The One Thing You Must Do to Improve Your Speaking

It’s practice. That’s the one thing. No need to be coy about it. If you practice, you’ll improve.

I know. It’s not sexy, or rocket science. Or easy. Which makes it even less sexy.

But practice is where the magic is. Here are 10 ways to practice your presentation skills:

1. Multitask.

   Yes, this goes against the avalanche of very sound “don’t multitask” advice out there. But you don’t have to create more time in your day to practice your oral communication skills. You just have to send less text-based communication. Instead of sending an email or text message, pick up the phone or get out off your butt and walk down the hall. Sitting is killing you anyway, so take a walk and communicate with another human using your vocal chords. Happy body + practicing presentation mouth = two birds and very productive multitasking.

   In addition to giving you a reason and way to practice your presentation skills, communicating in person is especially important if you’re making a big ask of someone, need to give them some constructive feedback or have to share some sensitive information.



2. Leverage your existing communication occasions.

   Again, you don’t have to look for new places or opportunities to practice—use the ones you’ve already got. If you present at a regular status meeting, stand up when it’s your turn to report or share your content in a different way (use a whiteboard, for example). If you call someone and get their voicemail, leave a message and listen to it—most voicemail systems allow you to review your message at the end. If you like it, send it. If you don’t, re-record. It’s a great way to improve the quality of your communication.

   Practice outside of work. You could be having a beer with a friend and telling them a story about the flat tire you got on the weekend. You don’t need to tell him that you’re working on your eye contact, but you can use the opportunity to do so as you tell them about the salty tow truck driver who saved your day.



3. Enroll your boss, colleagues, or confidant.

   Pull your boss aside before you jump on a conference call and tell her what you’re working on as it relates to your presentation skills development. Ask her to listen for those things so she can provide you with feedback afterwards. You could also create a speaking buddy system with some trusted colleagues so you can provide each other with feedback and coaching. What gets measured gets done and these feedback requests will focus your efforts.



4. Record for posterity. (And practice.)

   One of the best ways to improve your speaking skills is to record yourself speaking and listen to the recording. Nothing shines a light on your development areas better than hearing your own voice. If you’re on a conference call, turn on the voice recorder on your smartphone. After the call, listen back and ask what works and what you would do differently next time? You can do the same thing in meetings or in presentations (with the permission of the attendees/participants) so you have a point to reference to work and improve from.



5. Identify low risk opportunities.

   Look for low risk opportunities to share your knowledge and ideas with an audience that will benefit from your insight. Think about individuals, team, organizations or audiences who might benefit from what you know and/or are passionate about.

   You could volunteer to speak at your next department meeting and present a summary of trends you’re seeing that relate to your group’s priorities. You could provide a snapshot of competitive activity or an interesting strategy that’s working in another industry and how your team could apply it in your context. In short, research a topic that’s of interest to you and helpful to your colleagues and share the learning. It gives you an opportunity to practice and improve your skills and boost your profile.

   You could also look for opportunities in your community. What knowledge do you have that might benefit your child’s school, your faith community, your child’s sports league, the charity you support. If, for example, you’re a cyber security expert who typically consults to large organizations, you might do a short presentation at a school on simple online practices people could do to boost security for themselves and their kids.

   Use these low-risk speaking opportunities to have some fun and stretch yourself.



6. Join Toastmasters.

   I was a Toastmaster for three years and I can tell you first hand it is a great organization. They provide a supportive environment that is designed to give you a forum to practice in and freedom to expand your repertoire. Their proven structure ensures everyone gets an opportunity to speak, practice their skills and get some feedback. Toastmasters is also a great way to meet a cross section of your community you wouldn’t otherwise meet, all of whom are interested in growth and development and willing to do something about it.



7. Watch TED talks.

   TED talks are a tremendous resource for anyone who wants to improve their presentation skills. Watch TED Talks and other great speakers online to get inspired and watch for things they are doing that you can try. You can also watch for quotes or other content that you could use or reference in one of your own presentations. Or you might see a TED speaker share a concept in a visually interesting way that inspires some ideas for one of your own talks. You could also deconstruct what they’re doing well, things that you would like to replicate. This helps you keep good habits and practices top of mind as you’re developing own communication skills.



8. Teach others.

   One of the fastest ways to mastery is to teach people. Look for opportunities to teach others what you’re learning about speaking. You’ll get to practice speaking, share your knowledge and give back.



