Many individuals suffer extreme shyness or nervousness when faced with public speaking situations. These situations can range from large audiences of hundreds or thousands of participants to rooms with a few people present. Regardless of the situation, ensuring you have the proper level of public speaking self confidence will aid you remarkably in this foray.

If you put a long paragraph of information up on the screen, you will see people squinting to try to read it all. And even if the section of your talk refers to that text, you put your audience in the position of trying to read that text or listen to you. And either way they go, part of your message will be lost on them as they try to keep up.

There is one great secret to what makes speakers that really shine in front of a group so great. But it isn't magic or something that you can take as a pill and an hour later, presto, you are ready to stand up and dazzle the crowd.

Many times these men's groups are fraternities of the most successful business people in your area. And because these groups meet monthly they are always on the look out for good public speakers like you. If you are confident in your public speaking ability, you can easily see yourself getting return invitations to address these groups.

If you pick up any self help guide to how to be effective as a public speaker, one of the golden rules is to open with a joke. But guess what? That is not actually a hard and fast rule. Humor is the type of thing that works just as well about a minute into your presentation, halfway through or just about anywhere that you feel you are losing your audience.

Depending on how you conduct your presentation and the type of gathering, questions or objections from the audience could potentially take you off course. This is especially true if you really didn't plan to have an open forum type of discussion.

The biggest problem of reading to an audience is eye contact. Maintaining a continuous eye contact with your audience should be the first commandment of good public speaking. The more you can look at your audience, catch their eye and maintain that relationship, the stronger your presentation will be.

One problem that you often see in public speakers who is the use of the eyes. It's extremely easy as a public speaker to want to look at your outline or your written out speech throughout your presentation so you never get lost or have that terrifying feeling of not knowing what you are going to say next.

You don't have to worry about good spelling or the other conventions of writing a paper because it might never see the light of day. If you are new to writing speeches, it might be best to write it out like a paper so you can hear it being said in your head.

We as humans have trouble focusing on an abstract idea for very long before losing interest.This is one of many reasons one of the central rules of public speaking is to use lots of stories and illustrations to make sure you hold the audience's attention.