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Tips for Trainers, Group Facilitators and Career Counsellors

If your job title is Life Skills Coach, Group Facilitator, Trainer, Career Counsellor or Career Coach, chances are you constantly use communication skills in front of an audience.  Tune up your public speaking skills by borrowing some simple tips from the actor and professional voice-over artist.  

At acting schools across the country, one of the most important classes is voice and vocal training.  By perfecting the art of speaking for a living, an actor is able to build a career with a voice that can be interesting and uplifting.  Workshop facilitators and trainers can accomplish the same thing by incorporating some of the following techniques:                                                                                                 

(1) Physical:  Physicality is important to speakers.  You need to be loose and in touch with your own physicality.  Use standard warm-up exercises to get yourself attuned into your physical self before speaking before an audience.  Exercises can include stretching, breathing and standard relaxation techniques.

(2) Vocal:  A speaker’s voice is their instrument, and like an instrument it must be warmed up and trained.  Use simple vocal exercises to help yourself get started with expanding your vocal capacity.  These activities can include warm-ups and tongue twisters.

-      Warm-ups incorporate methods such as sustaining your breath on a hum.  Play with the pitch, up and down the musical scale, feeling vibrations resonate through your body.  As you get more adapt at feeling the resonation, try and move it deliberately, through your chest, your jaw, your nose, your sinus cavities, your forehead, the top of your head, then back down again.

-      Tongue Twisters:

“Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers

A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked.”

“Sister Suzy sewing shirts for soldiers

Such skill at sewing shirts Sister Suzy shows.”

(3) Acting:  By using standard acting techniques, a speaker can increase their skills at memory, movement, timing, and humour.  By learning what actors call “blocking”, you can improve how you stand on stage or in front of an audience.  By achieving dramatic tension, you can learn how to sustain the audience’s interest in your presentation, so it never feels like time is dragging.

(4) Stage Fright: even the most talented actors and speakers might still experience stage fright.  To get past it, remember:

(a) Stage fright always feels much worse than it looks.

(b)The audience doesn’t want you to fail; they are out there supporting your success.

(c) Nervousness and excitement, physically, are very similar.  Focus on being excited.

(d)Breathe deeply.

(e) Forget about yourself, and focus on what you have to do, and the information you are providing to your participants.

(f)  Be brave, be confident, and be honest.

Just like actors, trainers, speakers and group facilitators, should be constantly studying their craft.  Keep a checklist of public speaking tips nearby.  Before a presentation or workshop remember to answer the questions:

- How are you dressed?

- How is your posture?

- How are your gestures?

- How is your eye contact?

- How is your voice?

- How is your language?

- And above all: how is your smile today?

·        To learn more about public speaking tips visit www.toastmasters.org

·        To discover local vocal training studios visit TAAS (Toronto Association of Acting Studios) at www.torontoactingstudios.com

·        Tune up your speaking skills by borrowing what actors use every day.  Before long, you’ll get an encore!

 سید حسن مجیدی