How to improve your public speaking skills?

A lot of people in the World have got problems with public speaking, therefor, in this post i would like to give some advice how to improve your public speaking and become an interesting speaker.

There are three components you must know in order to improve your presentation skills, for better public speaking. If someone asked me how we can build effective communication skills and improve his public speaking, I can quote to him the words of Elbert Hubbard who said : "The only way to learn to speak, is to speak and speak, speak and speak, and speak and speak and speak". 
And while it's true that the only way to become good at anything is by repetition over and over, until it becomes second nature, there are many things that you can do to be more effective speaking in front of audiences.

The starting point in the art of public speaking, is to pick a subject that you really care about. Its to think through the subjects that have had extraordinary impact on you, that subject that you would like to share with others, because you intensely feel that others could benefit from your knowledge. With this, you have a springboard offer, which you can leave into your first public talk.

The second part of public speaking, it's preparation for effective communication. Preparation is more important that anything else except carry about your subject. It's not unusual for a person to spend many hours and days and even week preparing for a single talk. 
If the first two parts are successful public speaking or carrying and preparing, the third part is practicing and improving your presentation skills. If you have voice recorder(usually on mobile phone) or a video camera, record yourself giving the talk from beginning to end, then listen to or watch it and make notes on how you could make it better. If you're using a video camera, look into the camera and use the same facial expressions in the same body gestures that you would use, if you're speaking directly to someone that you like. When you critique yourself, be very hard on yourself. Remember the more honest and objective you can be about how you come across to others, the faster you will build effective communication skills for success.

In my conclusion i would like to finish with a quote, of one of the philosopher, who said: "Practice makes perfect and perfect practice makes it even more perfect." If you practice consistently, you will find that your presentation skills have dramatically improved overtime. Remember your ability to speak effectively in front of people can do more to advance your career and your life than perhaps any other skill you can develop.

Why it is important to overcome your fear of public speaking?

In the last post i wrote about oral presentation and  i realized that it's quite interesting topic to talk about, therefore i would like to continue with explaining you an importance of overcoming your fear of public speaking.

It is very important for us to learn how to overcome our fear of public speaking , for us to continue on our path to success in our studies or  future career. It's n normal and natural for us to be nervous about public speaking, everybody is but, you must overcome that fear to improve your presentation skills.

According to the Guinness Book of records, 54% percent of adults,rank public speaking ahead , have the fear of death, among life's major fears. Most people become nervous, only because of thought of standing up to speak in front of an audience, and their hearts pound. Speaking professionally is not something that you can decide in favor of or against. You don't really have a choice. If you want to realize your full potential in the world, you must learn how to improve your effective communication skills, to better get your message across to other people. We've seen people around us, make extraordinary career jobs, saving themselves as much as 5 to 10 years of time working up the executive ladder, simply by using effective communication skills at corporate meeting. We've observed men and women who put their careers on the fast track, overcoming their fears and developing their presentation skills. It's normal, if you really want something to happen, you have to force yourself against fears of being failed.

So that means that you should pay any price, spent any amount of time, overcome any obstacle, but make a decision right now that you're going to learn to speak well in front of the group and practice your presentation skills consistently. It could be one of the most important decisions you ever make in assuring long-term success in your life.

How we did our team-work presentation and how does "PechaKucha" work?!

In the last Communication Skills lesson, we have been asked to do oral presentations in groups, by using PechaKucha technique. Therefore, in this post i want to tell you our group experience about this presentation.

At the beginning i would like to give you a bit of information, related to our work. First of all our Professor divided us into groups of 4 people. Team - work , about "how to write technical report and make an oral presentation",  has been given on 17th of February, so we had enough time to prepare everything on time. So exactly on that day we started planning and dividing roles in our team. We wrote very good plan with all marks, explanations and main points. After what we started doing everything by using our plan. During last week we worked really hard and finished all writing and presentation work on time. The only problem was, how exactly to use PechaKucha technique. From here i would like to tell you what is PechaKucha, which technique is the best to use, how to speak and other useful information. 

So first things first, by the definition which is given in official web-site, "PechaKucha 20x20 is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to images."

In our group, we started thinking about the best solution which we can find in order to do our oral presentation in PechaKucha format, and after 2 hours of thinking, researching, planning and trying, we finally found the best way to do it. Our decision seems very easy, on the other hand it's very useful.

Once one of the software CEO's (Jason Fried) said : " It's simple until you make it complicated". 

This phrase amazed our group, because it's so truth that you can't argue with that.

So what we

did, was to make every single slide of our presentation as much simpler as possible, without big text and only one image per slide. You can ask me why, and my answer will be  "make it simple". By cutting all text, we can control all presentation without any worries about time. Avoiding big amount of text, it helps to a speaker to bring all information to audience.

What exactly we did, was one sentence per slide or 2-3 bullet points, and no more. The best way which we found to fill 20 seconds, was reading from the slide together with audience and than add some information on top of it, while people looking at the picture on the slide.

We practiced quite a lot of times, so we know what are we going to speak about. Also we divided every slide in presentation between us, it should help us to be more efficient. In case if someone will forget their text, we have "insurance" that every team-mate learnt all slides by heart. We are going to present our work on the next lesson, so hopefully we will do everything how it should be.

Therefore in my evaluation i want to tell you that i found very useful to work in team, it showed me different aspects, such as making plans together, divide work between all group, create new ideas by using "brainstorm" and other different things. Also, i understood how important is to use your communication skills, in order to finish your work on time and not fail your colleagues. 

