Thousands of years ago, Aristotle wrote that believability is one of the three most important facts in being a good speaker; this concept has not changed. A speaker must be believable to have an impact on his or her audience.

It is therefore so important to eliminate obvious issues that can easily destroy a speaker's believability. Reading from a script destroys believability because your audience doesn't know if these are your ideas or even if you understand the ideas you are reading. Excessive looking at notes inflicts the same damage. Obvious displays of nervousness also eat away at the perception of believability.

"If he is really so confident of his ideas, why is he shaking like a leaf?" your audience might muse..

The single easiest way to come across as more believable to an audience is through your eyes. Give long, luxuriant, and steady eye contact to as many people as possible, one at a time. Do this throughout your presentation and you will be believed.

Interested in practicing your eye contact?

~ TJ Walker

1. If there are more than ten people in your audience, restate the question.
2. Don’t waste time asking if people want you to repeat the question. Go ahead and repeat it.
3. Choose your questioners - don’t let the host do it.
4. Vary who gets to ask questions from around the room.
5. Give full eye contact and attention to the person asking the question.
6. If you come across better during question and answer sessions than you do during the speech, then you need to copy what you are doing in Q & A and do it during your speech.
7. If you consistently bore people when you give your speech, but enthrall them when you answer questions, then change what you are doing. Next time you give a speech, simply ask yourself questions and then answer them in the same lively way you always do - and dispense with the “formal speech.”
8. Question your audience repeatedly.
9. Never request that people in the audience write down and submit questions, especially in advance of the presentation.

1. Negative messages are 1,000 times more memorable and more powerful than positive messages.
2. Negative stories are more interesting to more people.
3. Therefore, minimize negatives and attacks because there is the danger that the only thing people will remember about you is something nasty you said.
4. In using negative messages, you run the risk of having all of your positive messages drowned out because of the selectivity of the members of your audience.
5. Use extreme caution when using humor in an interview, since so much humor is based on attacking someone, even if it is you.
6. Don’t belittle your competition for five seconds within the context of a one hour interview unless you will be happy with that being the only comment quoted.

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