Speaking to a Crowd
Speaking to a Crowd
This is a bit of an educational article and is a collection of some of my advice on how to deal with speaking before a large crowd or audience. It is a skill that some people are born with. It is a skill that some people never think that they will master. It is a skill that some people would rather avoid entirely.
Yet, I am going to tell you this: It is a skill that can be learned and acquired.
Quite a lot of people are shy or introverted, many tend to have social anxiety and there are some people that I know that are just socially awkward in a crowd of one!
Social awkwardness is prevalent amongst bookworms and intellectuals. These folks might try to convince themselves that there is no need to for them to learn this skill because they will never need to speak to a group of people. Yet there comes a time where we may be called to speak before a crowd of people.
The application of this skill is rewarding. In your professional capacity, if you are able to communicate before a crowd, then you tend to become a key individual merely because you can take part in the discussion verbally while most people can not. This assumes of course, that you have at least a competent grasp on the subject matter.
Another application could be that you end up speaking at a party or at a hobby event. All of a sudden, instead of one or two friends/members of the hobby being present there are now 20, or 50 people. This happened to me once. There were 140 competitors in a competition with plenty of family members and even some people walking in off the street. So roughly 200 people and every 3 hours I needed to get on the microphone and give instructions.
Was I born with it? No.
I was a typical introvert. At most I had one or two friends at school in Primary School, that expanded to two to three in High School. After that, I got a job doing deliveries, some human interaction occurred and then minor retail and promotions. Then a lot of Retail sales work.
This allowed me to master and learn how to speak to people and how to present myself when controlling a single conversation. How to lead a customer from conclusion to conclusion, prying out information that would allow me to know what the best sale option would be for this client.
Eventually, I learned to watch the customers standing in line behind the person that I am serving as much as the person that I am serving. I realized that they would listen in, there is nothing else to do after all. If I made sure to keep my conversation about a project interesting enough then I would gather their interest as well and soon enough I was pre-selling laptops while selling laptops.
The biggest test, however, came when I had to speak before a whole group of people. Speaking before the sales-team at a company meeting was easy, we all knew each other. Speaking before a crowd of 20-40 people at a hobby event was completely different.
The Anxiety
Have you ever had 40-80 eyeballs look directly at you while you are looking back at them, every person silent, waiting for your every word? Sure, everyone just wanted to know when their next game and matchup is, but you become instantly aware of every movement you make.
Like looking into a giant mirror, you realize that you say certain words funny, that you touch your face a lot, that you stammer and knowing that you stammer makes you more nervous so you stammer even more.
Soon enough your brain is working less on the issue at hand and more on the fact that people are watching you and that they are judging you. What are they thinking about? Are some of them disagreeing about what you have to say? Would they be talking about your mistakes afterward? Have you lost respect?
Firstly, none of these things are productive and the more you focus on them, the worse it will go, into infinity. There is no way that you will improve the experience by focusing on these. While every introvert that reads this will mentally be able to agree that this statement is true, that does not help alleviate the stress and anxiety that you are already experiencing.
So we need to look at how to mitigate these factors that contribute to the stress. The fewer factors affect you, the less stress, the fewer mistakes you make. Now you are scaling the whole process in reverse.
Dealing with Contributing Factors.
Here are a few tricks/factors to consider and/or eliminate while you are speaking before a crowd:
Your appearance
Before going out to the venue where your speech will be done, you work on your appearance. Perhaps you have time to go to the bathroom to make a quick check and touch-ups. At the very least you have a smartphone with a front facing camera or a small mirror.
Last checkup, do you have any food stuck between your teeth? No? Fine now leave it!
After this very moment, there is nothing more that you can do to help improve your appearance. You know that part of your day where you do not think about how you look because it does not matter? Well, that is how you need to be.
Whatever style your hair is in, whatever imperfections, it is just as it is. Yet the people in the crowd are not perfect either. Focus your attention to a few people in the front row. Forget about yourself. Are they perfect? Certainly not. So proceed.
To be annoyed with something that you cannot change about yourself at that moment would just be inviting a stumble.
Your crowd allies
Even though you are speaking in a crowd, there are likely to be some people in the crowd that you already know. These are your crowd allies. To stop yourself from thinking about what everyone is thinking, focus on your crown allies while you speak. This person is your friend, they are supportive of you. Some support in the crowd will give you better confidence.
Perhaps there is not a single person in the crowd that you know? Simple. Look for someone in the crowd who looks a lot like you, or that looks like one of your friends and make them your crowd ally!
Identifying a few friendly looking faces in a crowd could go a long way to increase your confidence as you speak to them.
Identify with your position
You have been put before a crowd to speak. Sometimes this is just a quick necessity. In that case, you will already have the motivation needed to speak up. If it is not a case of life or death then you might feel unsure of yourself.
However, in the latter case, there is usually a reason why you have been placed before the other people in order to speak to this audience. You might be the person who is the organizer, the leader, the planner, the researcher. You know things. These people before you want to know all about it.
You need to recognize that by being there, with a crowd of silent people before you, you have already won their interest. Now you proceed.
Preparation
Of course, if you know why you are standing before a group of people, then you know what you are going to be talking about. In my case, I would rather spend time learning what I am going to be talking about than HOW I am going to say things.
My voice is my own. Anyone can be loud. All you need to do is speak in such a manner that the person in the back of the crowd can hear you.
Know what you are going to say, prevents you from appearing ignorant. Being confident follows on from being a subject authority on the subject of your speech.
Conclusion
There is a lot more to learn regarding speaking to people. I believe however that if you practiced and paid attention to the above factors and improve on them, that your own methods will appear for you to learn from.
As with all things, practice makes perfect. Have a couple speeches before a group of friends of collegues. Practice.
Soon enough you will be prepared to take on the next milestone of your journey.
All Image credits to pexels.com
This had meant to be my Monday 29th post. 5 days late... trying to catch up...