, Pa.)

Mr. Trump often casts his actions against Iran as evidence of his strength, despite the fact that his exit from the Iran deal gave Tehran an opening to rebuild a nuclear program that had been hobbled by the 2015 agreement. Still, the combination of the hack and the hit men looking for Mr. Trump and his former aides gave the former president an obvious foil, and he was using it over the weekend to make the case that the Iranians would prefer a continuation of the Biden-Harris administration.

Microsoft stopped short of saying that the hacking effort it detected was focused on Mr. Trump’s campaign, though the campaign itself said that was the case. In an interview, Tom Burt, the head of the company’s customer security and trust team, said that in June, “the Iranian team associated with Iranian intelligence” operations of the Revolutionary Guards successfully breached the email account of a former campaign adviser, whom the company did not name. From that account, he said, the Iranians sent a spear phishing email to an official of a presidential campaign.

While it would have appeared to the recipient to have come from the former campaign adviser, Mr. Burt refused to say whether the targeted campaign was also Mr. Trump’s. By long-established practice, Microsoft says, it can reveal such details only with the permission of the victim of an attack.

In many ways, the effort was similar in technique to what Iran attempted when it sought to interfere in the 2020 presidential campaign . This time, however, the Iranian effort looks to have been more sophisticated — namely, through the hacking of a trusted intermediary — suggesting the hackers learned something from what the Russians accomplished in past campaigns, notably in 2016.

But Mr. Burt said the company could not determine if the effort was successful in penetrating the campaign it targeted.

The documents sent to Politico, as it described them, and to The Times included research about and assessments of potential vice-presidential nominees, including Senator JD Vance, whom Mr. Trump ultimately selected. Like many such vetting documents, they contained past statements with the potential to be embarrassing or damaging, such as Mr. Vance’s remarks casting aspersions on Mr. Trump.

In a statement on Saturday, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, preemptively chastised outlets that reported on any information that was improperly obtained.

“Any media or news outlet reprinting documents or internal communications are doing the bidding of America’s enemies and doing exactly what they want,” he wrote.

The 2016 election that Mr. Trump won was marked by similar “hack and leak” efforts after Russian hackers broke into the email accounts of top Democratic officials. Leaked emails showed the internal workings of the party and of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and also revealed criticisms of Mrs. Clinton by aides, and a trove of them was published by WikiLeaks in the final weeks of the presidential race.

Seeking an edge then, Mr. Trump’s campaign seized on the emails — many of them from Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta. “We love WikiLeaks,” Mr. Trump declared at the time.

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Nicholas Nehamas Reid J. Epstein and Kellen Browning

Nicholas Nehamas reported from Las Vegas, Reid J. Epstein from Washington and Kellen Browning from Phoenix.

Rallying in Las Vegas, Harris pledges to end federal taxes on tips.

Vice President Kamala Harris said on Saturday that she would seek to end federal income taxes on tips if she were elected president, mirroring a policy proposal that former President Donald J. Trump made earlier this year.

The proposal from Ms. Harris — which she announced in Las Vegas, where thousands of casino employees depend on tipped wages — is a priority of Nevada’s influential Culinary Workers Union. Both Ms. Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, recognized the union in their remarks to a packed basketball arena on Saturday night.

“When I am president,” Ms. Harris told the Las Vegas crowd, “we will continue our fight for working families of America, including to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.”

The “no tax on tips” pitch has garnered bipartisan support since Mr. Trump first floated it in June , including from Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, and both of Nevada’s Democratic senators, Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen. Mr. Trump also announced his support for the policy in Las Vegas.

The former president responded immediately to Ms. Harris’s proposal on Saturday night, posting on his social media website, Truth Social, that she had “copied” his own. “This was a TRUMP idea,” he wrote. “She has no ideas, she can only steal them from me.”

The Las Vegas stop was the last public event of a five-city introduction of the Harris-Walz ticket. As with the other rallies, Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz drew a crowd many times larger than any that had shown up for President Biden while he was seeking re-election.

By Saturday, there were signs that some of the Democrats’ good vibes may have an expiration date. The Harris campaign said Mr. Walz “misspoke” when he said he had carried weapons of war “in war” in a video articulating his views on gun control. And Ms. Harris, before her event in Las Vegas, answered several questions from reporters for the first time since becoming the Democratic nominee — a development that took place after pressure from Mr. Trump and his campaign.

But overall, the week’s rollout was widely viewed as a success. Ms. Harris has engendered more enthusiasm than any Democratic nominee since Barack Obama in 2008. The appointment of Mr. Walz as her running mate took place without any significant grumbling from the party — a bit of a surprise after a two-week vice-presidential audition that surfaced ideological divisions in the party, particularly over the war in Gaza.

On Saturday, Mr. Walz urged the crowd at the arena on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas — which the campaign said included more than 12,000 people — not only to vote for the Democratic ticket but also to work to ensure their friends and neighbors did, too.

“I know very clearly that I am preaching to the choir,” Mr. Walz said. “But here’s my words for you: The choir needs to sing. The choir needs to sing.”

During stops in Philadelphia , Wisconsin , Detroit and Arizona , Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz spoke to capacity crowds. By the end of the week, the high points in their stump speeches had become familiar enough to audiences that people in the crowd shouted them along with the candidates. All told, the new running mates drew more than 64,000 attendees to their rallies, according to estimates from the campaign.

“Aren’t they a breath of fresh air?” Representative Susie Lee, Democrat of Nevada, asked attendees in Las Vegas.

