I’m not a fan of the educational system that I was brought up with because I feel like I didn’t receive the maximum benefit from it. What I mean by that is that the two things I dreaded most throughout my school years (including college), reading and studying, are now two of my favorite activities.

A common piece of wisdom often bestowed to aspiring professional speakers is to speak whenever you can. This piece of advice when taken literally is actually very bad advice. Although self-help guru Tony Robbins put himself on the map by giving several hundred seminars all over the world within a single year, often speaking more than once per day, it won’t work for everyone. In this article, I’ll go over some of the pros and cons of seizing every speaking opportunity.

The Physical Toll:

Whether you’re at a job interview, attending a networking event or giving a speech, it’s important that you dress appropriately. I’ve seen fashion faux pas in business situations that have actually shocked me: from the person that I interviewed who was dressed more casually than me to person at a networking event who was dressed like he was meeting Cinderella at the grand ball.

Appropriate dress is always in the eyes of the beholder and inappropriate dress can often cause negative perceptions about you before you even open your mouth. Three’s no hard and fast rule such as all job interviews require formal dress or all networking events require business dress as I’ve seen several situations where events that traditionally require formal dress requested casual dress and vice versa.

The time limit: it can be fatal in the case of a Toastmasters Speech contest, but it’s not limited to just Toastmasters. I’ve seen speakers and trainers do a fabulous job with their presentations but have turned the audience’s perception of them negative but talking too much. As speakers, we naturally want to provide our audience with maximum value but less can often be more.

A big epiphany that many of the students who take my “Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking” class have is that even though they are petrified, the audience can’t tell. When I have students give their first speech in class (a short introduction) I ask the speaker if they were nervous. If they say they were, I ask the rest of the class if they could tell and in most cases, they say they can’t. Sometimes, our inner emotions don’t show through in our talk and this can be either a good thing or a bad thing based on your situation.

Have you ever wondered where your speaking style came from? Did you imitate another speaker or a combination of other speakers? Do you have a perception of the ideal speaker that you’re working your way towards? Speaking styles are not like fingerprints – they’re relatively easy to imitate, and more often than not, it’s done inadvertently. So how can you ensure that you speaking style is yours rather than of your mentor or a speaker that you admire? To find out, let’s take a closer look at some of the elements that make up your speaking style.

Content:

How lucky are we to be here today at this great location? Is there anything better than getting a day off from work to come listen to a speech? Rhetorical questions (questions asked for effect rather than to get an actual answer) are great attention getting devices and can enhance a speech. But many speakers make the mistake of opening their speech with rhetorical questions as a means to grab attention right off the bad. This isn’t always the best idea, so here are some things to think about when considering opening up a speech with a rhetorical question.