Great site with some good advice. I particularly like this part: "Talks are Entertainment - Public speaking's dirty little secret."
The best thing I learned for giving a good talk, and what I tell myself every time, is that it's story time for adults.
Think back to a young age, and how you learned all those morals with fables and stories. Want to give a good talk? Make it a good story with wit and anecdotes. Be Garrison Keillor up there, and you'll see sparkling eyes and open mouthed smiles.
We shouldn't consider this secret to be a "dirty" one. There's plenty of scientific research that shows that we remember things better when they are keyed by emotion [1].
By giving your talk a personal, emotional frame, you help the listener remember and recall it, which in turn makes better use of their attention and time.
Also, we should never feel bad for enjoying something. Life is not a zero-sum split where the more miserable something is, the more valid it is as work. As long as the entertainment of the talk does not detract from the information, it's fine. You can have both.
And what I find is that the audience wants you to do well. They are invested in your success and their enjoyment be being in those seats. Double-bonus if drinks are being served ;)
that's a tall order. And the topic requires a different approach. scientific topics require 'just the facts ma'am' with extra points for a dash of shop humor.
Ultimately, the goal of a talk is to win the hearts and minds of the audience. If you achieve that, while communicating the foundational ideas and knowledge required to go further (perhaps implementation of a paper or replication of an experiment), then the talk was successful.
Anyone been able to overcome panic attacks while public speaking? Medication seems like a hassle. And most advice is just obvious tips ("know your material!") that doesn't address the physiological problem.
My first talk was in front of a many-thousands-attendees conference and I didn't have a problem. It was fun. I've for years enjoyed speaking in front of groups. Never enjoyed doing the exec presentation per se, but I'd done it before and was comfortable with it. Then at two back-to-back jobs, two managers told me I wasn't actually good at it, neither speaking in front of crowds nor communicating to execs. Basically, they said I sucked at it. Thanks a lot :-(
Now I have the pleasure of enjoying a nearly crippling fear of talking in groups. My brain blanks. I stammer and repeat the same thing over and over. I simply can't find the words, and the longer the pause extends, the more I probably look like I'm having a stroke.
Could you try to build up confidence by speaking at smaller/tiny groups that are on your side (peers, friends) and work your way upwards? Counteract the terrible feedback from those managers (ugh, sorry that happened to you) with more positive and welcoming feedback from friends before you move onto strangers.
Even when not speaking I have panic attacks and am generally a bit anxious, yet I can speak pretty well in front of an audience because I learned to think of the audience as a group of my friends that I care a lot about and whom know or understand less about my topic, which they will benefit from knowing/understanding more about, than I do, so I get to talk to/with them about it and fully share my thoughts about it.
Consider going to something like Toastmasters and practicing. Getting useful feedback and improving might get your brain out of the idea that you're not good at it.
Going to Toastmasters seems to be the universal Internet standard advice for improving public speaking, but I'm not so sure about it.
I'm coming from a similar place of intense public speaking anxiety as the parent poster, and so attended my local Toastmasters, and at the first session mostly just observed. The hour was ~20 people who have been doing this for years giving highly refined talks to each other.
It was somewhat valuable seeing good speakers in their element, but to someone like me who's coming in with unrefined speaking manners and an anxiety problem, it was a total no-go. It probably varies by chapter, but I realized that Toastmasters wasn't a support group for bad speakers, it was a group of good speakers working to become great speakers.
That's not to say they wouldn't have been supportive and all, but in my opinion Toastmasters isn't an environment for overcoming anxiety at the low end. Of course, your mileage may vary.
Maybe you visited a particularly bad group for beginners? Or maybe you were just too anxious, and needed an extra kick so that you'd let them be supportive?
The Toastmasters are a standard advice for a reason. Public speaking is entirely a learnable skill. You quickly get better with practice, but that supportive element of other people is required to overcome strong stage anxiety if you have one.