Mr. Biden had trailed Mr. Trump badly in Nevada, where inflation is a top concern for many voters. But Ms. Harris has tightened that gap significantly since Mr. Biden dropped out.

On Friday, the vice president secured the backing of the Culinary Workers Union, an endorsement that will likely add to her campaign’s organizing operation and eventual voter turnout.

The culinary union is a 60,000-member organization that represents casino and hotel workers and has been a key part of the coalition that has helped Democrats win in Nevada.

Mariana Swanson, a culinary union member who worked as a restroom attendant at a Las Vegas nightclub where she depended on tips, said Ms. Harris’s announcement came as a “shock,” though a welcome one.

“It’s more money for taking care of your family,” said Ms. Swanson, 43, a Democrat and one of many attendees wearing a red culinary union T-shirt. “It’s more money for paying your bills.”

With her promises to raise the minimum wage and eliminate taxes on tips, Ms. Harris seemed to preview the planned release of her policy platform next week. She had told reporters earlier on Saturday that the platform would focus on the economy and lowering costs for working families.

In addition to rank-and-file Democrats, wealthy donors are also responding to the new ticket. On Sunday, Ms. Harris was scheduled to attend a fund-raiser in San Francisco that drew more than $12 million in contributions, her campaign said.

Ms. Harris’s crowd in Las Vegas would have been larger than it was, but law enforcement officials closed the doors as people fell ill while waiting outside the arena in temperatures that reached 109 degrees. Roughly 4,000 people were in line at that point and had to be turned away, the Harris campaign said.

“Don’t worry,” a hoarse-voiced Mr. Walz promised those who had made it inside. “We’re going to be back a lot.”

Before the rally began, thousands of attendees stood and danced in their seats waving Harris-Walz signs, as disco remixes, hip-hop and Latin pop blared over the speakers and the arena’s lights flashed in multicolored rhythm.

“We’ve got a party up in here,” D-Nice, a D.J. and the event’s M.C., shouted to roars of approval. “Let’s light this place up.”

Nicholas Nehamas

Harris has wrapped up here in Las Vegas. She made news by endorsing a “no tax on tips” proposal that has wide bipartisan appeal and had previously been proposed by Trump.

Vice President Harris just said that as president she would support making tipped income tax-free, a major issue in Nevada, where much of the economy is service-based. It’s a proposal that has already been floated by her Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump.

Harris also expressed support for raising the federal minimum wage. She told reporters earlier today that she would release her policy platform next week, with a focus on the economy and on lowering costs for working families.

Michael Gold

Donald Trump accused Harris of copying his “no taxes on tips” policy. In a post on his social media site, Truth Social, he wrote that Harris “has no ideas, she can only steal from me” and insisted that she would not follow through on the pledge. “This was a TRUMP idea,” he wrote.

Harris is now joining Walz onstage to deafening cheers from the crowd.

Walz is telling the story of his decision to join the National Guard at 17. Republicans have raised questions about his decision to retire from the Guard more than two decades later when it was rumored his unit would be deployed to Iraq.

Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota has taken the stage, his first visit to the crucial swing state of Nevada as Harris’s running mate. “I’m melting like a snowman outside,” the Minnesotan says of the Las Vegas heat.

Tilly Torres, a Las Vegas teacher, is introducing Harris. She said she had $87,000 in student debt forgiven through the Biden administration’s actions, one of its more popular initiatives. “For the first time,” Torres said, “I have financial freedom.”

Torres also has kind words for Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Harris’s running mate, saying that if he can “handle a high school lunch room,” then the vice presidency will be a piece of cake.

Beyonce’s song “Freedom” is blasting through this packed college basketball arena in Las Vegas, meaning Harris will soon appear.

Vice President Kamala Harris is 35 minutes and counting behind schedule for her remarks in Las Vegas tonight.

Reid J. Epstein

The Harris campaign said it was set to raise $12 million at a San Francisco fund-raiser on Sunday. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is expected to speak to some 700 people.

Theodore Schleifer

Fun fact — that $12 million is precisely the amount that former President Donald J. Trump raised in San Francisco at an event this summer. But Trump raised it from only about 100 people.

The Harris campaign says that more than 12,000 people are attending her rally in Las Vegas tonight. But law enforcement officials closed the doors as people fell ill while waiting outside in temperatures that reached 109 degrees. Roughly 4,000 people were in line at that point and had to be turned away, the campaign said.

Don’t expect to hear this later from Vice President Kamala Harris, but one of her warm-up speakers, Representative Dina Titus, a Nevada Democrat, just made a joke about a false rumor circulating on the internet about Senator JD Vance of Ohio, former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate. “You better hide behind that sofa because we’re coming for you,” Titus said to laughter from a crowd of thousands.

The crowd here quickly joined Representative Steven Horsford, Democrat of Nevada, in a chant of “We’re not going back,” a rallying cry in Harris’s stump speech. The easy recognition shows how familiar Democrats are growing with her applause lines.

Nicholas Nehamas Jazmine Ulloa and Shane Goldmacher

Nicholas Nehamas reported from Las Vegas, Jazmine Ulloa from Washington and Shane Goldmacher from Phoenix.

Harris hopes a new playbook will neutralize G.O.P. attacks on immigration.

For weeks, Republicans have pummeled Vice President Kamala Harris on immigration, blaming her for President Biden’s policies at the border.

Now, Ms. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, is seeking to neutralize that line of attack, one of her biggest weaknesses with voters, running a playbook that Democrats say has worked for them in recent elections and staking out her clearest position yet as a tough-on-crime prosecutor focused on securing the border.

