It’s no secret that public speaking causes many people to feel anxious. You’re in front of an audience, potentially a large one, and you’re expected to communicate in a manner that demonstrates your expertise.

This is where the anxiety can set in. None of us want to embarrass ourselves in front of a large group of people, especially in a professional setting where our reputation is on the line.

While there is stress around performance, remember there are also many potential benefits that come with delivering a great presentation. You have the opportunity to share your knowledge, expertise, and even your perspective, depending on the nature of the talk. Each of these can elevate your career or help you build new relationships internally or externally.

The question is, how do we alleviate the stress that comes with a looming presentation?

Practice.

In this blog post, we’re going to give you a step-by-step guide on how to structure your own solo public speaking practice sessions as well as how to assess yourself. You not only want to practice but practice in a targeted way that helps you to improve areas that might be holding you back.

Here are the steps we’ll cover:

1. Record yourself

2. Review

3. Observe

4. Re-record

Let’s discuss these steps in more detail.

1. Video Record Yourself

This is the first step in taking your speaking abilities to the next level: self-recording. The easiest way to do this is to pull out your phone, turn on the video camera, and record yourself talking about a subject you care about for a minimum of 1-minute.

The subject you care about can be anything – your love of a certain type of music, food, a hobby, or a trip you are planning – as long as it is a subject that gets you excited. Many people begin to shine in terms of communication when they discuss a topic they are passionate and knowledgeable about.

Once you finish recording yourself speaking about your favorite subject,  it’s time to hit pause on the camera and proceed to step two.

2. Review

Just as professional athletes (and even stand-up comedians) review game footage of themselves to improve, we encourage business professionals to do the same.

To do this, you need to replay the 1-minute video you just finished recording.

As a side note – if you find this uncomfortable, know that it’s normal. Many people find watching or listening to a recording of themselves to be uncomfortable, yet this step is crucial for gauging your current speaking abilities. We call this marrying the feel with the real.

You need to push past the discomfort of watching and listening to yourself speak because doing so allows you to begin the process of relearning. You’ll break apart the different elements you can improve within speaking, which we’ll discuss more below.

3. Observe

This is where reviewing our footage changes from simply seeing ourselves speaking to honing in on areas that we can take actionable steps to improve, such as the visual and aural elements of speaking.

First, let’s discuss a visual element of your communication, specifically your hands and eyes.

When you review your footage, what did you see your hands doing? Were your arms crossed? Were they in your pockets or behind your back? Were they completely still or did you use your hands to emphasize something you were describing?

There are two things we recommend doing with the hands. First, keep your hands open, as this looks more approachable instead of closed-off. Second, use your hands to gesture as this can add emphasis to a point you are making as you speak. In terms of placement, we also recommend keeping your hands above the waist when gesturing. You can use the hands independently or both hands together, variety is the key.

Next, where did your eyes focus during the video? Did your eyes focus on different things that were in the room? Or were you looking into the camera?

To improve your eye contact, we recommend you focus. A simple way to do this is to maintain eye contact with someone in your audience until you finish one thought or sentence, then transition to someone else. If you’re practicing for a virtual presentation, focus on the camera lens itself as this helps you appear to be maintaining eye contact with your audience. A simple trick, put a neon colored post-it note behind where your camera lens sits so you have a reference point.

In addition to the visual elements, the next area you want to focus on includes the aural elements, such as volume, inflection, pace, and non-words.

When it comes to your volume, it needs to be loud enough that your audience can hear you. Without this, your message will not reach your audience. If we look at the volume on a 1 to 10 scale with 1 being a whisper and 10 being a shout, the sweet spot for volume is somewhere between a 7-8.

Inflection is similar to emphasis, or vocal variety in the voice. Allowing for variety to exist makes sure your audience doesn’t fall asleep due to a monotone affect. Keywords and phrases, or areas of importance within your message, should be delivered with more or less inflection based on purpose.

Next, let’s talk about pace. When a speaker talks too rapidly, the listener or audience has more difficulty following along or understanding. Rarely does a person speak too quickly, it’s that there are no pauses in that rate of speech. While you may read this and think the only way to improve is to slow down, we recommend another technique: take a purposeful pause.

Simply pausing after finishing a thought gives your listeners a chance to absorb the content you provided. Adding a pause combined with a varying speaking pace can increase the engagement of those listening to your message. Bonus point, it allows you to take a breath in, too!

Besides volume and pacing, the final aural element we recommend focusing on is non-words or lack thereof. The most common non-words in American English include “like”, “um”, “uh”, and “you know”.

One technique that helps reduce the use of non-words is to use the pause mentioned above. The pause helps because most non-words are used when transitioning from one thought to another while speaking. If you pause, you’re replacing the non-word with silence.

Now, having discussed these various elements, it can sound like you have quite a large amount of work cut out for you. This may require you to watch and re-watch your video multiple times to pick out and note the above elements and how your speaking patterns fit within that.

Thanks to technology, there is another way to track these different elements using AI. Recently, we partnered with Yoodli, an AI application that automatically tracks speech pacing, non-words, and other metrics so that you have instant data on your communication abilities.

Once you’ve looked at these various elements in your video, it’s time to proceed to the final step…

4. Re-recording

Ok, it’s time to take a deep breath. This information can start to feel overwhelming, especially considering all of the different speaking elements and how they impact our message and audience.

Whether you decide to manually track these elements or use AI to do it automatically, it’s important to remind yourself not to become overwhelmed. Start small by focusing your energy on improving one element of your speaking at a time. Once you feel you’ve improved one element, go down your list and pick another. Ask yourself, which skill will have the greatest impact on how I’m perceived. It may differ for all of us.

When you repeat this process enough times, you’ll be creating the foundation for these skills to improve. Success comes next.

If you’d like to learn more and take your communication skills even further, feel free to browse our communication training courses here.