Know your audience like you know yourself

[suchona.kani.z]

If instead you focus your thoughts on the euphoric feeling of victory, on the motivations that push you to speak in public, on the satisfaction that will come from it and similar thoughts, suddenly those feelings will become positive and not negative!

It works, take my word for it: from being an ex-anxious person before any performance, I now welcome those feelings of anxiety/excitement with a smile, and I can even enjoy myself when I have to speak and everyone's eyes are on me!

Another important element to keep in mind when preparing to speak in public is that our presentation should not be a display of our ego, nor a boring reading on topics that are of no interest to our audience.

No, rather it should be seen as a 'gift' given to the hong kong email list audience: the speaker must give, not receive.

Give what? Well, that depends on who your audience is and what they expect from you.

The first thing to consider, even before deciding what the speech will be about, is who our audience will be made up of.

This will allow us to decide and dose various elements such as:

The level of technicality : a conference of professionals in a specific sector will require a very different technical language than an audience of young high school students.
The tone of voice : formal, informal, youthful, ironic...
Storytelling : If you are presenting a product or service to an audience of potential buyers, you will need to structure your speech very differently than you would if you were giving a TedTalk.
And much more. Also consider that the audience will often not be homogeneous, so not all aspects of your speech will be equally interesting to each person who listens to you.

The best way to overcome this problem is, as we have already said, storytelling.