This week, she has hit back by promising to heighten border security if elected and slamming her Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, for helping kill a bipartisan border deal in Congress. And her campaign has walked back some of the more progressive positions she took during her bid for the Democratic nomination in 2019, including her stance that migrants crossing the U.S. border without authorization should not face criminal penalties.

“I was attorney general of a border state,” Ms. Harris, who was once California’s top prosecutor, said on Friday at a rally in Arizona, a swing state where immigration is a top concern for voters. “I went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels and human traffickers. I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won.”

A day earlier, the Harris campaign released a television advertisement highlighting her pivot. The ad, targeted to voters in the battleground states, promised that Ms. Harris would “hire thousands more border agents and crack down on fentanyl and human trafficking.” It made no mention of undocumented immigrants already in the United States — a top priority for many progressives and immigration activists — although in her Arizona speech Ms. Harris stressed the importance of “comprehensive reform” that includes “an earned pathway to citizenship.”

No other Democratic nominee has taken a position this tough on border security since Bill Clinton. Her stance reflects a change in public opinion since Mr. Trump left the White House in 2021. More Americans, including many Democrats and Latino voters, have expressed support for hard-line immigration measures.

The shift in public opinion comes as Republicans have escalated their rhetoric against migrants. Border crossings skyrocketed during the Biden administration, though more recently they have sharply declined since a Biden executive order designed to clamp down on the border. The question for Ms. Harris is whether her new message as the party’s standard-bearer will come too late for voters who have already formed opinions of her record.

Senior Trump campaign officials have ranked immigration as among Ms. Harris’s deepest vulnerabilities and sought to pin responsibility for the Biden administration’s policies on her, calling her the “border czar.” The title far exceeds the actual policy portfolio given to her by Mr. Biden, who asked her to address the root causes of migration from Latin America.

Democratic polling has raised similar concerns about Ms. Harris’s immigration record. Blueprint, a Democratic group, recently tested six potential Republican lines of attack on Ms. Harris — including labeling her the “border czar” — and found that those involving immigration were the most effective, even more so than attacks related to the economy and inflation.

Other polls have shown that voters place more trust in Mr. Trump’s ability to handle border issues than in Ms. Harris’s. But if Ms. Harris can at least counter Republican arguments on immigration, she may be able to sway voters on issues more friendly to Democrats, such as abortion, her allies say.

The decision for the Harris campaign to frame her record as California attorney general as a “border-state prosecutor” stands in contrast to how she ran in the 2020 Democratic primary.

Then, during a debate, she raised her hand in response to a question about whether people who are here illegally should be eligible for public health care.

For his part, Mr. Trump has attacked Ms. Harris over the border in dark terms, engaging in fear-mongering about migrants and using dehumanizing language to falsely paint them as a threat to Americans .

“Every day, Kamala is letting migrant criminals roam free to assault, rape, mutilate and kill our citizens,” the former president said at a rally in Montana on Friday.

Chris DeRose, a Republican who served as a clerk of courts in Arizona’s Maricopa County, said many swing voters would be dubious of Ms. Harris’s rhetoric.

“She’s part of the Biden-Harris administration,” Mr. DeRose said. “There’s going to be some skepticism.”

But Ms. Harris and her allies have tried to make Mr. Trump’s immigration record into its own campaign issue. This year, Mr. Trump successfully convinced Senate Republicans to kill a bill supported by Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris that would have effectively mandated that the border be shut down to migrants when numbers reached certain levels and that vastly expanded detentions and deportations.

“Donald Trump tanked the deal,” Ms. Harris said in Arizona as a crowd of more than 15,000 supporters booed. “Because he thought by doing that it would help him win an election.”

Jen Cox, a senior adviser for the Harris campaign in Arizona, said Democrats in that state, including Senator Mark Kelly, had won elections with tougher messages on immigration.

“Voters want to see folks be serious about actually fixing the broken immigration system and securing the border,” Ms. Cox said in an interview. “They don’t want to see folks play politics with it.”

In a closely watched special election in New York this year, Tom Suozzi, a Democrat, won a competitive House race after slamming Mr. Trump over the scuttled border deal and taking unusually hard-line stances for a member of his party, including calls to temporarily shut down the border and deport migrants who assault the police.

“The most effective politician is the one that says what the people are thinking already,” Mr. Suozzi said. “And people are talking about this issue. They are very much concerned about it. And the vice president can continue to emphasize that, yes, we recognize this is a problem and we are willing to compromise to solve the problem, unlike the other side.”

Harris campaign aides say her move to the center since the 2020 primary had been shaped by her time as vice president.

Mike Madrid, a longtime G.O.P. consultant focused on Latino voters, said Ms. Harris’s pledge to sign the border security bill, which did not include protections for undocumented immigrants already in the United States, and the security-focused message of her new television ad reflected wider changes among Democrats.

Since the Obama years, Democrats had sought to fuse efforts to increase border security with calls to establish permanent paths to legal residency and citizenship for the roughly 10 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, many of whom have lived in the country for years, holding jobs, paying taxes and starting families.

But the Latino electorate, the fastest-growing slice of the voter bloc, now tends to be third- and fourth-generation voters more removed from the immigration experience, Mr. Madrid said.

“This doesn’t mean you have to go all Donald Trump on immigration,” he said. “It means you have to lead with border security and then weave in the elements of immigration reform later.”

Michael Gold contributed reporting from Bozeman, Mont., and Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting from Washington.

