Top Tip For Making A Great Speech

Great public speaking is all about confidence; the confidence to stand up in a room full of people who you don't know, and deliver a speech with eloquence and gusto. It's not easy - without effective mental rehearsal you may become short of breath, experience butterflies in your stomach, forget what you were going to talk about or even freeze completely. Some unfortunate people have even been known to faint.



Some people are naturally accomplished orators, who not only speak with passion and wit, but thoroughly enjoy being in the limelight. They have the ability to make every single person in the audience feel that they are communicating almost solely with you, and compel your full attention. Others prefer to stand back, to mingle amongst the crowd and shy away from the spot light. How can humans be so very different, from one individual to the next? We all have the same individual components after all. We are all born with the capacity to learn, develop and achieve almost unlimited things.



At birth, the human brain is not fully formed. A template is there which adapts to the environment and culture to which we are born. We learn through experience, be it our native tongue or a familiarity with standing up in front of our peers and taking centre stage. We learn whether something feels good to us or not depending upon each individual experience. Before the age of 10 we usually have a reasonably well developed sense of who we are and what we are comfortable with or not.



From there on in, we tend to live our lives within the limitations of these core beliefs and expectations. If we have had bad experiences or no experience of "performing" in front of a crowd, the tendency for most is to shy away from such circumstances. On the other hand, those who have had good experiences have the budding confidence to stand up there again and again, building greater degrees of confidence along the way. Good experiences, repeated time and again lead to comfort and confidence.