Effective Public Speaking || Other Part || Black and White CA ||

“Speech is Power: Speech is To Persuade, To Convert, and To Compel.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is persuasion a gift? Are some people born with the ability to speak well and "sell" their ideas successfully?
No.

Great speakers are not born; they are trained.

People want to listen to someone who is engrossing, relaxed, comfortable, and confident and knows to articulate his/her thoughts. In our everyday lives, when we converse with people we are able to express ourselves better as compared to when we are on a stage to give a speech where anxiety moves in, and we focus on the public at the expense of speaking. To become an effective speaker, one should focus on speaking and let go of the “public”

The next step is visualization-if you can see it, you can speak it. Winston Churchill is one of the great orators of the past who delivered some much-acknowledged war speeches in a way that took his audiences' imagination to the scene of the battle.

Whatever the topic is one should include the personal element in it making it easier for the audience to connect to the speaker. Steve Jobs in his famous Stanford University speech, 'Connecting the Dots' narrated his three life events which moved everything in his life. His three personal stories helped the public to build a connection with the speaker; inspired the students at Stanford that whatever bad happens in life, maybe dreadful at that point of time, but when you move on in life and see back you can figure the dots connecting each other to build what you are today

You might have heard several times people saying, “I'm glad that speech ended, it seemed to be never-ending.” But, rarely do we say, “I wanted to hear that speaker more”. Hence, always keep your speech bit shorter than anticipated.

One such speech was that of Barack Obama, his first speech at the 2004 National Democratic Convention where he cited, "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America". Obama began to run for president just three years after that speech. It was one such speech; I would have loved to listen longer.

Lastly, practice and practice to be an effective public speaker. Adolf Hitler, another great orator, was well aware that mastering the art of public speaking was crucial to his political career. He wrote all of his speeches himself, sometimes editing those more than five times. He practiced his facial expressions and gestures, and he was adept at interweaving metaphor and abstract ideas into his speeches about political policy.


I would like to conclude with the quote of Carl W. Buechner

“They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”

By Sonal Verma
CA Student
At Skill-Set & Will-Set to be A Chartered Accounant
Students Skills Enrichment Board (ICAI)