Hundreds of people are waiting outside to get into a Harris campaign rally at a basketball arena in Las Vegas, where the temperature is 107 degrees.

Inside, it’s a full celebration, with thousands of people standing and dancing in their seats to disco remixes. “We’ve got a party up in here,” the D.J. D-Nice, the event’s M.C., says over the speakers. It cannot be said enough how different the energy at Harris’s rallies has been from that at President Biden’s.

Vice President Kamala Harris took five questions from the traveling press pool on Saturday. It was the first time since she became the Democratic presidential nominee that she engaged with journalists even to that degree. She said she planned to deliver a policy platform next week.

Harris has faced criticism — including from former President Donald J. Trump — for not holding a news conference or sitting for interviews with journalists.

The singer Celine Dion, in a statement on social media, said she and her management team did not authorize or endorse the playing of “My Heart Will Go On,” her hit song from the movie “Titanic,” at a Trump rally in Montana on Friday. The Trump campaign has played the song at multiple rallies recently, and Trump has over the years received several requests from artists asking him not to use their music at his political events.

Neil Vigdor

The Harris campaign says Walz “misspoke” in a comment about his military service.

Officials for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign are trying to clean up remarks made in 2018 by her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, that gave the impression that he had served in combat, just days after the campaign had inadvertently drawn attention to them to illustrate Mr. Walz’s views about responsible gun ownership.

In a clip from a political event in 2018, when he represented Minnesota in the House, Mr. Walz referenced his 24 years in the Army National Guard and background as a hunter while discussing his views on gun control. He spoke of supporting common-sense gun legislation that also protects Second Amendment rights, including background checks and restrictions on high-powered firearms.

“We can make sure that those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at,” Mr. Walz said in the clip, which the campaign had shared Tuesday on social media, just hours after Ms. Harris named him as her running mate.

Mr. Walz deployed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as part of Operation Enduring Freedom, but not in a combat zone.

Lauren Hitt, a spokeswoman for the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement on Saturday that Mr. Walz’s remarks had been a misstatement and that he had not tried to mislead anyone about his military service.

“In making the case for why weapons of war should never be on our streets or in our classrooms, the governor misspoke,” Ms. Hitt said.

Mr. Walz, who is in his second term as Minnesota’s governor, has come under intense scrutiny from Republicans over his military record . They have accused him of exaggerating his record and also of quitting the Army National Guard two decades ago to avoid being deployed to Iraq, rekindling claims made by two retired command sergeant majors during Mr. Walz’s first campaign for governor in 2018.

Leading that criticism is Senator JD Vance of Ohio, former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate, who has accused Mr. Walz of “stolen valor.”

Mr. Vance served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2003 to 2007 during the Iraq war. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005 and 2006 with the aircraft wing but was not a frontline combatant. His official military occupation, known as a combat correspondent, meant he was tasked with basic communication roles such as writing articles about the happenings in his unit.

The Republican broadsides against Mr. Walz resembled the “Swift Boat” attacks in the 2004 presidential election that created a cloud of uncertainty over the military record of Senator John F. Kerry, then the Democratic presidential nominee. Chris LaCivita, who is a senior strategist for the Trump campaign, was an architect of those attacks, which were highly effective.

The conservative-leaning editorial board of The Wall Street Journal spurned comparisons this week between Mr. Kerry’s situation and Mr. Walz’s military service, which it wrote was “far different.” It said that there were plenty of reasons to criticize Mr. Walz, but that his military record was not one of them. It quoted a New York Sun editorial that described the attacks as “thin gruel.”

On a number of occasions, Mr. Walz has emphasized that he did not serve in combat. During a CNN interview last month, when the anchor Jake Tapper said that Mr. Walz had deployed to Afghanistan, Mr. Walz corrected him and said that he had served in Europe in support of that war.

In an interview with Minnesota Public Radio in 2018, when he was running for governor, Mr. Walz said of his military career: “I know that there are certainly folks that did far more than I did.”

And when Mr. Walz was running for re-election as governor in 2022, The Minneapolis Star Tribune wrote that he had shied away from dramatic accounts of his time in the National Guard, framing himself instead as a former high school teacher and football coach.

The 2018 clip of Mr. Walz saying that “those weapons of war that I carried in war is the only place where those weapons are at,” was not the only one that Mr. Trump’s allies seized on this week.

They also pounced on a 2007 C-SPAN clip from a Capitol Hill news conference when Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker at the time, thanked Mr. Walz for his service “on the battlefield.” Mr. Walz was identified by C-SPAN as an “Afghanistan war veteran” at the time.

Reid J. Epstein , Michael C. Bender , Thomas Gibbons-Neff and John Ismay contributed reporting.

In a memo, Tony Fabrizio, the Trump campaign’s chief pollster, argued that new polls by The New York Times and Siena College “dramatically understated President Trump’s support.” Fabrizio cited polls conducted in the days before the 2020 election that accurately predicted President Biden’s victory but overestimated the margin.

Donald Trump will attend two fund-raisers today in mountain resort towns favored by the wealthy. First, he’ll attend a lunch event in Jackson Hole, Wyo., then he will travel to a dinner fund-raiser in Aspen, Colo.

A former Trump administration official and climate change denier, appearing in a leaked training video for Project 2025, emphasized that the next Republican president must be focused on reversing the federal government’s current environmental policies. “If the American people elect a conservative president, his administration will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere,” said Bethany Kozma, a former deputy chief of staff at the United States Agency for International Development. The video is one of several that were obtained by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom, and the journalism project Documented.

