Authentic Public Speaking: How to Use Your Personality to Connect and Inspire
Liam Sandford
Liam Sandford is a Head of Marketing, public speaking expert, and 2x Best Selling Author including the book Effortless Public Speaking. He helps ambitious professionals and entrepreneurs communicate with impact to get noticed, grow their career, and build their business.
Authentic public speaking means delivering your message as yourself, not as a performed version of the speaker you think you are supposed to be. Audiences can feel the difference in seconds. When your words, your energy and your natural pace match who you really are, people trust you faster and remember you longer. This article is about how to find that natural style and stop borrowing someone else's.
I learned this the slow way, by spending years forcing a version of myself on stage that was not me.
The Version of Me That Was Not Me
For a long time I believed a good speaker was a certain kind of person. Loud. Fast. Working the room. The sort who feeds off a crowd and leaves the stage buzzing. So that is who I tried to be. Before a speech I would try to hype myself up into that high energy state, push my volume past where it wanted to sit, and manufacture an enthusiasm that did not belong to me.
It worked, in the way a costume works. From a distance it looked like the thing. Up close it was exhausting, and I suspect the audience could tell something was slightly off, the way you can always tell when a smile is being held in place.
The problem was not my delivery. The problem was that I had decided who a speaker was supposed to be, and it was not me.
What changed things was a realisation that had nothing to do with a stage. I am an introvert. I recharge in quiet, not in a crowd. A big social event does not fill me up, it drains me, and I need time on my own afterwards to feel like myself again. For years I had treated that as a weakness to overcome. I thought the goal was to become the extrovert I saw at the front of the room and envied.
Once I understood how I am really wired, the "stage energy" performance stopped making sense. I was spending enormous effort turning myself into the exact thing that tires me out, and calling it professionalism. The moment I stopped, my speaking got easier and, oddly, better. I was no longer splitting my attention between the message and maintaining a character. All of it went to the audience.
That, in the end, is authenticity. Not a warmth you switch on, but what remains once you stop performing.
Why Authenticity Beats Performance Every Time
Here is the uncomfortable truth about a performed persona: it costs you attention you cannot afford to lose.
When you are performing a version of yourself, part of your brain is always running the performance. Am I loud enough? Is my energy up? Am I doing the thing the good speaker does? That is a background process, and it is stealing resource from the actual job, which is landing your message with the people in front of you.
Carl Buehner's line has stuck with me for years: people don't remember what you say, but they remember how you made them feel. A performance makes people feel managed. Authenticity makes them feel spoken to. One of those builds trust and one of those quietly erodes it, and audiences are far better at sensing the difference than we give them credit for.
Public speaking, at its core, is just a conversation without the pressure environment. You already know how to be yourself in a conversation. Nobody rehearses a personality before meeting a friend for coffee. The whole task of authentic speaking is carrying that same self up onto the stage instead of leaving it in the wings and sending an actor out in your place.
You Do Not Need a Personality Test to Find Your Voice
There is a whole industry built on the idea that the route to authentic speaking runs through a personality questionnaire. Take the test, get your type, speak accordingly. I understand the appeal, because a label feels like an answer. But you do not need one, and leaning on one can quietly do the opposite of what you want.
The risk is this: a test gives you a new box, and a box is still a box. If you swap "I should be the loud extrovert" for "I am a Type X, so I speak like a Type X", you have just traded one prescribed persona for another. Authenticity is not choosing the right box. It is noticing what is genuinely you and building on it.
Here is the practical version, and it takes no questionnaire at all.
After your next speech, ask two questions. Which moments felt like me? Which moments felt like a costume I was holding in place? You will know. The costume moments took visible effort, the bits where you were performing an idea of a speaker rather than talking. The "me" moments are the ones where you forgot to be nervous because you were simply making a point you cared about.
Then do the obvious thing most people never do. Keep the first list, cut the second. Build your style out of the parts that already felt like you. That is a far more reliable guide to your natural voice than any type code, because it comes from your actual behaviour under real conditions, not from how you answered a survey on a quiet afternoon.
Introvert or Extrovert, Both Can Own a Room
The introvert and extrovert labels are the ones people reach for most, and I have identified as both at different points in my life, so I know how loose they are in practice. Worth saying plainly: neither one is the speaking personality. Society tends to prize the extroverted end, the loud and highly visible style, and that bias quietly convinces a lot of quiet people that they are simply not built for this. They are wrong.
Introverts get cast as shy or disengaged. In reality the traits that come with recharging in quiet are speaking strengths. You tend to prepare thoroughly. You think before you speak, so what comes out is considered rather than scattered. You bring a calm, steady presence that a room settles into. Susan Cain makes this case at length in Quiet: the world is often not built for introverts, yet they are frequently the more effective communicators when they stop apologising for how they are wired.
Extroverts, for their part, draw energy from the room and are comfortable in the spotlight quickly. That can make you look confident fast, and there is real value in it. But looking confident quickly is not the same as being effective, and the person who talks the most in a meeting is not automatically the one worth listening to. Extroverts win by leaning into interaction and warmth. Introverts win by leaning into depth and precision. The mistake, the one I made for years, is deciding one of those is the real speaker and trying to become it.
The goal was never to act like an extrovert. It was to use whatever my natural style is and let it come through without friction.
How to Adapt Without Faking
Here is where people get nervous, and it is a fair worry. If authenticity means being yourself, does adapting to the room mean betraying that self?
No. There is a clean line between adapting and faking, and it is worth learning to see.
Adapting is changing the delivery. Faking is changing the person.
Match your energy and pace to the room and the message. A large, buzzing crowd can carry more energy than you would use one to one, and giving it to them is not a betrayal of your nature, it is reading the situation. A small, serious room wants a calmer, more deliberate pace, and forcing false brightness into it would be the fake move. In both cases the core self stays put. You are turning a dial, not swapping identities.
