How To Improve Speaking Skills in 7 Simple Steps
I’m never going to perfect the art of speaking. And hey, neither are you. None of us hairless monkeys are. Granted, Tony Robbins, Eckhart Tolle, Jim Rohn and other well-known speakers are masters, but even they make mistakes.Just because I can’t perfect it doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.
There’s nothing like being able to make my sister smile with some stupid joke. My friends deserve the living, engaging stories I tell them now rather than the dry monotone that I remember having. It’s exciting that I can make new friends just by chatting them up in the minute it takes the elevator to get to my floor.
There are two major buckets you need to think about when you’re learning about speech:
- Fixing Mistakes
- Adding and Improving Skills
I’m not hiding the most important mistakes; they’re the first two steps.
On top of working on those mistakes, I built specific speaking skills. These are humour, story telling, volume, gestures, pace, mastery topics and more. These skills aren’t the whole of speaking–a great gesture doesn’t a great speaker make, but a tap on the nose makes a story cuter, and wide arms a statement grander.
This is where great conversationalists differentiate themselves: some love deep, highly emotional conversations controlled by pace, mastery topics and story telling; some play subtle games of humour, making their friends feel like everything is an inside joke they’re included in; some make their friends feel like great conversationalists by leading conversations to the most interesting bits, punctuating points properly with volume, gestures and physicality and then backing off.
Dabble now, focus later.
TODAY I’d like to go over how to improve speaking skills with exercises, behaviours and the daily grind.
Below are 7 simple steps that I hope will benefit you greatly. I was messing around with photoshop and came out with the JPEG below (How To Improve Speaking Skills in 7 Simple Steps) because why not. There are also useful videos and I vow to answer all questions in the comments.
Enjoy Irresponsibly.
Speak Clearly
- Being Direct and Responsible with your Meaning
- Speaking Loudly and Calling Attention To Yourself.
- Avoiding Slang, Jargon and Pop-Culture References
- Some Exercises to Improve Clarity
In summary, speak clearly. Enunciate and choose a volume as if it were on purpose. Select the easiest words to get your point across. Only once you’ve mastered clarity should you begin to braid some silvery strands into your language.
Develop Flow
I doubt that the river learned how to flow, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t.
With flow we’re aiming at a level of comfort with speaking that lets you approach all topics with equal grace.
There are two aspects of flow that I’d like you to improve:
- Pace
- Pausing
We also need to be comfortable pausing. If I had only thirty seconds of your time to help you improve your speaking skills, I would tell you to replace all of your filler words with a two second pause.
A filler word is “uh” or “um,” or anything you say that is equivalent. For example I like the word “like” but I shouldn’t. Notice whenever you use a filler word, pause for two seconds, and then continue.
Choose Your Mastery Topics
Let’s start by choosing Mastery Topics.
Mastery Topics are subjects that you’re interested in and passionate about. When you discuss these topics you naturally exude more confidence and excitement, and you’re more likely to draw listeners into your world. And, since you’ll be talking about your mastery topics so much, you’ll have all of the speaking nuances of the topics covered as well.
I’m passionate about living abroad, running a social skills business, general success, learning and food. And if I can I’ll pull our conversation over intto one of those topics and blow you away.
Become a Topic Master
Take a second to think about your everyday conversations.
Generally you fall into a topic that you’re comfortable with and your conversations follow similar paths. The why is fairly simple: we’re programmed to pursue pleasure–the same positive reactions to the same topics and jokes–and avoid pain–the potential shame of expressing an opinion that makes everyone around you uncomfortable.
There’s nothing wrong with this, but if we naturally do it all of the time we might as well do it on purpose. To add some flair to our speaking skills we’ll need to add some sub-topics to our Mastery Topic.
With these sub-topics we can practice our clarity, flow and style.
Develop Style
To do this, I suggest you emulate somewhere better than yourself.
Practice Daily
Be honest with yourself when you answer this question: do you think that you’re going to have improved speaking skills when you finish reading this post?
I don’t write that well.
But while reading won’t improve your speaking skills, behaviour will.
There are two behaviours that you should build:
- Practice Daily
- Practice at Events
Practicing daily is fairly simple. Every day, put aside some time to go over one of the exercises from this post. If that sounds too hard–and I understand that committing to anything is often challenging–ask yourself whether 5 minutes a day for 15 days is too much. If it is, then something else is on your mind and you need to handle that.
If not, I put together the option of receiving a challenge a day for fifteen days. The challenges are short enough that you can complete them in 5 minutes or less.
Practice at Events
Weight Watchers has been using the buddy system technique for years. The act of losing weight is motivational, but losing weight and being celebrated for it is far more exciting. Not to mention having people to hold you accountable when you have a bad week.
Where were you? Watching the game? Canada’s Next Top Lumberjack? Come on, this is important.
Attend an event that will let you focus on your conversational skills on a weekly basis. There are many events that you could attend, though my favourites are Toastmasters and professional networking events that you can easily find on Meetup.com