I think it might be worth it to try approaching one of the members and telling them, "I'm new here, I'm really bad at public speaking and want to get better, but I'm anxious because you all are such expert speakers already; can you help me?". If the Toastmasters group is worth anything, they'll put extra effort to make you feel comfortable.
You have to remember that most people there have started at the same place you're at right now. You even said it in your post.
>The hour was ~20 people who have been doing this for years...
That sounds like a goldmine of knowledge and experience to learn from. Find someone from that group who is willing to mentor you. Heck, the Leadership booklet has a checklist with one of the items being to mentor someone.
Talk to the people in the group about where you're coming from and what you'd like to come away with. I find that the people who are a part of Toastmasters are pretty supportive. Of course, groups can vary. But with a sample size of 20, you're bound to find someone.
> You have to remember that most people there have started at the same place you're at right now. You even said it in your post.
So this is the part I disagree with. Everyone gets nervous doing public speaking, but there are some of us who get really nervous to the point that physical symptoms are, without a word of exaggeration, debilitating. Just getting up in front of that room and giving a crappy talk would have been very, very hard.
> That sounds like a goldmine of knowledge and experience to learn from. Find someone from that group who is willing to mentor you. Heck, the Leadership booklet has a checklist with one of the items being to mentor someone.
You're right, and I really don't want to slight the group here -- the interactions I had and everyone I spoke to was extremely supportive, it's just that getting spun up to their level would have an incredible daunting order even give months/years of work. I should give it another shot, but I just didn't see a path forward there at the time.
Right, the debilitating physical symptoms are the thing. It's not about being a good or bad speaker. Like you said, I'd be happy to get to the point of just being a plain "bad" speaker. There are times when even reading the words on a slide, verbatim, is excruciating. It's an entirely irrational autonomic response.
> but I realized that Toastmasters wasn't a support group for bad speakers, it was a group of good speakers working to become great speakers.
No, it's very much a support group for people who want to become better speakers. Did you only attend one session?
Yes, you could have gotten a bad chapter, but that's the exception. Toastmasters are incredibly supportive of people just starting out. In general, they are the best group of people to speak in front of. They are respectful, encouraging, and even for many who are good, still very nervous when they go up to speak (even if you don't see it).
Defensive pessimism have worked for me in the past.
Convincing yourself that the event is already over and have failed. The deal is done, you don't have to fear your failure - you have already thought through the consequences of failing, and have accepted that you will have to face them. The actual speaking will just involve going through the already determined motions.
This, I find, can give some relieve from the most debilitating effects of anxiety during speaking.
When you've spoken to a big crowd, and somebody (especially a powerful person) tells you later that you aren't good at it, remember this:
He's on trial, not you.
You know you can make yourself clear to a big audience. If he can't understand you, well then, he's sexting somebody or he doesn't have the cognitive chops to understand what you're saying. That's sad for him, but not for you.
Remember this: people really want to hear what you have to say. They want to believe you. They want you to succeed.
Have a little sheet with bullet points of your talk so if you get truly lost you can get back on track. Better than that is asking a member of the audience, just be straightforward, "I just lost my track where were we?" Most people forgive a rough-around-the-edges speaker if there's a feeling of informality and participation.
Also practicing but quality practice is the key. Record yourself and watch it. Practice in several different places. Practice in front of a friend. Practice at a Toastmasters. Skim your speech during the little spare moments you have. And if you start to get down go search through some tech talks, there's a lot worse speakers than you out there so find one and boost that esteem haha.
Therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy in particular seems to have a good track record with anxiety and difficulty functioning in certain scenarios.
If this is really stressful and holding you back, you owe it to yourself to try to find a professional who can help you with it. There are a lot of mediocre therapists out there, but a good one can change your life.
Propanolol is a pretty harmless recommendation. Exposure. Keep in mind that the more panic attacks you have the more intractable this problem will become. So don't push yourself too hard.
