Practice your public speaking skills in public spaces - park, square, etc.

One of the main factors of a good public speaking is to attract the audience. The word public speaking itself have the word "public", which implies for everyone who's listening to our speech. Attraction usually comes along with personal interest and good leadership. This does not only apply to public speaking alone. Whether you're leading a group of people for aerobic dancing or you're gathering public to make a protest, you need to create a sense of attraction and awareness so that people want to follow you. You can captivate this by oral, visual, motion etc.

Even though you have a great speech written for you, it does not necessarily mean that you'll be a good public speaker. People may not want to pay attention to you or respond to you. So, a simple way to practice to be a good speaker is to do some leisure activities in a public space such as parks or squares. This will give you an idea of how many percentage of the total population at a certain place would pay attention to you.

To give you an example, I have seen two aerobic dancers in Lumpini Park in Bangkok every evening. Whenever Dancer A takes the stage, there are more audience filling up the entrance of the park gate. For Dancer B, there are half the audience of dancer A. I tried to analyse why there's such a difference since both performs at the exact location and the same number of potential participants. Then I realized that (1) Dancer A plays on recently hit songs while B just uses songs that she's comfortable with. (2) Dance A makes her move slow, easy and clear while dancer B focus on her own accuracy. These factors revealed that Dancer B did not paid any attention to her audience and did not adapt her activity to suit the peers, while Dancer A overtook her by doing so. This is a good start for public speaking on how you can receive the public attention and how you can make them more comfortable being with you.

So, in your school activities or workplace parties, you should try to test how much you are capable of attracting others' attention. This can make you to become a good public speaker.

If you're interested to make such kind of activity in Bangkok, I would suggest you to go to Lumpini Park - Bangkok, Thailand just by Silom MRT. This park have different peer group of different age, interest and personality, and it is also the place with widest public leisure activities happening every day. There's no doubt it could be the best place for you to try out some public activities.

What should do after I graduate ?

from the previous article that i wrote last 2 years (2011) after i got topic to write and submit to the English class "How can you learn public speaking through daily talks?"


WIKIPEDIA: Public Speaking
WIKIPEDIA: Audience Response