WEEKLY LISTENING Pt.1

The 110 techniques of communication and public speaking - David Phillips

 

David JP Phillips has spent 7 years studying 5000 speakers, amateurs and professionals in order to understand what makes a good speaker 'good' and a great speaker 'great'. As a result he found 110 core skills with loads of sub skills. These are 110 core skills:

The 110 techniques of communication and skills

David picks out his favorite skills and shows a demonstration. He takes chair as an example. A chair is representing your idea and you want people to buy it. There are two options.

• You are either standing on one side of the chair and you’re a fairly mediocre communicator; you hope for the best but sometimes it work and sometimes it doesn't.
• The other option is, you are on the other side of the chair and you know exactly what you are doing. You know taking a step forward increases focus, shifting yourself lower increases trust, tilting your head slightly increases empathy, lowering your voice, you get anticipation and if you pause you get undivided attention.

He further explains if everyone can become good at these skills. The answer is yes, of course. It's all about skills and not talent. Skills are learned, you are not born with it. 

He picks some important skills and here are some tips about them:

Body Language:

• Avoid closing your body language, that's a sign of feeling threatened. Communicate with an open body language.
• People observe your body language more than listening to you. It's important that your words and body language match, they should go together. If you are speaking about something positive, your facial expressions are positive and you are speaking positively but your body language doesn't match people will be distracted. If your body language and gestures are not saying the same what you are saying verbally, there is a disturbance in the communication.
• Functional gesturing is about using your gestures for what they are supposed to be used for.

Voice:

• Keep a calm pace. When a person has a low pace our brain reacts to it as it's more important than what a person says with high pace. 
• Pause is really important. When you don't take pause, you rather use "uh's and yeah's" which signals that you don't know what you are talking about and that's where it goes wrong. 
• People will prefer silence over the "uh's, yeah's and OH’s"

These were the most important skills that a public speaker should use. It's going to work wonders.

Some other skills:

• Looking up illustrates that a person is thinking, this helps in gaining audience's attention.

• Audible Inhale makes the audience believe that you are going to say something that's exciting.

• Duchene smile is a natural face expression, which means smiling with your mouth and eyes and it plays a significant role in communication and public speaking. The Duchene smile is an expression that signals true enjoyment and is influential. 

• Self-laughter increases anticipation of what you are going to say.

These were the four small skills; it can be a small skill but still have a great impact. So if you haven't used these before, start using these and it will make a great difference to the speech.