Learning How To Speak In Public

Through our speach we can express who we are. Our goals and aspirations. We must avoid negative connotations about ourselves such as "I'm to lazy"; "I'm not handsome or pretty"; I'll never amount to anything. This kind of self-talk will come out in your speaking. "As a man thinks in his heart so is he" "Uh, I'm a little nervous, bear with me y'all. Emerson stated it this way, "A man is what he thinks about himself all day long."

"We must properly evaluate ourselves first by knowing ourselves, then by being ourselves. After we do this, we can we can best present our best self by accurate, positive, and persuasive self expresion" [Georg W. Flattery]

Socraties, a Greek philosopher of ancient times, advised, "know thyself." To follow this good advice, we can explore ourselves by analyzing what we say. It is possible to explore what we percieve or feel through sincere dialogue with ourselves. In this way we face reality, and we can alter our feelings about our self-image. We are able to set goals that we can successfully reach and thereby change our image of failure to an image of accomplishment. Our security or insecurity is often determined by the way we talk to ourselves about ourselves.

Know Your Weakness

Knowing yourself includes knowing both your strengths and your weaknesses. It is especially important to know your weakness in order that you may develope strategies for turning them into strengths. Some common weakneses of speech are: a limited vocabulary, an inability to pronounce words, faulty grammer and sentence construction and perhaps stammer or stuttering. These things can be overcome. Some ways to do this is 1) increase your vocabulary by systematically studying the meanings of unfamiliar words and begin to use these words in speaking; 2)improve your pronounciation by talking with those who speak correctly and listen to news or television newscasts; 3) strengthen your grammer by studying those specific areas with which you had the most difficulty; 4) if you stutter try singing out loud, most stuterers don't stuter when they sing. Some preachers have a sing song style preaching technique with a deliberate stutter for effect. If you have speakers on the floor on both side of you where you can hear your voice bounce back it can significantly reduce the stuter..

Learning effective speech paterns is a method of increasing our potential to grow socially. More on this latter. Next topic will be: Exploring Your Speach Patterns. Stay tuned!

God bless,