Aspergher Syndrome Talk

In one of our last Communication Skills classes, we had a talk about people with "Asperger Syndrome", so in this post i will try to give you some information about it.

By the defenition, Asperger syndrome is an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) considered to be on the “high functioning” end of the spectrum. Affected children and adults have difficulty with social interactions and exhibit a restricted range of interests and/or repetitive behaviors. Motor development may be delayed, leading to clumsiness or uncoordinated motor movements. Compared with those affected by other forms of ASD, however, those with Asperger syndrome do not have significant delays or difficulties in language or cognitive development. Some even demonstrate precocious vocabulary – often in a highly specialized field of interest.

The following behaviors are often associated with Asperger syndrome. However, they are seldom all present in any one individual and vary widely in degree:
• "robotic" or repetitive speech
• challenges with nonverbal communication (gestures, facial expression, etc.) coupled with average to above average verbal skills
• tendency to discuss self rather than others
• inability to understand social/emotional issues or nonliteral phrases
• lack of eye contact or reciprocal conversation
• obsession with specific, often unusual, topics
• one-sided conversations
• awkward movements and/or mannerisms

• limited or inappropriate social interactions

In my conclusion i would like to say that people who has "Aspergher Syndrome" absolutely the same as all other people, and i think that no one should discriminate them. In other words, i think that we shouldn't point on them or anything else, they are also normal as us.

At the end of the post i want you to watch YouTube video about Asperger's Syndrome, which will be useful for your knowledge.

Importance of developing good work habits.

Your ability to develop good work habits for what you do, is to determine “how much you earn”, “how effective you are”, “how much you are respect in your organization”, and “how much real satisfaction you get out of your job/university “.

Unfortunately most people are poor workers, they are not own organized, they are not focused and easily distracted. They work at about 50 percent of capacity. Sadly enough they don't even seem to know how to work any differently and this is a big problem today. Even if they wanted to, it's like speaking in a foreign language, they would not know how to do it without first being taught. How to achieve success in every area of your life? What you have to do is that, you have to develop the habits of highly successful and hard working people. To begin with the Foundation said: “good work habits can be summarized into words: focus and concentration”. Now focus requires clarity concerning the desired results and the relative priority each step that you need to take to achieve those results. When you think a focused think up a photographer adjusting his lands to keep the key subjects sharp in the center the picture. To become a truly hard working individual at work you must be continually adjusting your lands to be sure that what you're working on is the most important thing you could be doing at the moment, to achieve your most important goal.

Successful people understand that the worst waste of time is doing something very well that need not be done at all. Concentration requires the ability to stay with the task until it's 100 percent complete. Successful people understand that they must work in a straight line to get from where they are to where they want to go without diversion or distraction. If you want to accomplish your goals you must be sure that everything you do is taking you in that direction, and then develop good habits to get you there. This decision alone will dramatically increase the quality and quantity, of what you get done every day, and soon enough you will be cut what are the most successful people in your field. Now there are several benefits from learning how to concentrate: first important task completion is a source energy and enthusiasm and self-esteem, on the other hand failure to complete important tasks or to complete them only partially, is not only a major source of stress, but it deeply energy and your enthusiasm and your self-esteem.

When you complete an important task, you experience a surge in energy and well being, but when you work on unimportant task, even if you completed it in time, you get no feeling of satisfaction or personal reward at all, there's no payoff for completing low-level tasks.

Disciplining yourself to concentrate on a job until it is finished gives you a feeling of confidence and competence, and mastery. It develops you into a hard working person and it gives you an experience that self-control, so that you feel that you're in charge of your own destiny.

To write this post i used some information from YouTube video made by Brian Tracy , which you can also find in the first post below.

To finish this post, i would like you to watch a short video about "good habits and morning rituals"

Four main parts of writing effective emails and conclusion (Activity 5).

In this post i'm going to write 4 main steps of writing effective emails and give my conclusion about the work done in general. 

Some days ago our group had a task (Activity 5) about writing effective emails. So i was correcting several emails and wrote my own emails also. By doing this exercise i learn some useful information and understood the main parts of an effective email, such as:

•  Subject of an email 

(has to be clear, includes all main information which receiver has to know such as:  date/deadline, meeting point/format/location, main point of meeting/work done and etc.)

•  To whom it might concern (start letter with greetings; using polite/respectful manner(Dear Mr/Mrs..) ; first sentence has to be addressed to receiver or it can include senders position including salutation)

•  Main part/Content   

- the biggest part of an email has to have all information(open) or explanation to receiver; 

- to make it looks nice sender shouldn't use more than 7 lines; 

- also sender should make an email as short as he can, however it has to be explained very well;

- sender should input all dates/deadlines, meeting points and etc;

- main part has to be finished with sentence which saying that sender is waiting for some feedback from receiver as an example "Don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions".

•  Signature 

- in this part sender has to say wishes to receiver including words like : "Thank you", "Kind regards", "Sincerely yours" and etc;

- also in this part has to be included name of a sender (his/her position in organization) and his contacts (tel., address, fax, email and etc.)

Therefore in my conclusion i would like to say that writing effective emails one of the most important part of communication in our daily/business life. The work done in this Activity 5, is very helpful, because it teaches you to follow several rules/steps in order to make a good email. I think that every person has to know how to use this technique, in order to learn how to communicate with other people on maximum level of politeness and speed. As many people which will know how to use this technique of effective emails as better our life of communications will be.

In order to finish this post, i would like you to watch this YouTube video about writing an effective email by "ontrackTV" (please click here).

Everything in this post was written by me (Maxim Zadnipryanets).