9. Focus your efforts.

   It’s easy to get frustrated if you try and work on too many things at once, sometimes resulting in a backslide in your development. If you want to catalyze your growth and development in anything, including speaking, isolate and work on one skill at a time.



10. Be patient and kind.

    This is an important one. Be kind to yourself as you’re trying to improve. Recognize that ignorance is bliss and while you may have been more comfortable in your old ways, you were probably less effective. As you start working on your speaking skills, you may frustrated because there is a gap between your ideal performance and where you are now. Be kind with yourself. Patience, kindness and persistent practice will pay off.

So, it’s not sexy or easy, the practicing. But the more you practice the more quickly you will move into the realm of unconscious competence: You’ll be able to do the things you want to do without even thinking about it. Once you’ve done that with one aspect of your speaking skills, you start on the next until it’s second nature. And then you rinse and repeat.

If you’d like some more tips on speaking well, sign up for our helpful guide on How to Research, Plan and Rehearse for Your Next Presentation. It’s my best advice all packaged up in a printable, easy-to-use, step-by-step guide.

Top Five Terrible Pieces of Speaking Advice

There is a lot of advice about how to be a better speaker sitting on bookshelves, floating around the web and wafting about the offices of presentation coaches and consultants. Some of it’s good advice, some of it’s great and some of it is terrible.

So, today, I give you five of the worst pieces of advice about speaking well.

1. Don’t over prepare. You’ll sound too rehearsed.

   This is bad advice because for 99.9% of the population it is 100% not true. Unless you are one of those rare savants who can get up and speak brilliantly off the cuff, you have to prepare. A lot of people confuse the comfort of ignorance with effectiveness: they would rather get up and wing it than go in with a plan and measure their presentation performance against that plan.

   If you don’t prepare, your content will lack structure and you will likely be too comprehensive (read: bore your audience with details they don’t care about.) And when you don’t craft your content in advance, you won’t be able to share relevant stories or examples that will help your audience understand your ideas and your personality to shine through which will deepen your relationship with your audience.

   When you create content on the fly, you can’t be present in the room. Instead, you will be consumed with trying to figure out what to say next and you’ll miss the opportunity to connect with your audience. You’ll likely miss their cues that are telling you they’re confused, bored, or engaged. On-the-fly energy also make you appear uncomfortable and lacking in confidence: fidgeting, shifting from foot to foot, racing your eye contact around the room and using a lot of qualifying phrases such as, “sort of”, “kind of” and “you know”.

   When you are prepared and well-rehearsed you demonstrate a deeper command of your subject matter because you don’t have to rely on your notes, you can reference back to things previous speakers said and you can be spontaneous and add levity to your remarks.

   Ultimately, your level of preparation is a reflection of the respect you have for your audience’s time and attention. Respect them enough to prepare so the time they invest in listening to you is worthwhile.



2. Memorize your talk. The best speakers never use notes.

   This is terrible advice because when you memorize your talk, it will sound memorized. You lose the conversational tone of voice and the opportunity for your authentic personality to come through. When you speak from memorization, the cadence of your delivery gets thrown off because you’re so focused on getting lines out, you lose your natural rhythm. People hear it and, unless it’s their child competing in a second grade speech contest, they don’t like it.

   And when you inevitably lose your place, you’ll likely stay lost and fumble around trying to remember what’s next, often repeating the preceding phrase hoping it will cue up the next sentence. All of this scrambling about is painful to watch and doesn’t help your credibility. If you’re the subject matter expert, you’re expected to be able to speak about content that you know well without having to memorize it.

   It’s a false choice to think you have to memorize or read from a script. These are not your only two options, although both of them are bad ones. Instead, speak from bullets set out to prompt you as you proceed through your talk. If you need to script out what you’re going to say as an interim step to figure out what you’re going to say, that’s fine, but don’t stop the prep there. Extract a few key trigger words and phrases to prompt you as you move through your presentation.

   You can bring your script with you as your Linus security blanket but do not hold it. Put your bullets on top and use those. Give yourself permission to say your points differently each time so the essence of the message is conveyed while you sound natural, engaging and conversational. It’s more important to get the essence of the message across than it is to be eloquent.



3. Never use your hands. They’re distracting.

   This makes me throw up my hands in exasperation. Not using your hands when you speak robs you of the opportunity to add clarity, presence and dynamism to your delivery.

