There are a lot of things you can do to improve your public speaking abilities. You can read up on the latest trends and best practices, rehearse your pauses and inflections, and study your content exhaustively. All of which will no doubt make you a better presenter.
However, there’s one secret that surpasses them all when it comes to elevating your presentations: self-awareness.
A strong sense of self-awareness is critical to being the best presenter you can be. It enhances your public speaking skills in a few key ways:
Self-Awareness is Motivating
It’s easy to get caught up in the meticulous details of presentation prep. You could lose sight of why you’re excited to share your message in the first place. Developing keen self-awareness lets you more easily tap into who you are at your core—your driving values and beliefs—so that you can use what you’re passionate about to propel you through preparation slumps.
Self-Awareness Gives You Mastery
Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is necessary to improvement. After all, how are you to improve if you don’t know what needs to be improved? Self-awareness gives you invaluable insight into where you’re the strongest. You can capitalize on those skills to transform that strength into mastery. It also shows you your weak points, which allows you to eliminate them altogether.
Self-Awareness Helps You Manage Emotions
Emotions are a critical aspect of presentations. They’re what make people feel connected to a presenter and an idea. A strong sense of self will help you tap into your own emotions and harness them to deliver a more compelling presentation. Moreover, having insight into your own emotions also helps you to identify with the feelings of others. This makes it easier for you to draw them out to better connect with you and your message.
Knowing the ways self-awareness can benefit you as a presenter is one thing; but knowing how to find that self-awareness is quite another.
Badge is a proprietary assessment tool designed to help you discover exactly who you are as a presenter—in other words, your presentation persona. It’s basically Myers-Briggs for presenters and it makes the journey to self-awareness a lot more fun and a lot less difficult. Check it out: Ethos3 Badge Assessment tool.
Once you’ve taken the assessment, you’ll have a better idea of you are and what you need to work on, as well as what you’re on your way to mastering.
Want even more guidance on how you can use the secret of self-awareness to deliver a killer presentation? Then check out Scott Schwertly’s book, What’s Your Presentation Persona?, so that you can deliver a killer presentation each and every time.
