2012-11-20, 10:23 AM
I did Speech and Debate competitively for 5 years (4 high school and 1 college).
Fortunately, I've never had a debilitating fear of public speaking aside from the usual nervousness. The short advice I have is practice. Everything single time you get up to speak it becomes easier. The nervousness never completely goes away, but you become accustomed to it and realize the truth. It's OK to be nervous. You just can't let it affect your speech.
I've done a variety of events both prepared and unprepared. Everyone has slightly different methods of how to gear up. For unprepared speaking, I don't do any practice at all aside from brief speaking excesses (ex speaking with a pen in my mouth to help enunciate). Your movements should come fairly naturally. The trick is to cut out any unnecessary movements and include only those gestures which emphasize your words. This is most easily practiced with prepared events since you can plan them out ahead of time. Practice will help you associate a sort of bag of gestures that can be used in almost any speech.
Two basic tips that apply to every speech:
1. Have an outline
Begin the speech like you would an essay. Lure the audience with an interesting fact or quote and then present an overview of what you will be discussing. Depending on the length of the speech, you should have a beginning, X number of sub points, and end. Assuming you aren't using a podium, you should start in the middle of the stage and take two medium steps to visually separate your points a la paragraphs in an essay. Then return to the middle when you begin the summation. This helps your audience track your organization by associating it with visual queues.
2. Scan the crowd (for a live audience)
You should make a slow sweeping pattern, not necessarily making eye contact with every single person, but moving from right to left and vice-versa. The eye contact should be firm and last only a few seconds before moving on to another random person.
After listening to your sample, I noticed two things. The first is the number of uhs and uhms. Your problem isn't too severe. I've heard MUCH worse cases. The best, in my opinion, method to cure this is to have a prepared speech. Recite it in front someone (from memory) and have them stop you every single time you say one of these filler words. Then start over from the beginning. It's an exhausting process and can be incredibly frustrating, but it works. This will force you to think slightly ahead of what you are going to say to ensure that you don't use any filler words. Over time, it becomes habit.
You also need to slow down. Most people speed up their speaking when they're nervous. As a rule of thumb, speak slightly slower than is comfortable to you. It sounds odd, but slowing down not only improves the clarity but actually makes you sound more persuasive.
The same goes for your enunciation. Part of what I hear is probably the voice recording quality, but your pronunciation could be significantly improved. My favorite trick is to try speaking with a pen in my mouth. It forces you to focus on what your tongue is doing. Again, you want to sound like you are slightly over pronouncing the word.
The most important thing to cure awkward gestures is to realize it's OK for your hands to be at your side doing nothing. Unless it's something that directly contributes to the speech by emphasizing something or providing organization your hands should not be moving. For really bad cases, have someone tie your hands at your waist with twine so you are immediately conscious of every time you attempt to move them.
EDIT: Wow that turned out way longer than I had realized. Feel free to ask more specific questions so I stop writing essays...
Fortunately, I've never had a debilitating fear of public speaking aside from the usual nervousness. The short advice I have is practice. Everything single time you get up to speak it becomes easier. The nervousness never completely goes away, but you become accustomed to it and realize the truth. It's OK to be nervous. You just can't let it affect your speech.
I've done a variety of events both prepared and unprepared. Everyone has slightly different methods of how to gear up. For unprepared speaking, I don't do any practice at all aside from brief speaking excesses (ex speaking with a pen in my mouth to help enunciate). Your movements should come fairly naturally. The trick is to cut out any unnecessary movements and include only those gestures which emphasize your words. This is most easily practiced with prepared events since you can plan them out ahead of time. Practice will help you associate a sort of bag of gestures that can be used in almost any speech.
Two basic tips that apply to every speech:
1. Have an outline
Begin the speech like you would an essay. Lure the audience with an interesting fact or quote and then present an overview of what you will be discussing. Depending on the length of the speech, you should have a beginning, X number of sub points, and end. Assuming you aren't using a podium, you should start in the middle of the stage and take two medium steps to visually separate your points a la paragraphs in an essay. Then return to the middle when you begin the summation. This helps your audience track your organization by associating it with visual queues.
2. Scan the crowd (for a live audience)
You should make a slow sweeping pattern, not necessarily making eye contact with every single person, but moving from right to left and vice-versa. The eye contact should be firm and last only a few seconds before moving on to another random person.
After listening to your sample, I noticed two things. The first is the number of uhs and uhms. Your problem isn't too severe. I've heard MUCH worse cases. The best, in my opinion, method to cure this is to have a prepared speech. Recite it in front someone (from memory) and have them stop you every single time you say one of these filler words. Then start over from the beginning. It's an exhausting process and can be incredibly frustrating, but it works. This will force you to think slightly ahead of what you are going to say to ensure that you don't use any filler words. Over time, it becomes habit.
You also need to slow down. Most people speed up their speaking when they're nervous. As a rule of thumb, speak slightly slower than is comfortable to you. It sounds odd, but slowing down not only improves the clarity but actually makes you sound more persuasive.
The same goes for your enunciation. Part of what I hear is probably the voice recording quality, but your pronunciation could be significantly improved. My favorite trick is to try speaking with a pen in my mouth. It forces you to focus on what your tongue is doing. Again, you want to sound like you are slightly over pronouncing the word.
The most important thing to cure awkward gestures is to realize it's OK for your hands to be at your side doing nothing. Unless it's something that directly contributes to the speech by emphasizing something or providing organization your hands should not be moving. For really bad cases, have someone tie your hands at your waist with twine so you are immediately conscious of every time you attempt to move them.
EDIT: Wow that turned out way longer than I had realized. Feel free to ask more specific questions so I stop writing essays...