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How To Hack Yourself: Public Speaking Series
Public squeaking: A complete guide
6 mistakes beginners make… and how to avoid them
Offstage, I am a data scientist, leader, and decision intelligence engineer. When I’m invited to give a talk, I turn into a theatre company of one. Everything from actor to director to costume designer.
The bad news is that the same goes for your talk, whether you know it or not. Unfortunately the skills that got you the speaking position might be entirely different from what you need to dazzle your audience.
The good news is that industry and academia are stuffed to the gills with novice speakers who don’t realize that public speaking is theatre, so it’s fairly easy to set yourself apart in a crowd of newcomers to the stage. To help you out, here are some practical tips along with a list of newbie mistakes to avoid.
Planning your content
Speech length
A professional speaker finishes on time. That means planning on a shorter speech that the maximum talk length. Since I know I like to improvise a little to keep my speech from feeling stiff, I will plan creating content that fills 75% of the available time.
