“Speech is power: speech is to persuade, to convert, to compel.” This is the line extracted from a book Ralph Waldo Emerson. We believe speaking is power because it lets you stand out in the crowd. The essence of public speaking is enormous and is realized as a good quality these days.
To define, Public speaking is an art of confidently expressing ideas and views in a systematic, expressive, and structured manner while persuading the listeners to endorse your ideas and views. Although speaking in public can be a nerve-wracking experience for even the most confident communicators, everyone yearns for having the skills of flawless public speaking. Effective communication and public speaking abilities are vital in every aspect of professional and social life situations. Recruiters often look for public speaking skills as much as written communication skills when they are looking to assemble professional managers in an organization and public speaking skills is therefore necessary to advance your professional career and leadership position.
Glocal After School introduced this course for the ones who wanted to learn Public Speaking and it was delivered by a very experienced speaker Mr. Pradeep Ghimire who is the Co-Founder at Debate Network Nepal.
“Amplifying Speaking Workshop” was a brief yet fun and powerful workshop designed for those who want to amplify their speaking skills. Its core content included ideas, both basic and advanced, on how to be more persuasive and how to do better – content, style and strategy-wise. The workshop tried to dig out answers to the very questions of why speaking is necessary, why we are hesitant or afraid, and why do we deliver ineffective speeches as we introspect to discover and attempt to strengthen the speaker within us. Sessions such as on vocal variation were designed to help measure frequency of the speeches. For the benefit of the participants, the feedback was also provided. This course helped the participants to learn the basics of fundamental speaking for a beginner and for the seasoned speaker, this course helped to better understand public speaking and push them to the next level. Basically, this course specialized in guiding the trainees to refine their knowledge, skills, and intelligence with regard to public speaking proficiency.
The first statement by the speaker was –“We all have a good speaker within ourselves. We need to explore and make that quality of speaker improve through a creative approach.” There are different components in good speaking. They are contents, style, presentation, word selection, time management and other techniques.
There was discussion about effective communication, Modes and Perception and Reflection as well. Likewise, there were three terms that were explained in a detailed manner. They were Matter Content, Matter Style and Matter Strategy. Mr. Ghimire said that a matter is something that can be written and content that follows must be clear, logical and interesting. The content needs to relate to the present condition and also mentioned that a speaker needs to be able to relate the message he/she wish to deliver.
The course dealt with various different contexts like developing competence to show presentation confidence, ways to Structure your topic’s message to speak with conviction, how to send clear messages to your audiences to demonstrate expertise, Sending signals with our body language and voice and also ways to Engage their listeners to hold their attention and influence like an expert. Likewise, The participants were asked to demonstrate their speaking skills as practice and feedbacks were provided by the instructor. The most important part of Amplifying Speaking was Vocal variation and vocal modulation. There was a formula which was explained to all the participants’ i.e. VoRaToPi where Vo means voice, Ra means a rate of speech, To means Tone of speech and Pi means Pitch of the speech.
The participants were introduced to the topic – Modes of Persuasion. Persuasion is clearly a sort of demonstration since people are most fully persuaded when we consider a thing to have been demonstrated. Aristotle’s modes of persuasion is believed to be the heart of almost every speech. They build credibility, stir emotions, and prompt action. There are three modes of persuasion. They are Ethos, Logos and Pathos. Ancient rhetorical theory identified three main modes of persuasion: a speaker could prove his points or render his arguments plausible by means of logos (that is, reasoning, analysis and argument), ethos (that is, the characters of the individuals involved in the trial, especially that of the defendant and the speaker), or pathos (that is, strong emotions roused by the speaker in his audience).
The best part of this session was the activities and assignment. The participants were given the assignment to prepare their 2-minute video depicting their speaking skills. And the instructor provided the feedbacks to all the videos that were uploaded as a part of assignments. Likewise, the participants were also asked to comment on each other’s video to ensure interaction within themselves. Some really good learning were noted from each participant on the last day of the session. It was a very interactive session and Glocal is proud to have these amazing speakers shape their way to develop their skills.
We believe in Skill Learning!