Public Speaking - You Can Run But You Can't Hide

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Public Speaking - You Can Run But You Can't Hide
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=NJ_Brighton]NJ Brighton

If you're stomach turns at the thought of having to stand before the
hundreds or thousands of eyes that turn on you as you ruffle your
cards and papers like a flailing magician, you might be suffering from
the fear of public speaking. So intense is this fear, that people
avoid promotions, meetings and entire careers because of the potential
public speaking aspect.

However, don' think you're safe because your job isn't relevant to
public speaking or presentations...there's always the acceptance
speech, the wedding speech and even the proposal of marriage itself.
Gulp...

Public speaking is shrouded in fear due to the one -way nature of the
situation. However, many smaller scale public speaking scenarios (such
as a meeting presentation, wedding speech or sales pitch) will always
benefit from audience interaction. Audience interaction makes the
crowd pay attention, with a more personal feel and incentive to keep
their eyes and ears on you.

Audience Polling

I see many public speeches start with the question to the audience as
the first words out of the speaker's mouth. Such as "Hands up who
doesn't like cold calling". As broad questions to encourage the
maximum response. Your are not actually trying to find out the answer
(you should already know why people are there and what they like/
dislike etc) but instead you're simply creating an interaction. Do it
early to get people immediately involved and interested. If you leave
it too late, you've already lost. Just think of it this way.

Tell stories.

These involve your audience's imagination, sense of humour and allows
them to connect your world with theirs. This is subtle involvement
Humour. Use humour where appropriate. Just having your audience laugh
or chuckle involves them and gets those endorphins working which
inject motivation and energy into them.

Put them to the test

Can you remember being at school and the teacher would say "At the end
of this class, we are having a test on everything we have covered over
the next hour?". Well, whether you had that technique squash your
plans of drawing a body part in your maths book cover or not, the
technique works on a psychological level.

Why?

Because nobody wants to look stupid, everyone wants to look clever and
win over their peers and finally, we are often embarrassed when caught
not paying attention or blatantly showing lack of respect through not
paying attention. All you need to do is use the word "quiz" instead of
"test", offer an incentive for good measure and boom...you now have a
room full of newfound "students" at your mercy.

Wouldn't it be nice however, if there were a magic button that you
could push TONIGHT, so that your fear of public speaking could be
wiped off the slate by tomorrow morning?

Well, I have a little secret that will open your eyes about your
public speaking fears and is guaranteed to be your own magic button.

Want to know what it is? Too good to be true? Check out the following
website for more info:

http://fearofpublicspeaking.wordpress.com/speak-without-fearguaranteed

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