Speak Well and Confidently

Are you very shy when it comes to new surroundings, such as starting a new class or moving to a new area? Sometimes, it is necessary to overcome your shyness and speak confidently. By doing this, it can help you not only to share your ideas properly to others, but also to learn communicating with others. Here are a few steps to consider when speaking with confidence.

Steps

1. Learn how to have conversations with people. Your ideas or opinions may not always be accepted by others, but this is nothing unusual. Open your mouth, express your beliefs! This will improve your courage.
2. Don’t be afraid and speak loudly. If you speak in a low voice, not only will others not be able to hear what you say, but you will also portray a submissive demeanor, which suggests the opposite of a confident one.
3. Make eye contact when you speak. For one thing, it is polite for others. Also, eye contact will help others to listen to your thinking carefully.
4. Praise yourself everyday! This will promote your own confidence, which is important when you speak. With more confidence, people will take your thinking more seriously.

Tips

• Don’t be nervous when you make mistakes. Human error is far from being a new concept — nobody is perfect! It is normal for everyone to make mistakes. Just calm down and keep speaking bravely.
• Try and try again! This may be difficult for a shy person at first, but you need to force yourself to speak, and not seclude your thoughts. If you have some ideas, then try to speak out! Don’t just keep them in your head.
• If you have self confidence issues, try to think that you are the only one who has sound knowledge about the topic. Then go ahead and impart your knowledge to the audience in an effective way.
• Remember that there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance. Don’t portray an exaggerated amount of confidence, or you will come off as arrogant, believing that your ideas are better than the ideas of everyone else.

Chhavi Rajawat, sarpanch from the village Soda

There was a sense of disbelief among ministers and ambassadors from diverse nations when the chairperson of the 11th Info-Poverty World Conference held at the United Nations introduced the jeans-clad Chhavi Rajawat as head of a village in India.

For, from a distance one could easily mistake Rajawat, an articulate, computer-savvy woman, for a frontline model or at least a Bollywood actress.

But she is sarpanch of Soda village, 60 kilometres from Jaipur, in backward Rajasthan and the changing face of growing dynamic rural India.

Thirty-year-old Rajawat, India's youngest and the only MBA to become a village head -- the position mostly occupied by elders, quit her senior management position with Bharti-Tele Ventures of Airtel Group to serve her beloved villagers as sarpanch.

Rajawat participated in a panel discussion at the two-day meet at the UN on March 24 and 25 on how civil society can implement its actions and spoke on the role of civil society in fighting poverty and promoting development.

It is necessary to re-think through various strategies of action that includes new technologies like e-services in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in an era where resources have become limited, she told the delegates of the international conference.

"If India continues to make progress at the same pace as it has for the past 65 years since independence, it just won't be good enough. We'll be failing people who dream about having water, electricity, toilets, schools and jobs. I am convinced we can do it differently and do it faster. In the past year alone, I and the villagers in Soda have brought about a radical change in the village purely through our own efforts. We have had no outside support - no NGO help, no public, nor private sector help," she said.

On achieving Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Rajawat said she sought full support from outside agencies and the corporate world.

"I thank United Nations Office for Partnerships (UNOP) which had deputed its senior adviser in India Mr Babu Lal Jain to visit Soda and extend all support in the opening of the first bank in the village. That made all the difference."

"In three years I will transform my village. I don't want money. I want people and organisations to adopt projects in my village as often projects fail owing to lack of a local connect and that is what I am here to provide by bridging that gap. I want the conference to help bring about faster change so that this generation can enjoy that kind of life that I - and you in this audience - take for granted," she said to thunderous cheers from the delegates.