Public Speaking for Professionals

How to Engage and Convince Your Audience

By: Robbin Laird

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Public Speaking for Professionals: Second Edition is the updated lead volume in my three-part Personal Professional Development Insights series, and it is designed to be your entry ramp into a broader journey of speaking, listening, and leading in turbulent times.

In this new edition, I show how public speaking is not a performance add-on, but a core professional discipline for thinking clearly, earning trust, and shaping decisions in what I call the “anarchy of the moment” a world of fragmented audiences, collapsing attention spans, and constant disruption. Drawing on four decades of teaching, research, and work with military, government, business, and academic professionals, I focus on practical tools you can apply immediately: clarifying a single core idea for any talk, using simple blueprints and the rule of three to structure your message, and turning every presentation into a laboratory for testing and sharpening your own thinking.

The book walks you step by step from managing stage fright and building authentic confidence, through crafting and delivering messages that diverse, skeptical audiences can actually hear and act on, to using speaking as a way to lead under pressure rather than just report information. You will learn how to speak across different Englishes and tribalized information cultures, how to use stories without drowning your argument, how to handle tough questions and micro‑crises in the room, and how to treat each talk as part of a longer path toward genuine leadership.

This second edition also anchors the full Personal Professional Development Insights series by explicitly linking speaking to the two companion volumes: Listen to Lead, which goes deeper into empathy and real conversation in a fragmented age, and Mastering Chaos, which addresses how organizations can build the adaptive capacity to operate effectively when disruption is the norm rather than the exception. Taken together, the three books offer a coherent framework from personal mastery to relational mastery to organizational mastery; this volume is the place to start if you want your professional voice to carry real weight in the rooms that matter.