The 5 Best Tips to Get an Standing Ovation from a speech

For most giving a speech is one of the most terrifying tasks they have to perform, with many people actually having a phobic reaction to speaking in public. But don’t be afraid with the right advice you can boost your confidence and deliver a funny, exciting and insightful speech. And once you have received your first standing obviation, you will be hooked – delivering speeches on a weekly basis. These 5 tips will give you the winning formula for delivering a perfect speech.

Athletic Visualisation – with the recent London Olympics, we have seen amazing athletes deliver spectacular performances. This is achieved through positive visualisation. The same technique is used by the best toastmasters; they don’t stand behind the curtain waiting to be called out on stage, visualising how bad they will perform, thinking about everything that can go wrong. No, instead they will visualise themselves, giving the best speech, receiving an amazing response and feeling great when being on stage. Your mind does not know what is real, if you imagine you’re on stage performing at your best your subconscious will remember this imagine event as real, so next time you’re on stage your mind will remind you of how you felt when you delivered your last great speech.

Repetition is The Key to Mastering Any Skill – nervous speakers with low self esteem, will often only go through their speech once or twice. With their nerves on edge, they are all too often afraid to practice in front of friends and family not wanting to receive any criticism that will affect their real speech. But we all know, that the more your practice the better you become. Confident speakers will practice, practice and practice – they want to make mistakes, so they can get feedback to improve their delivery style. They will practice their speech in the shower, on the train, in front of family and friends and constantly seek out people’s real opinions so they can be the best speaker they can be

Engaging the Crowd – we have all sat through boring talks, presentations and speeches. But we do some speakers capture the audience’s attention while others just turn the crowd to sleep? Confidence and practice is always the key, but you can get the audience involved. Ask them questions, make them compete a small task, add humour, use props. Talk with words and your body language. Don’t stand still move about, use your voice to change the audience’s emotions and gain excitement by creating intrigue. Don’t fall into the trap of just reading a list of points, make the audience want to hear what you are going to say.

Waking up the Sleeping Baby – if for some reason you start to lose the audience, create intrigue this way they will want to hear what you have to say “in a second i’m going to share with you the secret I have used to make a million pound, now when I tell you this you have to promise not to share it with anyone..” You can also make the audience listen more intently by stating, “Ok listen to this because in a second I’m going to come down into the crowd and ask one of you a question” no no-one wants to look silly, so if you have frightened to ask one of the audience members a question, everyone is going start to listen.

End as you Began – a good way to start your speech is with a real life story, as the story progresses creating intrigue you move on to your main topic which means you haven’t ended the story. The audience will be waiting for you to get back to the story, which means there listening more intently to your speech. Towards the end of your speech, once you have covered your main points, you return to the story and end it (the story is often a metaphor that represents the topic of the speech) “as, I was saying, dave…..”

For any speech to be successful you need to practice, practice and practice – this will boost your confidence, once confident you are more likely to naturally move around the stage using your gestures as well as words to communicate. Create intrigue and add humour, and practice ways of getting a bored audience back interested in you.

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