How many hours a day do you spend talking to your family, friends, colleagues or even strangers? The more often you spend talking to someone, the wider range of skill you have developed in speaking. The following are a range of skills that might have been developed through everyday talks: -
1. Organizing your thoughts logically.
Instead of speaking out whatever flows into your mind, you need to find a logical order so that the listener can tract your points. This may be seen in the case of telling people direction or guiding on how to follow the procedures in our daily life.
2. Adapting your message to the listener.
You may learn to respond different to different age group of people and people with different background knowledge. For example, you are a geology major. Two people ask you how pearls are formed. One is your roommate and the other is your nine-year-old niece.
Your response to the first listener maybe:
“When any irritant, say a grain of sand, gets inside the oyster’s shell, the oyster automatically secretes a substance called nacre, which is principally calcium carbonate and is the same material that lines the oyster’s shell. The nacre accumulates in layers around the irritant core to form the pearl.”
Your response to your niece may be:
“Imagine you are an oyster on the ocean floor. A grain of sand gets inside your shell and makes you uncomfortable. So you decide to cover it up. You cover it up with a material called mother-of pearl. The covering builds up around the grain of sand to make a pearl.”
3. Story-telling skills
It is also essential to Change your tone of conversation according to the mood you want to create inside the hearers’ mind. For example, you’re telling a sad story to your friend. The first line of your conversation should be dull and depressing instead of starting off with a funny joke.
4. Adapting to listener feedback.
Whenever you talk with somebody, you need to beware of that person’s verbal, facial and physical reactions. For example, you should not go on talking and talking when your friends stop responding you and trying to change the topic. You’ll have to realize that your topic is too boring, unrelated or insulting them.
Each and every day, we’re practicing these skills regularly without noticing it. They’re the most important communication skills you will need for public speaking. Most people who are able to communicate well in daily talk are capable of public speaking just as well. By the same way, improving in public speaking can make you into a better communicator in a wide range of situations such as discussion, meetings, conferences and presentations.