Former President Donald J. Trump has tried to extricate himself from the negative attention surrounding Project 2025, the right-wing policy playbook prepared for the next Republican president that Democrats have used as a political cudgel.

Adam Nagourney

As a rule, candidates who think they are ahead do not challenge their opponent to three debates, as Donald Trump did with Kamala Harris the other day. So it’s a pretty good bet that Trump’s own polling — or at the least, his political gut — had picked up on what Times/Siena college poll reports this weekend: that Harris could be a much tougher opponent than Biden.

Michael Gold and Simon J. Levien

Reporting from Bozeman, Mont.

Fine-tuning his attacks on Harris, Trump tries using her words against her.

As former President Donald J. Trump continues to reach for attacks on his new opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, that might halt her political momentum, he unveiled a new tactic at a rally in Bozeman, Mont., on Friday night, aiming to use Ms. Harris’s own words against her.

Interrupting his typical pattern of a digressive and lengthy speech, Mr. Trump played two video compilations of past remarks by Ms. Harris that his campaign hopes will portray her as overly liberal and inept.

The first video drew on statements that Ms. Harris made during the 2020 presidential campaign, when she tacked to the left and backed progressive ideas on criminal justice reform. The second was a montage of interviews and speeches that Mr. Trump’s campaign used to mock her speaking style and insult her intelligence.

The videos did little to alter the message that the Trump campaign has deployed against Ms. Harris for weeks and that Mr. Trump summed up during his speech on Friday.

“America cannot survive for four more years of this bumbling communist lunatic,” Mr. Trump told thousands gathered in the Brick Breeden Fieldhouse at Montana State University. “We cannot let her win this election.”

Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly tried to portray Ms. Harris as more liberal than President Biden in the three weeks since he ended his campaign and cleared the way for her to be the Democratic presidential nominee.

The video compiling her past positions accused her of supporting a ban on fracking, mandatory gun buybacks and a single-payer health insurance system like “Medicare for all.”

Ms. Harris has backed away from those policy positions, which largely stem from her time in the 2020 presidential race. But Mr. Trump — who has been known to flip-flop or equivocate on hot-button issues like abortion — argued that her early statements were the only ones that mattered.

Mr. Trump’s rally on Friday was his first since Ms. Harris chose Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota as her running mate, and he used the selection to bolster his portrait of the Democratic ticket as overly liberal. Effectively likening Mr. Walz to a socialist, he accused the governor of being too lax in his response to protests that turned to riots in Minneapolis after the police murder of George Floyd and for signing a law giving access to menstrual products to transgender children.

Referring to Mr. Walz as “Comrade Walz,” Mr. Trump argued that Ms. Harris tapped him for his progressive bona fides. “This is her ideology,” he said.

Mr. Trump also acknowledged that he has frequently mispronounced Ms. Harris’s given name in recent speeches, though he added that he “couldn’t care less” how it should be pronounced. He admitted that he has in the past “done a lot of bad name-calling” in which he has purposefully mispronounced a person’s name. “They say, ‘Sir, you made a mistake,’” Mr. Trump recounted. “I said, ‘No, I didn’t.’”

Still, Mr. Trump’s speech offered continued evidence of the growing pains he has faced as he tries to shift years of attacks against Mr. Biden toward Ms. Harris.

Even as he argued that Ms. Harris was more extreme than Mr. Biden, he tied her to the president’s policies on immigration and the economy.

At one point, he said she was the one running the country the past four years, even as he repeatedly argued that she was too unintelligent or incompetent to do so effectively. Mr. Trump has long made the same argument about Mr. Biden.

Mr. Trump's rally is part of a western swing that includes fund-raisers in mountain resort towns favored by the wealthy. Before he took the stage in Bozeman, he attended an event in Big Sky, Mont., and on Saturday he will travel to fund-raisers in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Aspen, Colo.

Montana is not an obvious site for a presidential campaign rally. Mr. Trump won the state handily in both 2016 and 2020, and he is expected to do so again in November. But with Republicans keen on flipping Democrats’ narrow edge in the Senate, Mr. Trump traveled to Montana to support his party’s Senate candidate there, Tim Sheehy, who is looking to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Senator Jon Tester.

At one point, Mr. Trump, whose flight to Bozeman was diverted to another city after his plane suffered a mechanical issue, reflected on how long it takes to travel to Montana.

“I’ve got to like Tim Sheehy a lot to be here,” he said.

Shawn Hubler Maggie Haberman and Heather Knight

Yes, Trump was in a scary helicopter ride, but not with that politician.

Donald J. Trump was doubling down on Friday about his story of nearly crashing during a helicopter ride once with Willie Brown, the notable Black California politician.

He was so adamant that it had happened that he threatened to sue The New York Times for reporting that the story was untrue , then posted on his social media site that there were “‘Logs,’ Maintenance Records, and Witnesses” to back up his account.

“It was Willie Brown,” Mr. Trump, who spent much of the last year hoping to make gains with Black voters, posted. “But now Willie doesn’t remember?”

Mr. Brown, 90, who was mayor of San Francisco and speaker of the California Assembly, gave several interviews on Thursday and Friday saying such a trip never occurred.

Turns out, however, that there was a Black politician from California who once made an emergency landing in a helicopter with Mr. Trump. It just wasn’t Mr. Brown.

Nate Holden, 95, a former Los Angeles city councilman and state senator, said in an interview with The Times that he had been on a helicopter ride with Mr. Trump around 1990 when the aircraft experienced mechanical trouble and was forced to make an emergency landing in New Jersey.