   Imagine trying to give someone directions to a local pub, or describing an athlete’s appearance. or explaining a team’s progress before and after a new process was introduced.

   When you fail to move your hands, you appear to be wooden and stiff and look like you’re trying to do an impression of Al Gore circa 1991. (He’s come a long way.) Ask your friends or colleagues what they did over the weekend and watch their hands and arms: They move! And they move naturally to enhance their storytelling. You want your hands and arms to do the same because gestures help tell a story, make a point, close a deal.



4. Always move around the stage. You’ll appear more dynamic.

   It is great to draw inspiration from your favourite televangelist or infomercial presenter if you’ve nailed the core skills that provide far greater return than moving around the stage. Skills like developing well-structured and compelling content, making meaningful eye contact, using appropriate gestures and cutting out filler language.

   In general, a lot of movement around the stage or at the front of the room has significant downside and limited upside. You diminish your presence as you drift aimlessly around the room and shift your weight like you need to hit the loo. In some cases, audiences start to focus more on your movement because they’re worried you might fall off the stage or bump into furniture and hurt yourself. Or them.

   Instead, stand still. Especially for the first few minutes of your talk, when you want to minimize distractions and establish your presence. Then, and only then, should you periodically and purposefully move to point to something on the screen, delineate a timeline or engage a different part of auditorium or lecture hall.

   Bottom line: focus on the core skills first. There are many, many other things to work on before you start worrying about moving around. It’s much better to animate your upper body and settle your eye contact than it is to move.



5. Provide your slides beforehand. People like to take notes.

   Presentation is an inefficient medium to be comprehensive in. You can’t, and shouldn’t try, to tell your audience everything you know about a subject. Instead, embellish a few key points and provide them with more detail after your talk.

   Why? Because you want them to be paying attention to you, not reading your deck. If you distribute a comprehensive handout at the beginning, you’ll feel pressured to speak to everything in that handout. You’ll also get stuck in the eloquence trap where you feel the need to say the things on the slide exactly as they are written on the slide. Your presentation slides should be simple because they’re designed to be presented. Your handout can be more comprehensive because it’s been designed to be read.

   If you’re asked to provide handouts beforehand, say no. Let the organizer know that you want to focus on the key points during the presentation and that you’ll be happy to provide something more a summary or comprehensive leave-behind at the end. At the beginning of my talks, I let people know that they will get a summary handout afterwards so there is no need to take notes.

   You may get the odd person bellyaching about not getting the handout at the beginning because they like to take notes on it. That’s great feedback because it means they really value what you’re saying, but it shouldn’t change your approach. It’s worth taking that feedback in the service of engaging the audience in the room, when they’re in the room with you, so you can engage them with your subject matter and deepen your relationship with them.

So, there it is: the worst speaking advice and what to do instead. If you’d like some more good advice, check out our articles on How to Research, Plan and Rehearse for Your Next Presentation.

The Essential Speaking Skill That Will Boost Your Credibility and Cash Flow

What if you could refine a speaking technique that would have your audience believe you were more intelligent, more likeable and more deserving of a higher salary? 

What if not improving that same technique would lead that audience to think you were insecure, boring and cowardly? 

And what if I told you that those perceptions were not in the eye of the beholder but in your own eyeballs and how you use them when you speak?

That’s right, we’re talking about eye contact. It’s the most important technique in your speaking toolkit because when you do it well, it has a huge impact on your audience’s perception of you.

And yet, most speakers don’t make effective eye contact because they are too busy looking at their notes in front of them or the screen behind them. Presenters have so much fear of forgetting what they plan to say that they over-script their remarks and over-rely on their notes. And when you do so a bunch of bad stuff happens:

Your vocal range (and your confidence) compresses. Very few people can read from their notes in a way that sounds natural, authentic and engaging. Are you Katie Couric and therefore a master of interviewing and speaking from your note? If you're not, you’re likely hunched over your notes, compressing your vocal range and volume and projecting the confidence of a sheepish seventh grader at your first prom.  

You undermine your credibility. When you need to read something basic and foundational, something that your audience expects you to know cold, you lose credibility. If you’re an expert in structured finance, you shouldn’t have to read the definition of a securitization. Watch how often you see people read from their notes notes from the moment you step on the podium—it often looks like they don’t even know what their name is!

