Speaking Strengths

Heart: caring, compassionate

Caring and concern about your content or audience is evident as you speak. Your heartfelt delivery connects you to the heart of your listener and they feel the significance of what you are saying.

Guiding question: Does the audience feel you sincerely care about your content?

Authenticity: genuine, real

You are the "real deal". You are expressing your genuine and sincere self. Your audience never doubts that there is fidelity between your message and your delivery. You are someone your audience feels they can trust.

Guiding question: Do you genuinely believe what you are saying and are you saying it in a way that is natural for you?

Charisma: personally magnetic

Although difficult to define, we know it when we see it or feel it. Charisma creates an almost magical sense of being drawn to a person. You create a sense of intimacy and desirability that belies role, context or familiarity.

Guiding question: Do people hang on your words? Are audiences rapt in their attention when you speak?

Energy: forceful, vigorous

Your presentations are vigorous and rousing, and your engaged delivery has a palpable force. You incite your audience into feeling charged and energetic. When you speak, the whole room feels alive.

Guiding question: Do people feel "jazzed" and ready to act after you speak?

Knowledge: authoritative, informed

You have deep expertise on your subject and are eager to convey your knowledge. You are ready to drill down into as much detail as the audience is interested in hearing.

Guiding question: Are you looked to as the authority on your subject?

Command: powerful presence, in control

You are fully in control of your message. Like a martial arts master, you are balanced, steady, and fully prepared to take on the unexpected. When you speak, you effortlessly command attention.

Guiding question: Do you hold the room? Do you own the content and the space in which you speak?

Passion: fervor, intensity

You move your audience with the depth of your conviction to achieve your goals. You have "fire in the belly". You tend to stir your audience up with your powerful language and the fervor of your beliefs.

Guiding question: Do people feel the depth of your conviction and emotional commitment to your message?

Humility: sincere, unassuming

You see your role as serving others and sharing what you've learned so the audience can make up their own minds. Your goal in communicating is to create understanding with the audience rather than demand their agreement.

Guiding question: Do people feel you are sharing your thoughts, content and/or experience with them without feeling pressured to agree with you?

Humor: amusing, funny

You are an amusing speaker. You can make audiences laugh or smile. Whether you tell jokes or funny stories or are simply quick-witted, you invite the audience to be amused.

Guiding question: Are you confident and capable of using humor to amuse an audience? Does it make you more comfortable when you can make the audience laugh?

Clarity: unambiguous, concise

You make your point simply. You do the work instead of your audience having to decipher your point. You bring forward the specific and concrete parts of the story to make your point clear and unambiguous.

Guiding question: Do you speak in plain English and can you take complex ideas and convey them so everyone in the audience, regardless of age or background, understands them?

Your Speaking Strengths are an inner resource ready for you to draw upon at will. Discover yours in a Speaking for Impact® program.