Recounting an episode that he had described earlier on Friday to Politico, Mr. Holden said Mr. Trump had been seeking to develop the site of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when it was part of Mr. Holden’s district. Mr. Trump wanted him to see his Taj Mahal casino, Mr. Holden said, so on a visit to Manhattan, he rode with Mr. Trump from his Midtown skyscraper to a helipad, where the two took off for Atlantic City, accompanied by Mr. Trump’s brother Robert and by his executive vice president of construction and development, Barbara Res.

“He was trying to impress me,” Mr. Holden said. “We start flying to New Jersey. He said, ‘Look at the skyline! Look at how beautiful it is! And I’m part of it!’”

Mr. Holden said he wasn’t impressed. “I grew up in New Jersey,” he said. “It ain’t nothing new to me.”

“Anyway,” he continued, “we start flying to Atlantic City. He’s talking about how great things are. And about 15, 20 minutes in, the pilot yells, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’”

The hydraulic system had failed, he said. “Donald turned white as snow,” Mr. Holden recalled. “He was shaking.”

Mr. Holden said that as the helicopter’s crew worked frantically to set the aircraft down safely, his own thoughts ran to a helicopter crash in 1989 that had killed three senior executives of Mr. Trump’s casinos over Forked River, N.J.

“I just thought, how the hell do you let your staff not maintain your aircraft after you just had a crash that killed some of your staff? How could you let this happen again? I thought, if we go down, this is your fault.”

The helicopter ultimately landed safely in Linden, N.J., Mr. Holden said.

Ms. Res wrote about the episode in a memoir and corroborated Mr. Holden’s account in a brief interview late Friday. Ms. Res, who also spoke to Politico, recalled that Mr. Trump liked to say that Mr. Holden had “turned white” from fear, but that it was actually Mr. Trump whose face was ashen.

A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Mr. Holden said he was in his living room watching Mr. Trump’s news conference on TV on Thursday when the former president told of experiencing a brush with death on a helicopter ride with Mr. Brown.

“I said, ‘What the hell is this?’” Mr. Holden said. “‘Was he in two near-fatal helicopter crashes? He didn’t fix those damn helicopters yet?’”

Mr. Holden said that he called Mr. Brown to compare notes. Mr. Brown told him he had never been in a helicopter with Mr. Trump.

“I said, ‘Willie, you know what? That’s me!’” Mr. Holden said. “And I told him, ‘You’re a short Black guy and I’m a tall Black guy — but we all look alike, right?’”

Mr. Holden gave his own height as 6-foot-1. “Willie has to be about 5-foot-6. Maybe 5-foot-5. He comes up to about my shoulders. And he’s bald. And I’m not bald.”

Mr. Brown, he said, “just laughed and laughed.”

Mr. Holden, summing up his assessment of Mr. Trump’s recollection, said: “I just think he makes things up. That’s what I think. He never thought anybody’s going to check.”

Mr. Trump told the story about nearly dying in a helicopter crash with Mr. Brown after a reporter at Thursday’s news conference asked him a leading question about Vice President Kamala Harris’s long-ago relationship with Mr. Brown and whether it helped her career trajectory.

The two dated in 1994 and 1995 when she was a prosecutor in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, and Mr. Brown was the Assembly speaker. Mr. Brown appointed Ms. Harris to two state boards before she ended their relationship.

“Well, I know Willie Brown very well,” Mr. Trump responded. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him.”

He recounted how the two had a close brush with death — “We thought maybe this was the end” — and that Mr. Brown used the frightening ride to tell him “terrible things” about Ms. Harris. “He was not fan of hers very much, at that point,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Trump had previously told the story, saying it was Mr. Brown on a helicopter with him, in his book, “Letters to Trump,” which was published in 2023.

Reached again Friday night, Mr. Brown reiterated that he had never flown in a helicopter with Mr. Trump and that he had not denigrated Ms. Harris to the former president because he admires and respects her.

“Those are the two things I am certain of,” he said. “All the rest of this is amusing.”

Asked if Mr. Trump might have confused the two California politicians because they are both Black, Mr. Brown said, “I wouldn’t want to conclude that he can’t tell Black people apart, because I’d hate for him to think that I’m Beyoncé.”

And then he burst out laughing.

Kellen Browning and Shane Goldmacher

Reporting from Glendale, Ariz.

Harris rides momentum to Arizona, for what her campaign says is largest rally yet.

Vice President Kamala Harris rolled into Arizona on Friday evening with the same political momentum that has infused her first swing across the country this week, drawing a crowd that her campaign estimated at more than 15,000 — her largest yet — in a Western state that not long ago appeared to be falling off the battleground map.

Along with her newly minted running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Ms. Harris delivered a stump speech that is barely a week old, and yet familiar enough to an impassioned new following that some shouted her lines before she did.

The rally was her fourth in four days with an arena-filling crowd that demonstrated the degree to which her candidacy replacing President Biden’s had remade the 2024 race.

Mr. Walz relished the crowd that filed into the Desert Diamond Arena in Glendale, Ariz., in 100-degree heat as he poked fun at Mr. Trump’s obsession with rally crowds.

“It’s not as if anybody cares about crowd sizes or anything,” Mr. Walz said to knowing cheers.

Despite her momentum, Ms. Harris faces an uphill battle in Arizona , a longtime Republican stronghold that flipped to Mr. Biden in 2020 but, according to polling, had been drifting back to former President Donald J. Trump this year.

To win, she will need to reunite the diverse coalition of voters who delivered the state four years ago, and she made an explicit appeal to one part of that group on Friday: Native American voters.