TBH this seems like the best option. I don't think my mind is actually nervous. I know my material, I'm happy to share it. It's the stupid lizard brain thinking I'm about to fall off a 100ft cliff and cutting off the blood supply to my brain and giving me dry mouth and deregulating my diaphragm. It's a STRONG physiological response, but I think without those physical effects and feedback loop I'd be fine.
For what it's worth, this comment rings so familiar to me that I feel like I could've written it myself. I've read the normal speaking advice, am reasonably articulate, well-prepared, have good material (or which I like anyway), and am generally a decently well-adjusted human being, but I have a fairly severe physical reaction when it comes to public speaking. Every guide on the subject ever written talks about "everyone gets nervous" and to "imagine the room is full of friends"/"imagine everyone is naked"/"speak only to the back wall"/etc., but over the years I've realized that the type of nervous they're talking about and the type of nervous I'm talking about simply isn't on the same level.
A lot of people think that they get it, but I think that unless you have it, it's fairly difficult to understand. The result is a lot of very unhelpful advice online. Besides your comment, the only other place I've ever read similar stories are for comments for propanolol on various drug-related websites online, where many people seem to indicate that they experienced paralyzing fear from public speaking, and that in many cases propanolol seems to have help them overcome it.
I've never tried it, but I'd be curious to hear if anyone hear had anything to say about it one way or the other. I'm an IC and have been mostly avoiding public speaking lately, but am at a company right now that engages in frequent song and dance shows where people are highly encouraged to get up and give lightning talks and such for everyone else. I've managed to dodge it so far, but there's no question at all that poor speaking skills will be detrimental to my career over the long run and that I need to find a fix.
Just try it. I have tried it. It works. It blocks the action of adrenaline so you essentially can't have a fight or flight response. This is especially important because there is a very negative feedback loop that goes from physical to mental over and over (get sweaty -> notice how sweaty you are -> pulse increases -> notice increased pulse -> wonder if everyone else can tell too -> get sweatier, etc.) that can end with a panic attack.
At least for me, I have the fight or flight response because of essentially prior trauma (minor when compared to trauma from war but still technically sub-clinical PTSD) and so "you shouldn't take drugs forever" isn't a strong counter-argument because you just need to take them until you have enough positive experiences for your dumb pattern-recognizing brainstem to chill out. Thank goodness for the gift of forgetting.
You can get like 160 doses online from India for like $17.
Yup, this is a definite wall in my career too. There is simply no way to get where I want to be, if I can't calmly explain stuff to my boss's boss. I dread being discovered as "that guy who gets really nervous". And of course that makes it worse.
I've noticed that professional speakers and actors speak very different from how I do. There is a much more dynamic use of tone and they generally speak more slowly.
I occasionally speak at conferences and have thought about recording lessons and wanted to know how to do this. I searched pretty hard for tips and there isn't much. I ended up watching a bunch of YouTube videos and making a playlist [1] of what I thought was valuable. If you're interested, check it out.
>There is a much more dynamic use of tone and they generally speak more slowly.
From what I've read on social engineering[1] and communications theory a slower speaker is generally perceived as more calm, confident, and deliberate whereas fast talkers are often perceived as being more anxious.
Also, alteration of tones is a tactic often used to add subtle influence to the delivery of key words and concepts.
One thing I heard many years ago but everyone I tell seems surprised by:
Export your slides to PDF.
You have no idea what you'll be presenting from, and PDF readers are everywhere and will so up basically the same on every screen. Most PDF readers have a full screen mode where pressing the space bar will advance you one "page", and 99 times out of 100 you don't need transitions. Just do it.
Yes, PDF is universal but PowerPoint and Keynote have "Presenter view" which adds extra functionality besides just showing you the same slide that your audience sees such as private notes for each slide as well as thumbnails of upcoming slides so you can skip slides without the audience knowing or use a timer to pace yourself [0].
I did a quick search and I could not find out whether Adobe Acrobat has this functionality.
