Being able to communicate your ideas clearly in a presentation, putting forward your firm arguments during a group meeting as well as talking in a persuasive manner about your product or service are essential to be successful in any business today. All these require confidence and strong public speaking skills. While only a few people are born with this talent, there is still hope for the rest of us, as these competencies can be easily developed. In this series I will try to give "short-cuts", some easy-to-follow tips to increase your impact as a public speaker.

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Hack your system!

I am doing quite many presentation skills workshops and I have noticed so far that most people find it difficult to express their ideas in a precise and concise manner. It doesn't really matter if you just had the idea or have been working on it in the past couple of years. When it comes to improvisation - the majority of us are desperately looking for the right expressions and can't find the words easily. However, I have also noticed that the situation can be way better if we write down our thoughts in advance. (I don't simply mean jotting down a few bullet points or keywords, but literally sitting down and phrasing the sentences aimed at our audience.)

If we want to hack the system, we have to understand how our brain works. New research has poited out that there is no single language center in the brain (as previously it was thought to be the Broca area), but rather a network of different areas. When one area finished forwarding data, it shuts down and other parts will take up the task. This actually means that different areas of our brain send in almost random words/expressions when we are trying to phrase our thoughts. Yes, it means that we do not get the words or sentence-fractions in a linear order - our brain throws them in mixed up!

This is one of the reasons why we often start a sentence and finish it with a completely different one or why we sometimes forget what we just started to say... And we start to stutter, our forehead is sweating and we wish we have never started.... Blue death during a presentation... Errrh..... It's quite amazing that we are still able to speak, right?

The good news is that we can hack the system!

Write down your most important ideas

Our brain stores the words, expressions and sentence-fractions together with the idea that we would like to describe. And this is where preparation comes in (AGAIN): if we write down what we would like to say BEFORE the presentation or talk about it with someone or at least keep thinking about what to say - then our brain will serve us with the proper ammunition during our speech. Our wonderful brain cells will be able to pop up the right words at the right time ONLY if we feed them beforehand.

And there is something else to mention here that I learned... Especially in the beginning, I was often inclined to rephrase sentences and to help my coachees putting their ideas into words. Later I stopped doing it, because I realized that this "hack" I am talking about works only WITH YOUR OWN WORDS AND PHRASES. This is why it is so hard to tell a speech that wasn't written by us - those are not our expressions and our own thoughts... Even if we like the stories or phrases that someone is using, we need to invest some mental effort to incorporate these words and thoughts into our own system, otherwise we will forget them.

Don't memorize!

While we tend to forget what we have learned, we less frequently forget what we experienced. So thinking about what you are going to say and how you are going to say it does not mean that you have to learn it word by word. Just play around with a few phrases and sentences that you feel adequate and your brain will do the rest for you.

Have a conversation

Conversations are usually less frightening for people than speeches. So pretend that you are having a conversation. With some minor changes, you can shift your mindset accordingly (eg. instead of starting your presentation with "I am going to talk about..." tell this: "I would like to discuss with you today...").

If you are interested in the previous two parts of this series, you can find it here and here.

This post has been crossposted on both Steemit and Whaleshares.