Public Speaking Rules

00:00 One rule, never read a speech.

00:03 The hardest thing you could ever do is read a speech without completely boring people to death. Unless you are a trained actor and a really good trained actor, if you try to read a speech, it destroys your eye contact.

00:16 It makes your voice flat, boring, monotone, and too consistent and speed and pitch and volume.

00:22 So whatever. You don't try to read a speech.

00:25 The next thing, don't try to read PowerPoint slides.

00:28 Turning your back to the audience, they can see the back of your head, and you're reading a bunch of slow, horrible thing to do.

00:37 People hate it, and they're simply going to ignore you.

00:41 Next thing, don't ever apologize for your speech.

00:44 Oh, I'm sorry. I wish I had more time to prepare.

00:47 I'm sorry I didn't have the right. Don't apologize about your speech.

00:52 Simply give the best speech you can next. Don't go on too long now.

01:00 It's not true that you have to speak 3 minutes or that shorter is always better. But if you're budgeted a half an hour, and you're still talking at 50 minutes, that's a big problem for everybody, even if you have interesting content.

01:14 So don't violate the amount of time you have allocated for your presentation.

01:20 The final thing is, don't just do a data dump.

01:23 Don't try to cram as many facts and figures and numbers into your speech because you are guaranteed not to communicate.

01:32 People are going to tune you out.

01:35 They will not remember anything.

01:36 So there are a lot of dos and don'ts you can avoid and still be successful, but you've got to avoid the biggest blunders common in many, many speaking disasters.