• People give power to you if you are allowed to speak in front of a set audience. Use this power wisely.
• Start with a story. Give your audience a scenario that happened to you and ask them how they will solve it. Open out the options you thought you would try. Then go through them and increase curiosity and finally provide the solution.
• Always outline how you are going to orchestrate your talk in 10 or 30 seconds. This will keep your audience who gets distracted in the middle of the speech in the loop.
• Always remember you are talking, and they are listening means you have been given the power to do so. So feel powerful, do not be nervous.
• Never spend more than 10 minutes explaining a point. That is the attention span of an average audience.
• Always research the audience and their possible interests. Then, loop those interests in the middle of your talk to grab attention back to your talk.
• Be sensitive to time. Do not spend most of your time on initial points and rush over to the end. Instead, give your contact details at the end, which will hook people to contact you after your speech; let the other people go with some time given back to them.
• You do not have to be perfect, but you need to be confident to play your part. Do not apologise for not preparing for the talk or being confused with your slides.
• Be more prominent than you are, talk louder, be a bit more aggressive than you do in an ordinary conversation.
• When you switch to two-dimensional space by webcast or youtube videos or podcasts, the energy even needs more.
• Be a passionate, fully present and interested person. Not like cheerleaders or anchors. A person whom your audience wants to hear. If they wish to get lemon, 🍋 give them lemons 🍋 bigger and better.
• Do a smooth transition. As a speaker, utilise your power as you are in control of what coming next.
• Interact with your audience based on your audience's interest.
• You are in charge of the next few mins or hours of all your audience, how the time goes by you are in power, and you are responsible for that. So anybody disturbing a pleasant experience, you have the full authority to act accordingly.
• Always end your talks early.

Reference:

• Confessions of a public speaker by Scott Berkun
• Cover photo by Sam Moqadam