Benefits of Improving Your Professional Speaking Skills
Nov 04, 2020
If you think that public speaking is scary, you’re not alone. 25.3% of Americans say they fear speaking in front of a crowd, making it the biggest phobia in the US. Even if it’s not the biggest fear, 74% say they have some fears and anxiety towards public speaking.
However, there is some validity to this fear.
In Vanessa Van Patten’s book, 5 Ways To Make A Killer First Impression, she references a Princeton research project in which people watched a video of political candidates for a split second. It resulted in 70% of the subjects accurately predicting who would win the election. Van Patten says “people can make incredibly accurate snap judgments in a tenth of a second.”
A 2013 Forbes study found that listeners make first impressions based on voice, including judgments on intelligence, trustworthiness, and likeability. This is why it’s so important to improve your professional speaking skills.
Effective speaking skills indicate creativity, critical thinking skills, leadership abilities, poise, and professionalism. Not only are these valuable qualities for the job market, but they’re also a good way of building credibility by speaking at events or conferences.
In this article, we’ve listed the top benefits of improving your professional speaking skills, which will encourage you to get out of your comfort zone and start improving your voice and your profits.
1. Career Advancement
If you’re ready to stand out at work, learning effective speaking skills is a must. Speaking at events and conferences indeed builds credibility. But it’s also possible to build credibility by speaking up in meetings to promote your good ideas, or in interviews to present yourself as a professional. By highlighting your creativity, leadership qualities, and critical thinking skills, career advancements will be right around the corner.
2. Builds your confidence
As you begin improving your professional speaking skills and take on different types of public speaking events, either big or small, you’ll start to build your confidence. It may be terrifying at first, but with every victory comes a feeling of relief and accomplishment. Relief that it’s over, and then accomplishment once you start to receive positive feedback from your peers and audience. Every small victory will further bolster your confidence.
3. Strengthens communication skills
While preparing for an event or conference, you have to carefully think about what you’re going to say. The best framework, persuasive strategy, and which diction to communicate your message, which can also carry over into everyday conversation. This type of thinking can help you improve your communication skills that are crucial for personal and professional success.
4. Builds leadership skills
One of the benefits of improved speaking skills is that you become more aware of how others perceive you.
By learning to control factors like posture, tone of voice, hand gestures, interjections, and pacing, you'll start to change how people positively view you. Speaking in a powerful way that changes people’s minds is a major aspect of leadership.
5. Learn to relax
Learning to be calm in a stressful situation is one of the biggest benefits of improving your speaking skills. The calming skills that you learn to successfully make a presentation are the very same calming techniques you can use to get through other stressful life situations. Those techniques also help if you’re called upon to say a few words at a wedding, awards ceremony, or other special occasions.
Why voice coaching can help
The answer is simple. Voice coaching can help you grow your skills more quickly. As opposed to learning by observing, a voice coach gives you valuable feedback that is useful and actionable. Investing in voice coaching will have a long term positive return on investment. You’ll be ready to take on any type of public speaking event, no matter how big or intimate the audience.
