Anyone done public speaking training?

[CitizenClem]

Thanks to the pandemic, I spend a lot of time in zoom meetings. Some people seem to be very good at speaking authoritatively, in paragraphs for a few minutes, whereas I think that I mumble some incoherent points. I wasn't a great public speaker before the pandemic, but I think all these zoom meetings have highlighted it.

Has anyone done any public speaking courses, and did you find it useful? Any recommendations would be welcome.

Bump?

Not as an adult. I had speech training as a teenager, which has served me to this day.

Yes lots, but there are some great books that will help too. I’d recommend How to Own the Room by Viv Groskop. I’d also recommend you read books on assertiveness as these helped me. If you go down the public speaking course route, I’d go for someone who specialises in training people in the media.

I applied for a presenter's job - presenting lectures kind of thing and as part of that we had a day of "workshops" which included advice/training on our presentation skills. Unhelpfully I can't remember his name and the company had brought him in - but what was helpful was he picked out the "weak" spots and made us present again doing the exact opposite. So for example - one person didn't involve the audience very much, so he got her to re-do it but in the style of a children's TV presenter. And another wasn't "authoritative" enough, so had to repeat pretending to be a US President on a campaign - I have never laughed so much seeing them promising prostate cancer testing to every member of the audience "AND YOU! YOU CAN GET A PSA TEST! AND YOU, AND YOU!" (we were all GPs and the training was in presenting to other GPs!)
Just thought that maybe useful for you - practice over the top "opposite" of what you do wrong then reign it in a bit! I will have a bit of a google to see if I can find the name of the bloke as he does the training generally as well as the company I applied for the job with.
(Didn't get the job btw - the rest were MUCH better than me! But was a really interesting fab day)

Found him! standupanddeliver.co.uk/man-behind-stand-deliver

I have, also a lot of media training. It’s so helpful and useful in so many ways, not just public speaking or meetings. Some of my training was with a woman called Diana Theodores and she was amazing. She’s written a book called Performing As You specifically aimed at women. I would strongly recommend it

Paul McKenna confidence book helped me. As well as putting a mask on and pretending I was speaking to my family in the front row

Watching with interest