“As president, I will tell you, I will always honor tribal sovereignty and respect tribal self-determination,” she said. The first speaker at the rally, notably, was Stephen Roe Lewis, the governor of the Gila River Indian Community, south of Phoenix.

In her speech, Ms. Harris zeroed in on two issues that are especially pertinent to Arizonans: immigration and abortion.

Crossings from Mexico into Arizona have remained high this year even as they have dropped elsewhere, and Ms. Harris positioned herself as supporting both an “earned pathway to citizenship” and tougher border restrictions, pointing to her record as California’s attorney general.

“I went after the transnational gangs, the drug cartels and the human traffickers,” Ms. Harris said. “I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won. So I know what I’m talking about.”

By contrast, Ms. Harris said, Mr. Trump was playing politics with the issue. She highlighted his opposition to a bipartisan bill this year that would have beefed up border security.

“He talks a big game about border security,” she said, “but he does not walk the walk.”

The comments come as her campaign began to air a tough-on-immigration ad that labeled her a “border-state prosecutor.” Senior Trump campaign officials see the border and immigration as one of Ms. Harris’s deepest areas of vulnerability, and his campaign has repeatedly labeled her, inaccurately , as Mr. Biden’s failed “border czar.”

Ms. Harris did add a new riff to her speech, responding to Mr. Trump’s muddled comments on Thursday at a news conference in Florida, in which he did not rule out directing the Food and Drug Administration to revoke access to abortion pills.

Ms. Harris said Mr. Trump’s agenda “would ban medication abortion in every state,” adding, “But we are not going to let that happen — because we trust women.”

Mr. Trump has previously supported the Supreme Court’s ruling on the abortion drug mifepristone. Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokeswoman, said in a statement the former president’s position on mifepristone “remains the same — the Supreme Court unanimously decided on the issue and the matter is settled.”

The abortion rhetoric could prove especially potent in Arizona, where the State Supreme Court reinstated a near-total ban on the procedure this year. The State Legislature eventually repealed it, but abortion is still banned after 15 weeks, and voters will have a chance to enshrine the right to an abortion until fetal viability in the state’s Constitution through a ballot measure in November.

The speakers who preceded Ms. Harris on Friday made a number of appeals to independents and moderate Republicans, another segment she will need to win over.

“I do not recognize my party,” said John Giles, the mayor of Mesa, Ariz., who is a prominent Republican backing Ms. Harris. “We need to elect a ticket who will be the adults in the room.”

Senator Mark Kelly, the Arizona Democrat who is also a Navy veteran and former astronaut, introduced Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz. It was the second time this week that a finalist in Ms. Harris’s running-mate sweepstakes introduced her at a rally. Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania did the same in Philadelphia on Tuesday.

Mr. Kelly said Mr. Trump had “zero respect for any of us who have worn the uniform.” Mr. Trump’s allies have raised questions about Mr. Walz’s decision to leave the National Guard in 2005 to run for Congress.

Attendees and speakers said the enormous crowd braving scorching desert temperatures on Friday was a sign that, after months of dreariness among Democrats, momentum in Arizona was finally on their side.

“It may be a little warm outside,” Kate Gallego, the mayor of Phoenix, said, “but based on the energy in this arena, I know it’s Donald Trump who’s feeling the heat.”

Maggie Haberman

Trump claims he has helicopter trip records and threatens to sue.

Former President Donald J. Trump on Friday afternoon vehemently maintained that he had once been in a dangerous helicopter landing with Willie Brown , the former mayor of San Francisco, and insisted he had records to prove it, despite Mr. Brown’s denial.

In an angry phone call to a New York Times reporter as he landed several hours away from his planned rally in Bozeman, Mont., because of a mechanical issue on his plane, Mr. Trump excoriated The Times for its coverage of his meandering news conference on Thursday at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home, during which he told of an emergency landing during a helicopter trip that he said both he and Mr. Brown had made together.

Mr. Trump was expected to keep his rally schedule on Friday as planned, boarding a smaller plane to complete the journey.

Mr. Brown denied on Thursday that he had ever flown in a helicopter with Mr. Trump.

It appeared Mr. Trump may have confused Willie Brown with Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, with whom Mr. Trump traveled by helicopter in 2018 while surveying wildfire damage in the state. But Jerry Brown, who left office in January 2019, said through a spokesman, “There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.”

Willie Brown, who was a boyfriend of Vice President Kamala Harris during the 1990s, knew Mr. Trump as a potential business associate during those years, when Mr. Trump, then a New York developer, was working on new projects. A biography of Ms. Harris, “Kamala’s Way: An American Life,” reported that Mr. Trump had sent his private plane for Mr. Brown and Ms. Harris in 1994 to fly them from Boston to New York City.

“We have the flight records of the helicopter,” Mr. Trump insisted Friday, saying the helicopter had landed “in a field,” and indicating that he intended to release the flight records, before shouting that he was “probably going to sue” over the Times article.

When asked to produce the flight records, Mr. Trump responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice. As of early Friday evening, he had not provided them.

Mr. Trump has a history of claiming he will provide evidence to back up his claims but ultimately not doing so.

He has also told the helicopter story before, in his 2023 book, “Letters to Trump,” in which he published letters to him from a number of people, including Mr. Brown. In the book, Mr. Trump wrote, “We actually had an emergency landing in a helicopter together. It was a little scary for both of us, but thankfully we made it.”

Two rivals in Michigan’s crucial Senate contest say they were both swatted.

