Trembling legs, hopeless cough, extreme dehydration, drenching sweat, breathlessness, very frequent urges to pee; these are a few symptoms that people usually go through before formally speaking to a client or any formal social interactions. 

Here’s your small ticket to great speaking skills.

• Study your proposal, case study and the client in depth: It’s almost just smooth execution once you’ve studied the client, their concerns, formed a case study and proposed a solution on paper. Do your home-work well, with honesty.

• Stand by What you Speak: When you speak from your heart, there are chances you’re saved from goof-ups in your speech. Consider including causes that are close to your heart even in small talk.

• Practice, Practice, Practice: Exercise, with discipline, to deliver your entire speech in front of a mirror with all the intinations, pauses, emphasis. That’ll also help you remember the blueprint of your proposal.

• Find a Beta Audience: Gather your homies, friends, cousins, or anyone who is a trusted ally and speak in front of them. Address them as a client. That’s your way to practice eye-contact, pauses, and clarity of speech as their feedback will help you improve. 

• Listen to great speeches, TedTalks to begin with: Make it a habit to listen to one TedTalk daily. Not only will it inspire you, it will give you ideas on how resource persons shape complex data pictorially, and in their scripts.

• Try to be more Social in general: People who are more social usually find it easy to break the ice and gel-in with people. Make efforts to socialize more, maybe through seminars, workshops, reunions, conventions.

• Courses: If in case none of these solutions work for you, consider taking up both, online and offline courses that offer practise exercises.

Consider that, public speaking and formal speaking is a skill and everyone will improve at their own pace, in their own ways. Learning is not the same path for all, it is a constant phenomenon.

All the best, dear students.