Neha Joshi

How you deliver a speech — how you use your voice, gestures, and entire body — can add power to what you say. Or it can weaken your message and its impact.

1. Prepare a Powerful Speech

Delivery only gets you so far. What matters most is your content: the idea you’re advocating, its clarity, its supporting evidence and reasoning, its emotional appeal, its stories and images. Write out or, at the very least, prepare a detailed outline of what you want to say.

2. Rehearse

Never get up in front of an audience without having practiced what you want to say and how you want to say it. Stand up while you’re practicing and, if possible, walk around. Speak it out loud. Practice it at least three times.

3. Breathe

Taking slow, deep breaths immediately before you stand to speak is the best way to calm your jitters at the time most people get most nervous. Being conscious of your breathing is a great way to keep you grounded in the present moment.

4. Move with Purpose

You don’t have to stand firmly rooted in one place. Just be sure that you move with a purpose. Don’t pace around, as if you’re nervous, or walk from one side of the state to the other and back again as if you don’t have anything better to do. Change direction when you change directions in your speech.

5. Stand Still

Standing still, with your sides at your hand, is your “default position” while giving a speech. It’s the physical equivalent of pausing while you’re speaking. Standing still — and being confident in your standing — conveys a great deal of power.

6. Hold Your Eye Contact

Don’t let your eyes roam aimlessly over your audience. Don’t try to look at everyone at the same time in some generalized gaze. (It can’t be done.) Instead, look at one person at a time. Establish eye contact with that one person and hold it for five to eight seconds while you complete a sentence. Then look at someone else, preferably someone in another part of the room.

7. Use Bigger Gestures

Generally speaking, it’s best not to rehearse the gestures you want to use. You’ll come off looking staged or stilted. Use the gestures you naturally use in conversation, only make them larger, more expansive.

8. Speak Louder

Even if you’re using a microphone, raise your volume. It will add energy and vitality to your voice. (You cannot shout in a monotone.)

9. Pause

Unleashing a steady flow of words doesn’t make you sound like smooth and polished. It makes you sound rushed and nervous. So pause every so often. Pause right before making a bold assertion. And pause again after you’ve made it.

10. Smile

When you smile, you make people feel more at ease. They sense that you like them. (You do, don’t you?) It also sets you at ease.

Delivering a speech in this way will add power to your message. And it will establish you as someone worth listening to.