Practise your speaking skills

Public speaking is as much an art as it is a craft. Every craftsman can tell you that besides skills the right tools and practise lead to mastery. To practise speaking do that often. When your job is short of opportunities, join ToastMasters and practise there. When it comes to the tools and the knowledge about them, there is much confusion in our guild. Certainly presentation software is less a tool but a hazardous substance ( the dose makes it toxic even if it is really fancy). The real tool is the proper presentation of (the right dose of) conclusive arguments in a concise manner. One of the best guides you can find is the eBook The Contrary Public Speaker: A Break-the-Rules Approach to Breakthough Presentations. Good speeches and presentation owe their success much more to proper preparation than to the talent of the speaker. It is a lot of work (but also fun) to prepare. Check the resources section of Lee Aundra's site and practise the warm-up test found there:

• One hen,
• Two ducks,
• Three squawking geese,
• Four limerick oysters,
• Five corpulent porpoises,
• Six pairs of Don Alberso's tweezers,
• Seven thousand Macedonians in full battle array,
• Eight brass monkeys from the ancient, sacred crypts of Egypt,
• Nine apathetic, sympathetic, diabetic old men on roller skates with a marked propensity to procrastination and sloth,
• Ten lyrical, spherical diabolical denizens of the deep who haul, crawl, around the corner of the quo of the queasy at the very same time.

This is the " The Announcer’s Test", seveloped by Radio Central in the 1940's to test a new announcer's reading ability, this is a fantastic exercise to warm up your speech muscles before that key event!
Enjoy!