I'll always have a PDF on a thumb drive in case something goes sideways with Powerpoint of whatever. But, as you say, there are advantages to presenting from presentation software. In general, I try to be as ready as possible for a Plan B that mitigates whatever projection and network problems arise.
I'm not great now, but used to be an absolutely dreadful public speaker. While I was in college I got a most of a year warning that I would have to give a technical presentation to an audience of a few hundred. At that point I could not do that. I told myself, "If you are going to stand in front of that many people and talk, you need practice". So for the next 8 months EVERY time a professor asked for a volunteer I said yes. No matter how ill prepared I was. Once I got myself into a real pickle. I volunteered to do a homework problem on the board for a homework I had not done yet on a subject I was weak in. It went ok. I had to ask the class for help, and announced what steps I thought I should do. After that I began to trust the advice that the audience wants you to succeed.
When it came time to giving the presentation I practiced a huge amount. Recorded it and watched it again and again. I also spent time thinking of every question that could be asked and prepared backup slides (with quick links) to visuals to support the top 10 questions I guessed might be asked. I got to use two of those visuals to answer questions.
Overall it was a great experience and I was able to place 4th at the national level of the competition.
Agreed, former Speech and Debate participant for several years. Did not place well. Consistently last actually. Was extremely useful in learning to care less and less about being in front of people and the center of attention. Still get massive guitar playing stage fright though.
This is the "Schaum's Outlines" of public speaking in a technical context.
When ever I give a talk, I read the entirety of speaking.io.
This style does lead to slides that make little sense outside the context of the talk. When I reviewed the slides for a talk I gave 18 months ago, I had no idea what the slides were about.
> This style does lead to slides that make little sense outside the context of the talk. When I reviewed the slides for a talk I gave 18 months ago, I had no idea what the slides were about.
That happens, but still - I think it's for the best.
The way I learned to see it, slides too often are used as crutches by people too afraid of focusing attention on themselves. But that's not how good talks are made. It takes practice to overcome this fear, but you have to. Your public talk is all about your ideas. Which you mostly deliver by speaking them[0]. Slides should have one primary purpose: to help you express your ideas in a clearer way. So e.g. do show a graph or a piece of code you intend to discuss. Do show e.g. a hierarchy of your ideas in a spatial way, if that's a good way for people to imagine the concept. Don't show the points you're going to speak word-for-word.
Also, my observation: if you intend to put a joke slide, train transitioning to it well in advance. There aren't many better ways to destroy a joke than to show it on a slide, and then awkwardly proceed to read / explain it.
--
[0] - If those ideas are better expressed as an article, just write an article. Also, there's no hurt in doing both - text and public presentations are orthogonal distribution channels.
> Your public talk is all about your ideas. Which you mostly deliver by speaking them[0]. Slides should have one primary purpose: to help you express your ideas in a clearer way.
One question I have about this is whether some audience members would still benefit from seeing in written form much of what is spoken. I know that the "learning styles" idea has been drawn into significant question, but it seems possible that there are various benefits. An obvious example is when audience members include non-native speakers of the language of the presentation, where it seems clear that same-language subtitling helps comprehension.
(I'm a non-native Portuguese speaker and I recently made English subtitles for a friend's Portuguese-language lecture, which I hope to be able to share with the public soon. I was working with Google's autogenerated Portuguese subtitles, which were often very inaccurate. In about ten places, my friend said something that I totally missed, and could still not understand even after watching the video over and over again. But I'm pretty sure a native speaker would have understood all ten, and that I could understand all of them given accurate same-language subtitles.)
But maybe this means that people who offer live subtitling of lectures (which is a thing that's been offered at a few conferences, though maybe it's kind of expensive?) are helpful, not that more of the spoken presentation belongs in the slides. So you could have slides that contain very little of the spoken presentation, plus an optional separate subtitle medium that contains the entirety of it.
