Brownie

Why Do You Need a Speech Coach?

It’s always been surprising to me how often clients tell me they want to improve their speech and become better public speakers, yet they don’t want to record themselves and no one gives them any feedback.

It’s surprising because with most things in life, if you want to be successful, you know that you have to do something to get there and monitor your progress. If you want to lose weight, you have to change your eating habits. If you want to get in better shape, you have to exercise.

Chocolate Brownies:
For some reason, people don’t put speech improvement in the same category, and they should! If you monitor your speech the way you do what you eat, you would recognize that lots of chocolate brownies won’t help you lose weight.

The chocolate brownies of speech are things like:

  • rushing when you speak, using lots of filler words
  • not asking clarifying questions to gauge your audience’s comprehension
  • holding your breath
  • poor postural habits
  • a soft voice
  • a “pitchy” voice
  • random thoughts or circular topic engagement
  • lack of variety in usage of connecting words, introducing topics, segueing from one idea to another, or summarizing key points
  • frequent grammatical mistakes and mispronunciations

I ponder why people don’t focus on these things like they do weight and exercise, and I think it’s because they don’t know how to change. Many of us accept that we have to eat healthfully and exercise to take care of our bodies, but sadly, too many people just “wing it” when it come to speech and hope no one will notice.

If you are ready to take charge of your “brownie eating” habits and begin to create change, a Speech Coach could be the way to do it. If you’re not aware of what you could do differently or how to change it, you won’t ever do it. Getting a Coach will change that!

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