It’s five minutes before your talk begins. You’ve prepared a great speech, worked out all the issues and practiced it several times. But for some bizarre reason, you still feel a bit nervous. Is something wrong?

These feelings are perfectly normal - many seasoned speakers still feel a bit nervous before a big speech. It’s your mind’s way of reminding you that you’ve got something important coming up. Nervous energy is a good thing; it helps keep us on our toes.

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Have you ever done a presentation with other people? In school, these are often known as group presentations but they also happen frequently in adulthood - a handful of people give a talk with each one doing a part of the presentation.

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The Public Speaking and Presentation Skills Blog Carnival is finally here. If you blog about public speaking, then this is a great opportunity for you to promote your blog to others interested in public speaking. We’re looking for articles in the following categories:

• Public Speaking Tips
• Presentation Skills Advice
• Tips to make money as a speaker
• Tips, advice and suggestions for Toastmasters members
• PowerPoint tips and tricks

If you’d like to submit an article, visit the carnival page on blog carnival.

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The creative mind is our most powerful asset – I just wish it would cooperate more when I’m trying to come up with fresh material for speeches, articles and blog posts. So when my trusty mind is not cooperating, I look for inspiration elsewhere.

Here are my favorite sources for getting ideas for topics to speak (or write) about:

Visiting the various news service websites for stories that can inspire a speech:

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When you speak to groups regularly, you’ll come across a hostile audience every now and then. Now hostile is a bit of an extreme word to describe a non-reactive audience. Sometimes the audience is sleepy, bored, not paying attention or simply disinterested.

In this three part series, we’ll discuss what makes an audience hostile, some steps you can take to keep an audience from getting hostile and what you can do when you’re facing a hostile audiene.

So let’s start with what makes an audience hostile:

A number of things can cause an audience to get hostile. These things include:

read full story of "Public Speaking: Hostile & Difficult Audiences - Part 1: What Causes a Hostile Audience:"

A common obstacle that many people who speak face is being able to speak clearly. This is more of an issue for those who speak infrequently as opposed to those who speak regularly – those in the former category are often unaware of the issue.

You can have a well written speech, practice it until you know it cold and then deliver it with confidence. But if your audience can’t understand what you’re saying, it’ll have minimal impact. You’ve probably seen speakers like this. So what are some of the things that can interfere with the clarity of your speech and what can you do about it? Let’s start with some of the reasons an audience doesn’t understand your talk:

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One of the biggest challenges related to public speaking is to make a speech or presentation more interesting. Each time I teach my “Overcome your fear of public speaking” class, several students list “boring the audience” as one of the things they fear most.

The good news is that there are several ways to make a speech more interesting and many of them simply require a little extra planning up front. So let’s look at three things we can do to make a speech more interesting.

Research your audience:

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