Your eyes disengage. If you’ve got your nose in your notes, the only thing your audience is seeing is the top of your head. And when the audience can’t see your eyes, they aren’t thinking and feeling good things about you and your content.

“The eyes are the single most important part of the body in transmitting information non-verbally”

— Carolyn. P. Atkins

A ton of great academic research has been conducted to better understand the importance and impact of eye contact in communication. One interesting study, conducted by Carolyn P. Atkins, a researcher at West Virginia University, explored the audience’s perceptions of speakers who make eye contact for different amounts of the time when speaking.

The findings were instructive:

• A speaker perceived to have “no” eye contact looked at his audience less than 10% of the time;

• A speaker who looked at her audience 10 – 50% of the time was judged to have “minimal” eye contact;

• A speaker with “good” eye contact looked at her audience 90 – 100% of the time.

You don’t even get to “good” until you’re making eye contact with your audience at least 90% of the time. Ninety percent! Michael Jordan said, “I didn’t come here to be average.” and I bet that's true of you too. You don't get out of bed in the morning striving to be "minimal". You want to be good, even great! This research study suggests that with anything less than "good" eye contact, audiences will perceive you to be:  

Nervous Uncomfortable Afraid Insecure Hesitant Cowardly

Unsociable Weak Inferior Dull Boring

Ouch.

On the flip side, once you do hit the 90% mark, your audience will perceive you to be:

• Intelligent;

• Likeable; and

• More deserving of a higher salary.

And they will have more active brains, better recall and do more with what you share when you make “good” eye contact. Nice.

So, if you’re not hitting the 90% mark—and most of us aren’t—you have some work to do. And it’s work worth doing. You want to ensure your audience is receiving you and your content in the best possible light.

Here are seven ways you can improve your eye contact the next time you present…

1. Get your head out of your notes. This is easy to say, hard to do. If you need to script what you want to say to help you think through your remarks, fine. But don’t stop your prep there. Distill your script into high-level bullets and use them to prompt you to speak. Separate your reading from your speaking. Speak with eye contact and then pause to look at your notes. I call this "pausing to reload".
   
   We have a tendency to fall in love with our own prose—it’s called the Eloquence Trap—and when we have our speech written out in front of us, we stay stuck in our notes and that kills our eye contact and credibility. Instead, focus on getting the essence of the message across rather than obsessing over eloquence. Essence with good eye contact beats eloquence every time.
    
2. Don’t be a grazer. People can feel it if you’re not making authentic eye contact, when you’re grazing around the room and your eyes aren’t landing anywhere. It feels like you’re not really in the room but caught up in your own internal teleprompter. So, when you thank the person who introduced you, make eye contact with her and then turn to someone in the middle of the room. From there, start making meaningful, sustained connections to random people throughout the room.
    
3. Lengthen the duration of eye contact per person. Connect with a human in the audience for 3-5 seconds before you move on. Time gets compressed when you’re under pressure—5 seconds will feel like 30.
    
4. Wait for a natural pause before you shift your eye contact. When you have a natural pause in your content, disengage your eyes and move onto the next person. Be sure to randomly select the people you make eye contact with so you don’t look like a robot—or one of those crazy lawn sprinklers that jerk from side to side. People will understand their turn to connect with you will come.
   
   If the stage lights are bright and the room is dark, look for audience members with glasses. Their lenses catch the light and can give you focal targets. You can also divide the room into 6-8 sections and move around the room landing for 3-5 seconds on each section as you talk.
   
   When you slow it down and become more deliberate with your eye contact, your presence strengthens and the audience senses that you are calm, comfortable and confident.
    
5. Align your eye contact with your most interested listener. When you get to the content that you know particular people in the audience care about, look at them when you talk about it. Look at the business line leader, for instance, when speaking about the acquisition’s efficiencies and the head of corporate development when speaking about reps and warranties. This helps your content land in a powerful way and makes them feel like you’ve designed the presentation just for them.
    
6. Square up your shoulders and your face. If you want to increase the consistency of your basketball shots, you turn your shoulders to be square with the hoop. (Trust me, it works. I’m 5’8” and take all the help I can get!) The same is true with eye contact. Square up your shoulders and your face with the person you’re looking at and you’ll appear to be comfortable, not stiff, as you enhance your presence. You don’t have to move your feet every time you make eye contact, but sometimes you’ll want to. The same notion applies when you are sitting—most boardroom chairs swivel—so move when necessary to make meaningful eye contact.
    
