It’s often said that people fear public speaking more than death. As Jerry Seinfeld observes, for those such people, they are ‘better off in the casket than doing the eulogy’.
Despite being one of our greatest collective fears, public speaking has become an inherent part of our working lives in the arts sector – from presentations at meetings, to promoting a debut novel, to sharing our insights with those wanting to capture the creative economy.
Getting past the jitters can also provide a revenue stream with public speaking proving to be lucrative for creative professionals. We ask seasoned professionals to share advice on how to hone the skills of public speaking.
Dale Bigeni, illustrator and designer
‘I think the essential skills for great public speaking are these very obvious but overlooked elements. Eye contact with the crowd is super important; engaging content like personal stories and great success stories about your business; and also a game plan, never under-cook a presentation and make sure if all your notes stop making sense, your brain knows where you were heading!’
Esther Anatolitis, Director, Regional Arts Victoria
‘I love creating spaces for public discussion – it’s terribly important to me as arts advocacy, as a set of curatorial projects, and also, as a way of being in the world… by this I mean that the personal and the political are inseparable; we each create the kind of world we want to live in by what we say and how we say it. I’m constantly looking for new modes of facilitation, new models of presentation, new ways to connect people and practice. The more digitally connected we are, the more we crave connections of immediacy, thus the massive proliferation of ideas platforms that build on writers’ festival models.
