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Your clients, your prospective customers, your students – whoever your audience is — they want to hear your confidence. They want to get a solid feeling from you.
They’re looking for you to provide an answer for them. Whatever you’re offering, they need to hear your certainty – in your words and your tone. And they need to see it in your body language. You need to be bold.
What Speaking Boldness Is
Webster defines boldness as showing courage, begin distinct and clear, being conspicuous and confident. How does this apply to speaking? When you’re talking, to be bold you need to:
- be honest and direct. Here’s where the courage comes in. Just tell the truth. That’s what people want to hear.
- be clear – take a stand and state it clearly. Forget about trying to please everyone or trying appeal to everybody. Doing that makes your message vague, too general, and even confusing. So be clear.
- be direct – Again, take a stand and just say it! Leave out the disclaimers and the minimizers and the maybe’s.
- be sure – Communicate your certainty with a strong voice and by showing your own enthusiasm about what you offer.
What Speaking Boldness Is Not
Boldness is not aggression. Being bold is being assertive, not aggressive. That’s a whole different thing. With my clients I see a lot of confusion here – especially for spirit-centered businesswomen. Because of that confusion, they avoid being bold in talking and in presenting.
Being bold is not about being pushy or hype-y. It’s not about having a hostile edge in order to appear powerful.
Why Speakers Get Aggressive
When you’re anxious about speaking, being a bold speaker can seem almost impossible. So many people use some form of anger to power through their fear. It’s that anger that turns it away from boldness and into aggression.
They may get mad at themselves and scold themselves enough to just MAKE themselves speak. Or they motivate themselves with a warrior-mode message to find the strength to overcome the fear – like a football team in the locker room.
When you rev up those engines and all that adrenaline, you come across as aggressive – in your facial expression and in your words. And people run in the other direction, don’t they? No wonder you’re avoiding this.
What’s The Solution?
Follow these three steps:
- Honestly assess your own speaking style and get some outside feedback. Are you bold, aggressive, or (yikes!) forgettable as a speaker?
- Keep those boldness qualities we talked about in mind when you’re crafting and delivering your talk.
- Eliminate your fears of speaking so they don’t get in your way of being bold.
What are your thoughts about boldness? Let’s make this a two-way conversation! Leave a comment here on the blog.
And if I can help you quickly release those speaking fears, contact me and we’ll get you on your way to boldness.