Our words and delivery are meant for an audience. By practicing your speaking and interview skills with someone else, you can find out what you’re doing well, how you might be diminishing yourself and how you could get the impact you’re after.
Below are four reasons why you should get an outside perspective.
You are so accustomed to the way you do things that you don’t actually know what you are doing. Your speech habits are just that- unconscious behaviors – so automatic that you are unaware. From um’s and likes and other filler words to clearing your throat and smoothing your hair or listing to one side, your subconscious can be sabotaging your delivery. Other socialized behaviors can get in your way and have you softening your voice or apologizing. You may all too quickly defer to people with higher status or different gender; you may have limiting beliefs that affect your social interactions… like fearing you won’t be nice enough or tough enough or thinking that you talk too much or should be soft-spoken.
You can talk to yourself and think great ideas and sentences and stories and phrases, but until you say them out loud to a real live audience, you don’t know if you can connect your mind to your voice and your body (eye contact, gestures, facial expressions). When it comes to speaking out loud, you don’t know if you can do what you think you can do.
You don’t know if or how or when you are connecting. When you tell me a story, I can reflect back what was interesting or moving. I can tell you what I thought was important. I can tell you if I got your message and key points. I can tell you if you had energy or if you were kind of dull and monotone.
When it comes to what we say (our words) and how we say it (delivery), you don’t always have the impact you’re after.How many times have you intended to be engaging or inspiring only to find blank faces staring back at you? How often do you fear you have been too self-aggrandizing only to find that others were not impressed by your accomplishments? Assuming you do have an intended impact (and if you don’t, take a moment to think about what you want your audience to learn/notice/remember), can you talk your talk?