7. Practice every day. Practice making sustained eye contact in casual conversations in your personal and professional contexts. Build the habit in low stress environments so you can do it comfortably when pressure is on. Serena Williams learned to smash the ball when she was six. She still practices it to this day.

Your eyes may well be the windows to your soul, but they’re also the windows through which your audience experiences your confidence and credibility. Don’t miss the opportunity connect with them.

How to Present Like a Rock Star When You Can't See the Audience

Technology has made incredible things possible: humans on the moon, rovers on Mars and unlimited, on-demand reruns of the West Wing on Netflix. It’s also made it possible for people living in places far away from each other to work together. And that is an awesome thing—everyone wins when people can live where and how they want while working on great projects. Everyone wins, except perhaps you as you try to present or pitch to a group of people you can’t see and can’t see you.

Modern work realities have created a very difficult presenting situation. When you can’t see your audience, you have fewer tools to capture and keep your audience’s attention and you have very limited ways to get real-time feedback. Being relevant, clear, compelling and organized is that much more important because if you lose your audience when they’re not physically with you, they’re completely gone.

So what to do in this techno reality of absent audiences?

Here are some tips for keeping those body-less voices engaged...

1.    Ask questions.

Audiences, present or virtual, have a hard time ignoring rhetorical questions. They may not always answer them immediately (see note about staying with silence below), but rhetorical questions snap your listener’s attention back into your presentation. Just be careful not to overuse them.

You can also ask questions that you know the audience has and then answer them. Before you hold your webinar or conference call, ask your client/host about the top 3-5 pressing questions the audience has. When you’re giving your presentation, reference back to this conversation and the questions as you respond to them.

You could also poll your audience, even when they’re remote.  Ask questions like “how many people have encountered this problem?” or “How many of you see this as an opportunity?” It’s also a good remote presentation practice to let the audience know that a question is coming so they can collect their thoughts. That approach sounds might sound like this: “In a minute, I’m going to ask you about…, but before I do let me finish up my last point by saying…”. When you’re ready for the audience’s responses, you can invite them to share their thoughts over the conference line or ask them to share via the chat box on whatever webinar or virtual meeting platform you’re using.

2.    Stay with silence.

When you’re presenting to a remote audience you will need to fight against the discomfort you may have with silence. You might worry that it’s a strange experience on the other side of the presentation too. But the reality is that your audience will appreciate a chance to absorb the concepts you’re sharing and being able to do so will increase their likelihood of staying engaged in your session.  

And if all you get are crickets when you ask a question or request feedback, you can make a joke (“come on people throw me a bone!”) or call on specific people, friendly allies you know to be in the audience and open to participating.

3.    Use visuals with more copy.

Since your audience won’t have the same visual cues from you to locate where you on in your talk track, it’s often helpful to use visuals with more copy so people are clear on where you are in the presentation and what you’re talking about. It’s also helpful to use directional language periodically (“Now, moving onto the third point…”) so people know where you are on the screen/slide.)

4.    Incorporate more examples and stories.

When your audience can’t see you, storytelling and examples are more important than ever if you want to keep them engaged. Use short vignettes and crisp examples to keep things interesting.

5.    Boost your voice.

A remote audience can’t see your eyes or your body language, elevating the importance of your voice. To add more impact, stand up when you deliver your presentation. This allows your diaphragm to expand so you can project more effectively.

And use your hands, even if your audience can’t see them. Your hands are connected to your voice. When your hands are animated your voice will be too and you and your content will be more engaging.

6.    Be clear and colloquial.

Eliminate qualifying phrases and distracting sounds that make you sound uncertain and distract your easily-distracted listeners. Phrases like “sort of,” “kind of," “I guess,” “like,” “ok?,” “right?,” “you know?,” and “do you know what I mean?” All of this gets amplified when an audience can only hear your voice.

Do keep some of the conversational colloquialisms that make you sound natural. This could include some dialogue, snippets of important conversations you’ve had with clients, customers or member of the audience. It’s more engaging when you recount parts of conversations rather than report them, such as, “The client said, ‘You miss the deadline, and I’ll be pissed. Do it twice and you’re done with our business.’” This is more interesting than reporting about the conversation, as in, “The client emphasized the importance of meeting deadlines.”   

