Tips for becoming a better speaker: feedback
[The last tip was about getting enough practice.]
At least once, and preferably several times, set up a video camera or recruit a friend and tape yourself giving a tour or talk.
Without realizing it, people stick their tongues out between sentences, juggle change noisily in their pockets, grin at inappropriate moments, say “You know?” at every comma, and so on. Watching yourself on video helps enormously.
Finding a camera
Video cameras are so cheap these days that if you don’t have one, someone you know does, or you can borrow one from your department or company.
Many larger schools and businesses have special rooms outfitted to record presentations for archival purposes, and you can probably take advantage of these just for the price of asking. My alma mater has even created a special facility to allow engineering students to videotape themselves day or night as they hone their speaking skills for project presentations; perhaps your school has the same kind of facility.
Taping a session
Once you have the video camera set up, tape yourself giving a talk.
You may want to give your talk to an empty room, or wrangle a couple friends to sit in the audience. This gives you the added advantage of having actual people to interact with and connect to, which will probably improve your performance, and it provides a source of outside feedback.
Whether you tape yourself in an empty room or with an audience, you’ll also want to do some sessions with “friendly” practice audiences that you can count on to give you external feedback after you are done. I suggest you start by fixing what you see on the tape yourself, then graduate to feedback from a friendly live audience.
Pay attention to what you learn
The tape and your practice audiences are going to provide you valuable feedback: pay attention to them.
Odds are you are going to feel squeamish about watching yourself on tape or asking your audience to tell you what you did wrong. Don’t cheat! Don’t watch the video on fast-forward: your audience has to sit through the whole thing in real time, and you should too. Also, beware of making excuses for yourself: if you notice something annoying, your audience will too, so fix it.
Don’t let your reviewers take the easy way out
Don’t take “you did great” as good feedback from your practice audience. If they tell you this and you haven’t been giving presentations for years, odds are they are sugarcoating the truth.
Dig harder. You may actually have done pretty well, but dig for questions about everything. Did you jingle your change? Move around too much? Too little? Stand in front of your slides so your audience couldn’t see them?
Ask questions until they start to give you feedback that you can use to improve. Take notes. Once you get this feedback, you’re going to want to keep practicing and getting feedback until you’ve worked out all the major kinks and defeated your nastiest nervous habits.
