Painless Presentations: The Proven, Stress-Free Way to Successful Public Speaking

Chapter 1

The Seven Aspects of Speaking

Delivering a presentation is one of the greatest fears of many people. It does not matter if you are a business professional, a student, a member of the cloth, a teacher, or a politician—preparing and delivering a presentation can be a painful process. Being asked to deliver a presentation brings back bad memories from our early school years when we had to deliver our first oral book report. Many of us were told to pick a book, read it, and prepare an oral book report without being given any guidance. We had no structure or idea how to prepare for this life-changing event.

That event was one of the most frightening events in many people’s lives, and many of you probably still remember the sweaty palms, the nervousness, and the butterflies in your stomach. That fear, more commonly known as speaking anxiety, can stay with you an entire lifetime, unless you are taught how to overcome these fears. Painless Presentations: The Proven Stress-Free Way to Successful Public Speaking provides the tools and techniques to help you learn how to reduce your speaking anxiety and deliver a more stress-free presentation.

To be a successful speaker, one needs to learn and understand many aspects of a presentation. This chapter will discuss these seven aspects. An effective speaker learns to deal with all these aspects at the same time. The seven aspects are as follows:

Aspect 1—The Speaker

Aspect 2—The Message

Aspect 3—The Audience

Aspect 4—The Channel

Aspect ...