Building Public Speaking Skills

Earlier this month I wrote about the importance of having good foundations in our lives and for public speaking. Honestly, it could have been a whole chapter in a book, but I wanted to keep it approachable in relation to speaking and communication.

This week I’m going a bit deeper on this topic, by exploring the concept of building our public speaking skills.

We all want a strong foundation for our building – whatever it is we are building. Without a solid structural foundation, we risk our building collapsing. In writing about foundations, I counted posture and breath as two foundations for connected communication.

Consider breath and breathing. Is breathing a foundation? Or is it building? I would argue it is both. Notice I haven’t even mentioned your voice yet…

Breath builds on the foundation of posture. However, breath is affected by many things, including posture, nerves, general health, etc.

How do we build our breath to support our public speaking?

There are many ways, including singing lessons, movement modalities such as martial arts, yoga, Pilates, Alexander Technique, and others, but I would also include meditation and bringing general awareness to your breath.

So – stop reading for a moment and enjoy a nice, delicious, luscious inhale and exhale. Take your time.

Felt good, right? A good friend of mine set up her own breath awareness practice – Take 5, 5 times a day.

She set a calendar reminder for 5 times a day to stop and take 5 conscious breaths. It didn’t even take 5 minutes!

Building your breath awareness is key to becoming a more connected speaker. Bringing awareness to your breath is the FIRST step to building.

So – how can you use this to begin to build your speaking and communication?

Start with the Take 5 x 5 awareness.

Then, observe others’ breath and breathing.

Watch my Video on finding your ‘Belly Breath’. It’s a first step to becoming more aware of where we hold unnecessary tension in our abdominal area.

When you bring awareness to what’s tight, you can then bring awareness to make it more free! Connected speaking uses free breathing to support our voice and our message.

Building our breath awareness leads to a stronger structure as we building our speaking experience.

If you want to know more about how to build your speaking skills, why not reach out and book a free 45-minute connection call? You can easily book a no-pressure (I don’t do ‘hard sales’) conversation with me using this link right here.

Wishing you beautifully connected breathing and speaking!