How many people are prepared to speak in front of large audiences? Not many and yet it is always an excellent opportunity to reach out to people quickly and effectively. Public speaking is about connecting with every single person in your audience. It is about managing yourself and your stress in order to deliver the required message as competently as possible. But nobody’s perfect and perfect people often appear cold to people with high emotional intelligence. So mistakes are fine as long as there are not too many of them and they are not repeated. To make mistakes is to be human and we all like humans don’t we.
Reading from a script or reading power point slides is worthless most people can read for themselves, it is the speaker’s additional knowledge that people want to hear. Nobody attends a voluntary presentation unless they want to understand something better so the more natural we are the more we connect. And if we connect we give the audience the opportunity to learn. We all learn in different ways using Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic means and the more you can cover all of these in your presentation the more you will connect with your audience
Three basic rules for public speaking are engage everyone, be natural in yourself and allow the audience to go away with what they want, additional knowledge.