7.    Mix it up.

It’s always important to fight habituation when you present and it’s doubly so when you’re speaking to an audience you can’t see.  Mix up the pace of your presentation, add pauses for effect, adjust the tone and volume of your voice when appropriate.

8.    Rehearse with the technology.

Murphy’s Law about things going wrong seems to be particularly true when presenting with technology. When I saw Salim Ismail from Singularity University present, he joked, “AI (Artificial Intelligence) is easy. AV is difficult.” Rehearsing with the tech you plan to use will save you a mountain of stress on presentation day. 

9.    Be respectful of time.

This is always important and even more so when your audience is of the virtual variety. You have to start and stop on time.

10. Send what you promised.

If you've promise an agenda or slides in advance of the presentation or call, send them in advance. And make sure you budget for a few minutes of “document finding” at the beginning of your presentation so everyone has what they need in front of them before you begin. Remind them where to find the documents just before and during the beginning of your session.

11. Make behavioural requests.

It doesn’t hurt to lay out expectations and make behavioural requests at the beginning of the presentation or call. You might set up the call with a request like this: “Here’s what I’ve found will deliver the richest experience for everyone: shut off your other devices, shut down all other the apps, windows or tabs so you can be present, participate and contribute.”

Conference calls can be particularly painful. (And should you need a refresher on the absurdity of conference calls and other remote communication, check out this funny video.) To get the most out of a conference call situation, always circulate the agenda before hand, take attendance and ask people to announce and introduce themselves when they come on the call. Referencing back to people on the call and what they said earlier on the call or before it started helps keep people engaged. And be sure to announce yourself before you contribute if not everyone will recognize your dulcet tones.

So, if you’re not able to convince your tightfisted boss or budget sensitive client to pony up for a train or plane ticket so you can present in person, don’t panic. While it’s not always easy to be persuasive and engaging when you can’t see your audience, it is possible. Remember that they are with you, invite them to participate and be your best, most animated self to keep them engaged.

The Importance of Speaking as a Signal Skill

In the inaugural episode of The Podium Project podcast, I talked about speaking as a "signal skill". The concept generated a lot of interest and feedback so I thought it would be helpful to expand on the idea a bit further here on the blog.

Here’s the rub when it comes to speaking: if you're a compelling and confident speaker, people assume you're good at other things too. If you're a great speaker, people think you're a great leader, a strategic thinker, a trustworthy advisor, a charismatic and a friendly person. The act of speaking confidently signals that you have competence in a variety of other areas, even if you have less experience than the people around you.

One of the best examples that illustrates speaking is signal skill is the ascendency of Barack Obama. When he ran for the Democratic nomination, he was a junior Senator from the state of Illinois with a couple of years experience under his belt. Everyone else vying for the nomination in 2008 had more experience than him. But his ability to share his ideas with clarity, conviction and an infectious sense of possibility shaped the way the electorate viewed him—someone fit to hold the world’s highest elected office.

But you don’t need to be a politician to benefit from speaking as a signal skill. It’s available to everyone, whether you're an management consultant, a lawyer, an investment advisor, a creative director or an entrepreneur. Improving your ability to speak takes hours (and not 10,000 of them) and it enhances people's perceptions of you in a way that might otherwise take years.

After coaching thousands of speakers over the past two decades, I can assure you that speaking is a learned skill. You don’t need to be born with Margaret Thatcher’s brain or Bill Clinton’s charm. A few small changes to how you prepare, frame and deliver your communication makes a big difference to how others perceive you and that shift in perception can help you quickly you achieve your bigger picture goals.

One of my clients made a few tweaks to her presentation and delivery before getting on the podium at a big off-site meeting. The next day, one of her colleagues approached her and said, “I’ve been watching you speak for 30 years and you have never spoken like that. You had the hair on the back of my neck standing up, the room was in the palm of your hand...". Those simple tweaks she made transformed how others viewed her as a leader and emboldened her belief (and theirs) in her broader capabilities. The best part? She didn’t need another degree or to get up an hour earlier every morning to get better. She just needed to spend a few minutes of focusing on the right things.

So, if your speaking skill set is sending a signal to the people around you, how strong is yours and what message is it conveying? What would shift for you professionally if you improved your speaking skills and took things to the next level? I'd love to hear about your experience in the comments below.