Three Reasons Why You’re Cheating Yourself by NOT Improving Your Speaking Skills

More so than any other professional skill, improving your public speaking skills will give you the most benefit in your career whether you’re employed, self-employed or unemployed. Even if you don’t regularly speak to groups, the skills that it takes to communicate effectively to groups and the confidence that you’ll gain will automatically help you in interpersonal situations. So here are the top three reasons why you should improve your speaking skills.

Reason #1: The Skills are Transferable

The skills that are necessary to be a good speaker including topic selection, determining the goals for your talk and writing your speech so that it’s a hit with your audience can help you even with one on situations. After all, a speech is simply a conversation with an audience.

So by being able to plan out what you’re going to say and effectively communicate it, you’ll be able to perform better in interpersonal situations such as job interviewing, sales and management. Learning how to answer questions during a speech make job interviewing a breeze and being able to speak to groups makes it easy to handle team interviews or pitching your product to a group.

Reason #2: It Provides New Opportunities

Being able to speak to groups effectively opens up doors in the workplace. If other people on your team are unable to speak well to groups, then you’ll get to do the presenting which automatically makes you look like an expert (otherwise, you wouldn’t have been asked to speak). By doing presentations at work, you’ll gain positive exposure with both your peers and those above you on the org chart.

Moving up in the corporate world often means management. With that role comes added responsibilities such as communicating policies and news to those who work for you and communicating status to those above you. In some cases, you be required to speak to the board, shareholders, the media or even the general public. The latter being an incredible career booster because you’ll gain exposure outside of your employer which can help you if you ever want or need to switch jobs.

If you have your own business, speaking at conferences, local business events and community events gets you added exposure as an expert in your industry. In addition to the obvious benefit of reaching more potential clients, you’ll be perceived as an expert in your field. For example, if you’re one of five financial advisors that belong to a local business association and you speak regularly at gatherings and events, you’ll be perceived as the expert of the group because you’re the one who is confident enough to speak on that topic.

If you’re passionate about a cause such as charity or political issue, you’ll reach more people in less time by speaking at local events than you would by going door to door. So not only will you benefit by reaching out to others but so will the cause you’re trying to raise awareness for.

Reason #3: It Raises Your Confidence and Self-Esteem

This is perhaps the biggest benefit of speaking skills as there’s nothing that boosts your confidence and self-esteem more than success. A great way to improve your self-esteem is to look at your successes and your assets. Knowing that you’re excelling in an area which few people feel comfortable and even fewer are successful is like giving your confidence a shot of adrenaline.

This confidence boost is not limited to communication – it can help you when you need to overcome challenges from all aspects of your life. But it does help tremendously when it comes to communication. For example, if you’re comfortable speaking to groups, you’ll come across as more confident in one on one situations such as job interviewing and dealing with difficult people.

So these are just some of the many ways that improving your speaking skills will help you. The benefits of improving certain skills aren’t always obvious so it’s up to us to find ways to move beyond the pack to become successful.

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