I'd vote for either publishing a video with subtitles after the conference, and/or a transcript of your talk. If you prepared your talk in advance, you could offer a transcript even before the presentation.
If you can get a live translation, that'll be best for non-native speakers, though that's a rare thing (I've only seen it on big TEDx conferences and on religious conventions, where people care very much for non-natives and deaf people to be able to receive the message). Of live subtitling I've never heard before.
Related, a good trick for some public talks - if you can, make handouts for everyone, that contain all the charts and pieces of code you'll be showing on your slides and discussing. It's very hard to make something complex fit on a slide in such a way it'll be visible for people in back rows (or people with bad sight). Paper handouts on the other hand have huge resolution and will be right in front of the person reading it; for a typical presentation, you should be able to easily fit all your charts and code examples on a single A4 page. It's a very cheap way to ensure even the finer points don't escape people just because they sit too far.
I've given talks in English both in places where it wasn't the main language and places where it was. In the former case, most of the audience consisted of non-native speakers and there was generally an obvious specific language that the talk could have been interpreted to by a simultaneous interpreter (and sometimes was!). In the latter case, there were sometimes non-native English speakers in the audience, but they didn't necessarily all have the same native language.
Haven't read the entire thing, though there's good stuff in there. One disagreement I have is with the use of slides. Slides should only be used for things that cannot be described merely through words. Mostly graphs and code. Photos, inspirational quotes, and cat gifs should be insulting to the audience because they are distracting, convey no information, and are just an appeal to your senses. Even the second and third best public speakers don't use slides as a crutch, and really nobody should. Public speaking should be entertaining, but it's the speaking itself that should be entertaining. I would rather try be like one of the best public speakers than impress people with my mad web surfing skillz.
Heavily depends on the audience. If you're doing an internal presentation for a company, you can bet that everyone is mostly hoping for a slide deck in their inbox an hour after your talk is done. So it has to have lots of words and pictures.
I can here for this comment. To me, slides are like tables or diagrams in a research paper: you only use them because expressing the idea in a paragraph (i.e. speaking) would be too difficult or nonsensical.
I understand that some speakers are so slide centric because it's their presentation style or they do it for shits and giggles, but most speakers seems to do it because of ignorance and inexperience.
Either way, it's still a crutch. If they do it because it's their style, that's fine except it's utterly pointless and audiences should be insulted by it; at best, the slides just repeat the same information that the speaker is telling you in person, and at worst it's inane kinda funny garbage that I could have easily come across on my own time. The information and insight itself should be compelling enough to carry a talk, and if the speaker can't muster the enthusiasm to actually entertain people while being informative, said speaker really isn't providing much value at all. Admittedly, this is from my perspective and I know that slide-heavy talks amuse people. I'm going to be a pompous jackass and say that people should have a little integrity and actually care more about the information they are receiving than by merely being entertained. In a sense, I am criticizing audiences more than I am speakers because speakers wouldn't get away with these things if they weren't getting even just a couple laughs. Slides have their place, but the ideal should be that they are only used as figures would be in a research paper. Imagine how annoying it would be if most research papers had meme images between every paragraph! Funny at first, but would get super tiresome when you're trying to understand algorithm-heavy concepts.
I like slides that "just repeat the information that was said". It makes it easier to think about previous point (because it is in front of me) and easier to catch up if I lost attention momentary. It makes it also easier to remember what was said afterwards (I can either remember speech or slide visually and having it in two forms help).
There are certainly speeches/talks that don't require the use of slides at all.
However, slides do often help engage an audience and keep attention focused. (Though less content is often better.)
I tend to use photos plus a relatively few words personally. Presentations that are unadorned but with some minimal text also works. But there are certainly different styles.
There's also a tension between presentations that can stand on their own and those that are solely in support of a live presentation. In an ideal world, most decks wouldn't be called on to function as a substitute for watching the actual presentation but that often isn't realistic.