The two leading contenders for Michigan’s open Senate seat disclosed that they had been targeted in separate “swatting” incidents in a span of less than 24 hours, just days after winning primaries in a crucial contest that could determine which party controls the chamber.

The first incident, involving Representative Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat, happened on Thursday night at her home in Oakland County, north of Detroit. The second one occurred on Friday at an address that had been listed on public records under the name of Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate and former House member, in neighboring Livingston County.

Politicians on both sides of the political aisle have increasingly been the target of swatting in recent years. The hoaxes — when false threats are deliberately made to law enforcement to draw a heavily armed response to a person’s home — have added to a climate of intimidation and the harassment of public officials.

Ms. Slotkin was not home at the time of the incident, according to a spokeswoman for her office, Lynsey Mukomel, who said in a statement that Michigan State Police troopers went to the residence after a false threat was emailed to a local official. She did not elaborate on the nature of the false threat. Michigan State Police confirmed they responded.

“Michigan State Police checked the property and confirmed no one was in danger,” Ms. Mukomel said, adding that U.S. Capitol Police would investigate the incident.

Mr. Rogers, a former longtime House member who was endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, experienced a similar incident around 12:30 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, said Chris Gustafson, a spokesman for his campaign.

A person reported that a man was holding a woman at gunpoint at the property in Livingston County connected with Mr. Rogers, according to Mr. Gustafson, who said that Mr. Rogers currently does not live there but that other members of his family do. (Mr. Rogers now lives in Oakland County, Mich., according to his campaign.)

Shanon Banner, a Michigan State Police spokeswoman, said that a sergeant had responded to a report about a domestic situation at a residence in Livingston County on Friday and determined that it was false. She was not immediately able to confirm whether it was the same property.

Mr. Gustafson, in a statement, said that it was the second time that Mr. Rogers had been targeted in a swatting incident. The first was in 2013, when he was a member of Congress.

“This kind of violence cannot be tolerated, and it is our hope that those responsible will be quickly prosecuted and held accountable,” Mr. Gustafson said.

The rivals are running for a seat that is being vacated by Senator Debbie Stabenow, Michigan’s senior senator and a Democrat, who announced last year that she would not seek a fifth term . Democrats control the Senate by a thin 51-49 seat majority.

Ken Bensinger

Joe Rogan would like to clarify: He did not endorse Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The world’s most popular podcaster has, sort of, but not really, thrown his support to one of the 2024 presidential race’s least popular candidates.

On Thursday, Joe Rogan said he preferred Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running as an independent, for president. “He’s the only one that makes sense to me,” Mr. Rogan said, as a guest on a podcast hosted by Lex Fridman, and called Mr. Kennedy a “legitimate guy.”

Mr. Rogan’s devoted following, one that leans young, male and numbers in the tens of millions, is highly coveted. His remarks about Mr. Kennedy, uttered on a show with a far smaller reach than his own, nonetheless set off a frenzied response.

Supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, worried that Mr. Rogan’s stance could carve off voters and hurt his electoral chances come November, quickly turned on the podcaster, standup comic and U.F.C. announcer. They questioned his intelligence and even mocked his height , a spectacle that was greeted with something akin to joy — or, at least, schadenfreude — among Democrats who have long written off Mr. Rogan as helpful to their cause.

By Friday morning, Mr. Rogan was backpedaling. “This isn’t an endorsement,” he posted on the social media platform X, and advised that he is “not the guy to get political information from.”

Mr. Trump himself weighed in on Friday afternoon, pondering “how loudly Joe Rogan gets BOOED the next time he enters the UFC ring” in a post on his social network that seemingly reflected his concerns that the influential podcaster could tip the scales against him.

“This takes straight from the Trump base,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant. A New York Times/Siena poll in battleground states in May found that 54 percent of respondents who said they planned to vote for the former president had a favorable opinion of Mr. Rogan.

Mr. Kennedy, long before Mr. Rogan’s unwinding act, had already taken credit for the perceived nod, posting on social media: “From one ‘legitimate’ guy to another, thank you.”

Even if it’s not a true endorsement, Mr. Rogan’s praise could come as a huge shot in the arm for Mr. Kennedy, who has seen his polling average drop from as much as 15 percent in early June to somewhere around 6 percent as of late last month.

While Mr. Kennedy drew national attention this week after acknowledging that he dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park a decade ago, such headlines have not helped ease his struggles raising money . He’s also fighting to get his name on the ballots in critical states, or, in the case of New York , keep it there.

“He doesn’t attack people. He attacks actions and ideas, but he’s much more reasonable and intelligent,” Mr. Rogan said of Mr. Kennedy on the “Lex Fridman Podcast,” which has 4.1 million subscribers on YouTube.

Mr. Rogan’s fan base is much bigger. In March, Spotify said that “The Joe Rogan Experience” had 14.5 million followers , almost triple the platform’s second most popular program. He also has 19 million followers on Instagram and 17 million followers on YouTube.

A poll by YouGov last year found that 81 percent of his listeners are male and 56 percent are under 35 years old , feeding the perception that he has a direct line to a cohort that polling suggests tends to support Mr. Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris.

“This is a group Trump needs strong performance with,” Mr. Madrid said.

During his interview with Mr. Fridman, he said that he was “not a Trump supporter in any way, shape or form” and adding that he turned down multiple offers to have him on his show. “I’ve said no every time,” Mr. Rogan said. “I’m not interested in helping him,”

Mr. Kennedy sat for an interview on the “Joe Rogan Experience” in June 2023.

Ruth Igielnik contributed reporting.