A useful way to keep this honest is to think about who you are really speaking to. The 2 Year Test is simple: look back two years, at the challenges you faced and what solved them. Your past self is usually a fair proxy for your audience. When you speak to that real person about something you genuinely understand, adapting your energy to reach them feels natural, because it is in service of them rather than in service of an image of yourself.
That last point matters more than any of the mechanics: it is not about you, it is about your audience. The moment your attention is genuinely on the room and what it needs, the question of how you come across mostly takes care of itself. The self awareness that fuels a performed persona feeds on you thinking about you. Point your attention outward and it starves.
Building Your Authentic Style, Step by Step
Authenticity is not a switch, it is a practice. A few concrete moves that work regardless of where you sit between introvert and extrovert.
Prepare in the way that genuinely suits you
If you are the type who wants the whole thing mapped out before you feel safe, map it out. If you are the type who works better from a handful of anchor points and trusts yourself to join them up live, do that. Neither is more professional. Forcing the wrong preparation style on yourself is the first place authenticity leaks away, because you walk on stage already fighting your own method. One caution either way: do not script it word for word, which makes anyone robotic, and do not rehearse it to death, especially a final run through on the day, which drains the life out of it.
Lean on your genuine strengths, not borrowed ones
If your strength is depth, go deep and let the room feel your command of the subject. If your strength is warmth and interaction, open the room up and play with it. Build the speech around the thing you already do well rather than bolting on a strength you admire in someone else. A borrowed strength always shows.
Let one clear point carry the weight
Whatever your personality, a confused audience is a lost audience, and clarity is where authentic speakers separate from performers. Deliver your main point in one sentence, then back it with a story, some data, or an example. If you cannot say it in one sentence, you are not clear enough yourself yet, and no amount of stage energy will paper over that. Clear beats clever every time.
Reflect honestly, refine slowly
After each speech, run the two question review: what felt like me, what felt like a costume. Then change one thing for next time, not ten. Improve one thing at a time and you keep the gain. Try to fix everything at once and you fix nothing. Over enough reps, the "me" list grows and the "costume" list shrinks until there is barely a costume left. That is confidence, built the honest way. Confidence is success remembered, and every authentic rep is another memory in the bank.
Frequently Asked Questions
Isn't "just be yourself" useless advice for a nervous speaker?
On its own, yes, which is why I would not leave it there. "Be yourself" only helps once you can tell the difference between your real self and the performed one, and most nervous speakers cannot yet, because the nerves are loudest exactly when they are trying hardest to perform. The practical route in is not to relax into some vague authentic state, it is the two question review after a speech: which bits felt like me, which felt like a costume. That turns a slogan into a decision you can act on.
I am naturally quiet. Won't an authentic style just come across as boring?
Quiet and boring are not the same thing, and conflating them is exactly the trap I fell into. Boring comes from low clarity and no momentum, not from low volume. A quiet speaker with a sharp point, a real story and a clear line of thought will hold a room better than a loud one with nothing to say. Your job is not to add noise, it is to add substance and let your natural register deliver it. Stillness, used deliberately, is arresting.
How is adapting to the audience different from faking?
Adapting changes the delivery; faking changes the person. Raising your energy for a big crowd or slowing down for a serious one is reading the room, and your core self is untouched. Manufacturing a personality you do not have, hyping into an enthusiasm you do not feel, that is faking, and audiences sense the seams. The test is simple: if you could keep it up all day without it costing you, it is adapting. If it is exhausting to maintain, it is a costume.
Do I need to know my personality or Big Five type to speak authentically?
No. A test can be interesting, but it can also hand you a fresh box to perform, which is the opposite of authentic. Your own behaviour under real conditions is a far better guide than a questionnaire. Notice which moments in your speaking already feel effortless and like you, and build from there. That evidence is specific to you and earned in the room, which no personality type can be.
Can I be authentic and still improve, or does improving mean becoming someone else?
You can, and this is the point most people miss. Improving is not swapping yourself for a better speaker, it is removing the friction between who you are and how you come across. Every rep that cuts a bit of costume and keeps a bit of genuine self is improvement in the truest sense. You end up more like yourself, not less, and far more effective for it.
Bringing It All Together
For years I tried to be a speaker I had invented, high energy and extroverted, and I called the effort of it professionalism. The turning point was not a technique. It was accepting how I am wired, an introvert who recharges in quiet, and letting that be the speaker instead of the thing I was trying to overcome.
You do not have to make my mistake. You do not need to become the loud one, and you certainly do not need a personality test to give you permission to be yourself. Notice what already feels like you, build on it, adapt the delivery without swapping the person, and keep your attention on the room rather than on your own performance. Do that and public speaking stops being a costume you hold in place and becomes what it always should have been, you, talking to people you can help.
For the full system, work through the Ultimate Guide to Public Speaking, and if getting a bit better each time is the goal, how to get one per cent better every day is the place to go next.
TL;DR: Authentic Public Speaking
Authenticity is not a technique you add on top of a speech. It is whatever remains once you stop imitating other speakers.
The single biggest block to authentic speaking is trying to borrow someone else's energy. If you are naturally quiet and you force loud "stage energy", the audience feels the seams.
I spent years assuming a good speaker had to be high energy and extroverted. Then I worked out I am an introvert who recharges in quiet, and my speaking got better the moment I stopped fighting that.
You do not need a personality test to speak authentically. You need to notice which parts of your delivery feel like effort and which parts feel like you, then build on the parts that feel like you.
Match your energy to the room and the message, not to some ideal speaker in your head. Adjust the delivery, keep the core self.
Reflect after every speech: what felt like me, what felt like a costume. Cut the costume.
More From Liam Sandford
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