Effective public speaking is not just about confidently performing on stage or orating a speech that resonates with your audience. It’s also about one-on-one interpersonal communication that strengthens bonds, establishes new connections and allows you to express your point-of-view.

A crucial part of effective communication is not even to do with speaking, it’s to do with being silent. 

If you rearrange the letters in the word ‘silent,’ you end up with ‘listen.’

Any leader or manager who can not master public speaking will end up being a poor and ineffective leader or manager and they will struggle to gain the respect of the collective they are leading or managing.

Even on an interpersonal level you will struggle to gain the attentive respect of whoever you are talking to if you can not communicate with them effectively.

Like every other person alive or dead, I always struggled with public speaking.

My biggest hurdle wasn’t even the stage fright, it was the fact that my mind is blabbering about multiple things all at once, so I never really knew what to say and, even when I did, I never felt I was making much sense. It wasn’t until I went to university that I found my voice and started to master my own public speaking style. 

When I started building my MTA Portfolio, I knew I wanted to diversify my public speaking skills so that I would be able to adapt my style to fit different contexts and interactions.

This meant gaining as much information about the person or collective you are speaking to either before the fact or during the interaction. Having a feel for the makeup of your audience and reading peoples’ body language are key indicators for the tone and direction of your public speaking approach.

Undoubtedly, the most effective lesson I have learned from this module is to speak less and to listen more.