The post Covid 19 public speaking plan: why now is a great time to learn

Public speaking will be an important skill post-covid

Hi. Post-COVID, as we start to get back to the office, as we start to go back to normal, whatever normal is these days, is public speaking a useful skill to have? And I certainly think, yes.

Public speaking will never go out of style

Hi. I’m Shola. I’m the professional speaking coach, and also a professional speaker, based in London. Yes, indeed. Public speaking skills will never, ever go out of fashion. They will never go out of style. And of course, most of us, for the last few months, have been doing our public speaking, if any at all, on Zoom, on Microsoft Teams, on Webex. And the skills that we use, there are obviously some overlap between speaking online and speaking offline to groups. But what you may find is that because you haven’t had the opportunity to speak in person with people for a while, you may find that you’re a bit rusty. So if you want to make a real impact when you get back into the office, this could be a good time to brush up on your public speaking skills, and in fact, to improve them, so that they’re at a level beyond where they were when COVID set in.

Prepare yourself for new opportunities through speaker training

So a lot of people over the last few months would have been learning new skills. They’d have been doing LinkedIn Learning, going onto Udemy, taking coaching. A lot of people have spent the time improving. So if that isn’t you, then maybe this is a really good moment now to actually improve those skills that you’ve got. So to take a public speaking class, to get a bit of coaching, because it might be also, that when you get back to the workplace, things are shaken up a bit. There could be opportunities that exist for you that didn’t exist before. You could be somebody who perhaps has been put on furlough, and you might return to no job and need to interview. So you’ll need some vital interviewing skills. And one thing we know that public speaking can do, is it can really help you with confidence, especially if you’re finding that you’re having to interview for jobs, your back in the hurly-burly of meetings at work, rather than being in the more reserved and refined world of online meetings.

Maximise your opportunities to get noticed

So you’re back in that hurly-burly, and you’re having to fight a little bit to be heard, having that extra bit of confidence that you can get from public speaker training can really help to make the difference. As I said, if you’re somebody who wants to speak more, or who just is thrust into a speaking environment, with all the changes that have happened with COVID and in the workplace, you might find that there are opportunities. There might be people who’ve decided to move on, or to go to different jobs, or take different roles. And so there could be a bit of a vacuum or a gap for you, if you’ve got the right skills, to cut through and really make an impact. And of course, being able to say the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, in a way that’s persuasive and impactful, can really help with being noticed.

So I totally think that post-COVID, even though a lot of us will still be speaking online, because a lot of people won’t be going back to work anytime soon, this is a really good time to get your public speaking skills up to scratch.

Now is the time to go beyond the basics of speaking online

In addition to that, you might be thinking about your skills on video, because you might want to take your speaking on video and on camera to the next level. Now of course, all of us were thrust into that situation where everything suddenly went online, and meetings were online. And that’s all very well. But some people have just managed at that basic level. They open their mouth, something comes out. They’re communicating online. But there’s a next level that they can get to, where they can be more on purpose with their personal brand, with their communication, with their frameworks that they use when they’re speaking. So all of that could well be seen as the next step, even if you’re carrying on speaking on video, and not yet going back to in-person communications, or life in the same room communications.

Elevate your public speaking skills and get ready for what comes next

So I think there’s a big opportunity here for people to get ready for post-COVID, but also to elevate their skills on video, teleconferencing, et cetera, as we continue using these online tools to communicate. And I tend to think that that’s not going to go away. I think a lot of people will now want to work from home. So there’ll be much more of it going on. There’ll be a lot more virtual meetings happening, because we’ve seen them and we’ve seen that they work. So why not get a step up in the skills speaking virtually, speaking on video, et cetera, ready for that next wave, ready to be ready, ready for whatever comes next, in terms of the workplace, or in terms of your career opportunities?

Speaking well on video and in-person is as important as ever

So hope that helps you to understand why I think that public speaking skills, and also speaking on video, are so important, even as we move into this next phase of this post-COVID working life. Hope that helps. Take care, and get in touch if you have any questions at all. Take care. Bye.

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Shola Kaye is an award-winning speaker, author and professional speaker coach with clients around the world. Her work has been mentioned in Forbes, Harper’s Bazaar and on the BBC.
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