Feel nervous about speaking in public? Tell a personal story in your speech (early), and you can reduce public speaking fear dramatically. One of the first public speaking secrets that we share in our public speaking training classes is that stories are your friend.

When you tell a story, you reduce presentation jitters and build rapport with your audience. Don’t believe me? Watch any professional motivational speaker on YouTube. You will find that their entire speech is composed of a series of individual stories that they link together. In this post, we will cover some of the major benefits of telling stories as well as the best way to do it.

Major Benefits of Telling Stories in a Presentation

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, when you tell a story in your speech, you are presenting a series of pictures. These pictures magically appear in the minds of the audience. This is where true communication occurs. The human mind thinks in pictures. So, when a speaker is able to create this series of images in the audience’s mind that is similar to the picture in the presenter’s head, the speaker has communicated effectively. Stories are a powerful tool to capture and hold the audience’s attention.

Storytelling skills are easy to master as well. After you identify the important concepts you want to cover in your speech, recall instances from your own experiences where that concept was true. Just play the mental movie in your head of that memory. To tell the story to your audience, just describe this movie in enough detail that your movie also plays for the audience as well.For full show notes, visit Storytelling in Speeches-How to Reduce Presentation Fear Quicklyhttps://www.fearlesspresentations.com/tell-a-story-in-your-speech-and-reduce-public-speaking-fear/