We’ve all been asked to make a presentation for a group at one time or another. The ability to give a speech or make a presentation is one of the most useful skill a person can have. So if you’d like to improve your public speaking, consider this thought.

Earl Nightingale said the “The most important element necessary to make an effective speech is to be interesting.” That’s great, but how are you supposed to do that?

One idea comes from Dale Carnegie’s “The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking.”

In this book, Carnegie tells story of Russell Conwell. Conwell was the founder of Temple University, which he financed by travelling and giving his famous “Acres Of Diamonds” speech. As you might suspect, it wasn’t the exact same speech each time. Conwell had a habit that helped him make every speech interesting to that location’s audience.

Here’s what it says in the book:

Russell Conwell’s famous lecture, “Acres of Diamonds,” was given nearly six thousand times. You would think that atalk repeated so often would become set in the speaker’s min, that no word or intonation would vary in delivery. That was note the case. He recognized that he had to make each successive audience feel that his talk was a personal, living thing created for it, and it alone. How did he succeed in keeping this interrelationship between speaker, speech, and audience alive from one speaking engagement to the next? “I visit a town or city,” he wrote, “and try to arrive there early enough to see the postmaster, the barber, the hotel manager, the principal of the schools, some of the ministers, and then go into the stores and talk with people, and see what has been their history, and what opportunities they had. Then I give my lecture and talk to those people about the subjects that apply to them locally.

Include a little bit of your audience in your talk, and they’ll pay attention every time.

If you are still interested in improving your public speaking, go check out this article titled “3 Steps to Better Public Speaking“