I think the cat gifs can work (or other memes,) but it has to be the right speaker. If the speaker is funny then it works, but if the speaker is using it to break the ice or tension, then it does not work and it's just awkward.
One facet that I think the site could add would be "expected time investment" for many of the steps. They sound simple as one liners, because in concept they are.
However, "Record yourself" can be quite a bit of time and review and re-doing - three times for a 30 minute speech is 90 minutes. That's a lot of talking!
The layout and structure of the advice provided is quite good, and I think it's a great reference point. As somebody who has been half-naked and tied up in front of about 10 people for the sake of making a student film, it helps reset the concept of performance a little.
There are two major problems with public speaking:
1. Many do public speaking for the sake of public speaking. To prove themselves something. That they can publicly speak. This is wrong. You need to have a clear goal. Your speech is an enabler. E.g. you want to attract new clients, employees, funding, whatever. Even just to strengthen your personal brand doesn't work either. Behind this semi-goal must be again a clear and meaningful goal. E.g. increase personal brand because you want to sell x or position yourself as expert in field y.
If you have this clear gloal your speech will fly by itself. If not you will utterly fail and you feel it every second of that speech.
2) The bigger problem is that people heavily learn their speech before. Just learn the first five minutes. Then try to speak to the public like you would speak to a good friend. Don't learn sentences. Just have a rough outline of the speech in your head. The best speeches usually come when you didn't prepare at all (but this never happens).
> Then try to speak to the public like you would speak to a good friend.
I think this works better for some people than for others. When I speak to a good friend, often I'm rambling and not articulating clearly, and I often lose track of the point of my story. It happens far more often than I like that I fail to capture someone's interest, and I definitely don't want that to happen on stage.
That's something to work on. Structuring your thoughts and thus speech a little bit. Next time you feel like explaining something to someone, try to be mindful of the points you're explaining, and proceed in a recursive way: first an outline, then the details, one at a time. Because good public speaking does indeed work very much like talking to a friend (with some small differences in style and tempo).
Maybe a writing exercise would help? Try and write an article on a topic, and get someone to comment on its structure (I'll be happy to help).
I actually consider myself to be pretty good at writing. I think it's mostly that it costs a lot of time and energy for me to articulate properly, to maintain social cues, etc., which leaves little for properly structuring a story. I hope/expect this to get better over time, but it definitely doesn't come naturally unfortunately.
In 1) you provided examples for talks that are meant to convince people / win you something. But the very same advice applies in the other kind of public speaking - the one in which you want to give something valuable to your audience.
You have to have a clear idea of what you're trying to explain to people. That necessarily involves first understanding it. After that - and this is a step I see some smart people struggling with - you need to think through how to structure that understanding, recursively, from the expected level of your audience upwards. Then the public speech is pretty much like executing a pre-order traversal on a tree (with root node being your talk outline).
Yes! I've found that public speaking has become almost second nature to me over the years only after becoming an absolute expert in my field to the point I generate unique research and can bring new things to the table. As a result, I may prepare a slide deck ahead of time and am usually still working on it just before I speak. The slide-deck itself are breadcrumbs. It's there to keep me on subject but in terms of preparation, I don't prepare because I don't need to thanks to how well I know the subject matter.
Definitely agree on 1. Having a clear goal makes it a much better experience by soothing the nerves esp. for someone like me who doesn't speaks often in public. The more clarity I have about my content more confident I feel while speaking.
Minor nit... Conferences have CFPs, you don't write a CFP! (unless you're organizing a conference). It's a call for papers, speakers submit papers (at least in academia, I guess in tech conferences maybe an abstract sufices)
The best thing I learned for giving a good talk, and what I tell myself every time, is that it's story time for adults.
Think back to a young age, and how you learned all those morals with fables and stories. Want to give a good talk? Make it a good story with wit and anecdotes. Be Garrison Keillor up there, and you'll see sparkling eyes and open mouthed smiles.