Communication Skills and How to Improve Them

A speaker may be able to impress an audience with techniques and entertainment, but if everyone walks out unaffected, than the speaker is not a leader. He is simply his title: a speaker. The speakers who truly engage an audience and make them think about themselves, their role, their company or their country is atypical. To engage an audience on this level, one must have true sincerity in what one says. At the heart of leadership is the facility to tap one's own values and experiences and convey them to others. Audiences today can identify mendacity swiftly and are generally more disparaging than before. So how do experienced speakers overcome this ostensibly sizeable hurdle? Many techniques exist to overcome self-doubt and project confidence. With the appropriate use of these methods, the audience believes the presenter to be successful and valid.

Authenticity seems to be the only characteristic of a speaker that truly reaches audiences today. Speakers who create meaning and inspiration expand themselves through new and broader perspectives. For an audience to recognize this meaning and stimulation, the speaker must exude confident characteristics, such as a high sense of worth and self-efficacy. According to Colby, those with high self-worth and self-efficacy predict that those judging them would arbitrate them as ones with high self-esteem. But do audiences really judge speakers with high self-esteem differently from speakers with low self-esteem? According to research performed by Colby, "Even though low CAs [communication apprehension] predicted higher self-efficacy and self-worth scores for themselves, they were not perceived to have higher self-efficacy or self worth scores by their partners. Similarly, even though high CAs guessed that they would be scored lower on both self-esteem dimensions, they were not perceived any differently from low CAs on either measure". These findings propose that even though some individuals demonstrate manifest disparity in the way they perceive themselves and the way they consider others view them; those notions do not essentially match how they are actually viewed by others. Although these findings suggest that self-esteem has no impact on an audience (regarding their perception of the speakers self-esteem), the embodiment of it does make a difference in a presentation. Those with high self esteem tend to include their own characteristics in their presentation. Confidence therefore exudes from their speech.

A self-fulfilling prophecy is an expectation about the other side's behavior, which leads the other side to behave in ways that confirm one's expectations. The connection between confidence and a self-fulfilling prophecy is clear when comparing the prophecy of a presenter with high confidence with that of a presenter with low confidence. Presenters that expect their audience to be hostile, cynical, and hard to persuade reduce their own demands and abilities and eventually achieve worse outcomes, thereby allowing the audience to claim the characteristics the presenter believed they had (Diekmann). However, those with high self-confidence will most likely believe that the audience will be motivated and engaged. By believing this, confidence radiates throughout the speech, and the speaker impacts the audience simply through his poise, which in itself is motivational. Those with low self-confidence will most likely have minimal influence on an audience because "by reducing their demands in the face of expected competition, negotiators