Podcasting and public speaking have a lot in common, and practicing one can help you with the other. That’s why it can be such a good idea to play around with podcasting as a speaker if you haven’t given it a go already.
But what exactly are those similarities, and how do the two go hand-in-hand? Even more importantly, what does this mean for public speakers and how can they benefit from podcasting?
In today’s article, we’re going to take a look at exactly that.
Public speakers are always looking for new ways to practice so that they can hone their skills and become the best that they can be in the public speaking field. Podcasting is super appealing here because it gives speakers a regular place to practice their speaking, even when there’s not much else going on and the events circuit is quiet. If you want to be the best public speaker that you can be, you can’t afford to turn down any opportunity, so podcasting just makes sense.
No public speaker can get away with simply reusing the same material throughout the entirety of their career. There’s always a need to develop new material, and podcasting provides the perfect place for you to do that. It’s a low-risk, low-stakes situation in which if you make a mistake or something doesn’t quite work out, it doesn’t matter too much. It’s better to find that out during a podcasting session than it is to die on stage.
Podcasting is a great way to make connections in your industry and to find people that you might want to work with in the future. This is good news if you work as a consultant, and it can also help you to land public speaking gigs if you speak to someone who later goes on to organize an event. Knowing the right people is just as important as knowing the right things, and podcasting can help you with both of those.
One of the best ways to improve your public speaking skills is to record yourself speaking and then to listen back to it so that you can spot common mistakes and find ways to improve. Podcasting can be great for this because it’s designed to be listened back to, and so you can make a point of listening to every podcast that you record to look out for areas of improvement that you can apply to your public speaking going forward.
Podcasting forces you to expose yourself to new ideas, whether that’s because you’re bringing in a guest who has a different point of view to you, or whether it’s because you find new studies and best practices when you’re carrying out your research. Without new ideas, you’ll start to stagnate, and eventually no one will want to listen to you speak because you’ll have nothing new to offer them.
Verbal signals like tone of voice and the way that we emphasize certain words can have a huge impact on how our presentations are received. The good news is that by recording podcasts, we force ourselves to focus on those verbal signals because they’re the only things that we have available to give listeners an indication of what we’re thinking. We can then take this practice and use it to make our future presentations stickier and more approachable.
This point is interesting because it also applies to people who aren’t public speakers. Podcasting can dramatically increase your reach and introduce you to an audience that you might not otherwise have a chance to interact with. This builds your following and provides you with a new stream of people who consume your content, which is why podcasting is so popular with thought leaders of all shapes and sizes, whether they’re public speakers or not.
Building on from the last point, podcasting is great because it helps you to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. You’ll talk about the topics that matter to a relevant audience and use your own experience to show that you know exactly what you’re talking about. This then ensures that when people need advice, you’re the first person that they turn to.
As a public speaker, you’re going to find yourself using microphones all the time, from podcasting to speaking at events. If you’re new to the industry or you’ve only ever delivered small scale talks where there was no need for amplification, microphones can be intimidating or feel unnatural. By podcasting and getting used to using a microphone, you’ll put yourself more at ease when you use one at an event.
You might remember the concept of scientific testing from when you were at school or if you’ve done any software testing. The basic idea is that if you’re trying something, you need to change one variable at a time so that if there’s a change in the result, you know exactly what it was that caused that change. With podcasting, you control all of the variables, so you can change one thing at a time (such as your tone or whether you speak for half an hour instead of an hour) and measure the effect that it has.
Now that you know our thoughts on how podcasting can help with public speaking, we want to hear from you. Have you given podcasting a try? If so, did you find it useful? What similarities did you notice between podcasting and public speaking?
As always, we’d love to keep the discussion going, so be sure to let us know in the comments. You can also follow us on your favorite social networking sites for more. We’ll see you soon for another article
Popular Categories