What qualities do you need to work on to be a better professional speaker?
A study group of National Speaker Association members, among others, in a brainstorming session decided that speakers need to work on the uniqueness.
I am a church goer. Totally un-embarrassed by the fact. For a while the church my wife and I attended had a preacher who just plain wasn’t very creative.
It seemed that he had a hand full of themes and he kept building sermons around them.
One of those themes was along the lines that ‘You have to be you. If you aren’t you, who is going to be you.’ And various variations.
Related: How to improve confidence.
Indeed the speaker needs to be himself or herself.
It is too plainly apparent (are those words redundant) that sometimes speakers are trying to be something or someone they are not or they are trying to be too much like someone else.
There is no problem with learning from others even at times using the techniques that others use. But being others, that’s a problem.
If you are going to be someone else, be too much like someone else, before long your audience is going to want that someone else. Why settle for an imitation when you can get the original.
How do you improve your uniqueness? To me that is like asking myself how can I be myself better.
I use my own examples. I use stories from personal experience but do not always talk about myself. Something I read, saw, heard. If I tell a joke, I am the butt of the joke. I never make fun of others. Ever.
I probably don’t watch enough other speakers. But one thing I am sure of, when I go up on stage I am taking only tools and resources that I have come up there with. My audience is getting me.
Now I just have to work at being the best me I can be.
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