In today’s era of cut-throat competition and endless opportunities, you can’t rely solely on good grades to excel and achieve success on the professional front. People who bank upon their higher educational degrees overlooking the significance of soft skills miss various lucrative growth opportunities and eventually lose their edge. To hit the jackpot, you need to have a perfect balance of soft skills and academic excellence.
It is important to understand that personality is not just about fluently speaking in English and donning good clothes; it’s more than that. Personality development implies value addition in personal and professional spheres of life. If you really want to make a difference and stand apart from the rest, go the extra mile and groom your personality.
Wondering how to shine your personality? Count on public speaking! Public speaking helps you enrich your personality and widen the horizon of your expertise and skill set. When you interact with a group of people, you try to present your best self. And in the process of demonstrating your best self, you make all possible efforts to groom your personality. You can identify your personality traits by doing a simple personality test to determine which of your traits have the strongest presence.
Let’s discuss in detail how public speaking can help you shape your personality.
1. Communication Skills
Public speaking provides you an opportunity to evaluate your speaking habits, pay heed to your vocal quality, and assess your language/accent. All these efforts enhance your ability and proficiency to communicate verbally and make an impact on people. Moreover, you learn to make a careful selection of words, pronounce words correctly, and put forward your message with clarity in a persuasive manner without verbal crutches (like “umm,” “ah,” etc.).
2. Body Language
Non-verbal cues, such as hand gestures, head movements, and facial expressions, speak the facts that are not audible and say a lot about your speaking style. Moreover, this non-verbal communication has a huge impact on audience engagement. So, when you practice public speaking, learn how to make right eye contact with the viewers and what your body posture should be on the stage. By aptly combining the spoken words with physical gestures, you can create your own unique identity.
3. Confidence
Public speaking empowers you to overcome your insecurities and fear, making you comfortable around people. Speaking engagements teach you to channelize your nervousness into enthusiasm and deliver your talk with passion and grace. Continuous practice of speaking at office meetings and in small groups equips you with the confidence to express your thoughts and opinions to a larger audience without any hesitation.
4. Critical Thinking
As a public speaker, you need to tailor your message to fit the requirements of your audience. For this, you do careful reasoning and apply meticulous standards of evidence and logical principles while evaluating, conceptualizing, and/or synthesizing the information accumulated through observation or experience. You start thinking critically to improve your speaking style and make your talk relevant and meaningful to your listeners.
5. Presentation Skills
Public speaking involves positive visualization of your ideas and perceptions to win the trust of the audience. So, you learn to customize the predesigned, high-definition presentation templates to align them with your speaking objectives. You also gain the basic knowledge of all major presentation platforms (such as PowerPoint, Google Slides, Apple Keynote, etc.) and utilize the advanced features offered by them to make your slides more captivating and visually appealing.
6. Empathy
Empathy is an important skill to develop, specifically if you work in a setting where there is diversity among the workforce. Being empathetic implies you better understand other people’s feelings and perspectives. Pondering how public speaking makes you empathetic? Well, when you prepare your speech, you consider the needs and problems of the audience to forge a deep connection with them and encourage them to receive your message and information with their hearts open.
7. Authenticity
No matter how best content you have prepared and how beautifully you have organized it on your slides, you won’t be able to connect with the audience at the emotional level if you are not authentic. Being authentic means representing your true self and matching your inner reality with outer expression. Public speaking encourages you to develop a style that provides you the freedom to be genuine and share your real thoughts and feelings with people.
8. Leadership Skills
To be a good leader, you first need to be a good communicator. In a nutshell, public speaking and leadership go hand-in-hand. Whether you speak to persuade, inform, or inspire, your objective remains to articulate your message effectively and encourage the listeners to take action. So, when you master public speaking, you develop leadership skills simultaneously.
The Takeaway
Whether you are an established career person, budding professional, or a student, a good and striking personality is crucial to influence the people around you. Public speaking and personality are closely related to each other. While public speaking makes you more presentable and lets you express yourself in an authentic and convincing manner, your impressive personality makes people more receptive to what you say.
Despite understanding the benefits of public speaking, many corporate world professionals get apprehensive about taking up the stage and holding the mic to address a mass audience. So, come out of your shell, learn the art of public speaking, and bring a holistic change in your personality. Keep growing! Remember, the fears we don’t confront become our limits.
