This can backfire horribly.
Having taught speech classes for many years, this is all so true.
If you know your subject really well, you can’t fail…you can drop all your notes, your PowerPoint can be lost and you can still wing-it. As long as you know what your are talking about, inside and out, you will feel less nervous.
Also remember that the audience wants to like you, and wants you to succeed. Nobody wants to hear a boring presentation by someone who hasn’t a clue - so if you can bring some value to them, they will be appreciative.
The important keywords:
Intro
Body
Conclusion
Make your intro something dynamic to get their interest right off the bat; it can be a short story/scenario/anecdote, it can be a quote, it can be something funny or sad, but make sure it gets everyone to sit up and pay attention from your first words!
Keep the body of the speech concise - follow a logical order from point A to point Z. Keep it moving.
Use the conclusion to wrap up the speech in a pretty bow - reference your opening statement or give them a final important bit of information. If nothing else, say “…in conclusion…” and quickly summarize your important points.
I truly hate 99% of all PowerPoint presentations - idiots who write 950 words in a font size of .001 per slide, in purple and lime green, with text that flies in from all directions and then reads them to the audience. BORING!
People can read (duh), so use your PowerPoint sparingly. Use just keywords so they are listening to you and not reading along with you. Use visual photos and graphs instead of chatty text. Add some humor in a photo or show dramatic before/after photos. PowerPoints are good for providing links to other sites or periodicals of reference, so someone can see them and write them down, but do those in large fonts, dark color (not light blue) so people in the back can read them.
Giving a good speech simply takes practice - just like riding a bike. The more you do it, the easier it gets. But as jjimm states, you really, really have to know your shit! There is nothing more obvious than someone talking about something they have no clue about - people can smell a con a mile away. If you know what you are talking about, you exude confidence and the audience picks up on that.
I used to ding my students’ grades for every “uh” and “um” they used - it shows you are thinking and don’t know what you are saying. The more prepared you are, the less you have to use filler words. Think about politicians caught on camera, lying - there are about a hundred “uh’s” and “um’s” in their speech as they frantically are trying to think of an answer. The same goes for an athlete after the game - they are not prepared for the questions so out come the “uh’s” and “um’s” but that is less serious as nobody expects a great speech from them. They do, however, expect you to know what you are talking about.
So - preparation, practice and confidence; that’s it in a nutshell.
Then, even if you screw up, you can laugh about it and jump right back into the speech without skipping a beat.
I can’t watch the link now, but I assume it’s somebody doing something completely inappropriate. Not the healthiest suggestion I’ve ever made, but I was thinking of maybe the once a decade big speech, not a weekly or frequent thing. Works about as well as benzos – and I’m sure some people take them imprudently and become dependent as well. Clearly neither substance is a good thing to use without a great deal of caution, which may not be possible for some people.
I remember a few comments from observers and students of some of my classes that I seemed very nervous, but handled it very well.
That’s a good technique – handle it. Be as nervous as you want, and get to know how you respond and be sort of friends with it. Nobody cares if you’re holding a sheet of paper and your hand shakes a little. Say your business, and if you mess up, say nothing but name, rank, serial number in your head and stick to the plan. Nothing bad will happen no matter how nervous you are.
Alas, good PowerPoint slides don’t mean a good talk (and bad slides don’t mean a bad talk, always.) The conference I’m involved in gets feedback on all speakers. In the distant past the biggest complaint was bad slides. This was in the time of real slides, 35 mm. Though the program committee reviewed them, they were expensive to make and speakers rarely made the requested changes.
Today we review the PowerPoint and can change them before they go on the conference computers if absolutely necessary. Very few complaints, but there are still plenty of bad talks. It would be nice to require submission of videos of the speakers, but you can change slides a lot more easily than speaking habits.
Why is it sad to treat it with drugs just because it’s natural? Astigmatism is natural and I don’t think it’s sad I treat it with eyeglasses. What the drugs do is help you to sublimate the nervous energy.
On the other hand, I agree people should stay away from benzos if possible simply because as you said they tend to make you drowsy and lethargic. I’ve found a beta blocker best because it relieves my physical symptoms of anxiety and allows me to focus on the task at hand.
You can’t perfectly distinguish physical and emotional symptoms of anxiety. I’ve never had any visible symptoms of anxiety but I get a racing pounding heart when I am speaking to a large audience.
Propranolol throttles that back and I can feel like myself again. For me, it’s actually more effective than benzos, and I’ve tried a bunch of them, because my anxiety is almost entirely physical. But to me it just feels like anxiety, I can’t distinguish between “feeling nervous” and my heart racing and tummy aching in the moment - they’re one in the same.
Add me to the “know your shit” category. I also think that how you prepare is just as important as how well you prepare.
Do you have a series of bullet points that you read from? Or an entire speech typed out? Or do you memorize an entire speech? Or do you just wing it?
I took a public speaking class in high school (which I thoroughly enjoyed). I started off doing the bulleted notes thing, but I quickly discovered that I could speak much more comfortably and fluidly if I just memorized what I wanted to say. Not word-for-word, of course; I would plan out the overall structure, rehearse a few key phrases that I wanted to hit precisely, and then fill in the rest by just practicing over and over again. It totally worked for me.
This is not meant to suggest that the way I did it is the best way. It may be the case that some people perform much better when they have notes in front of them. All I’m recommending is that you make an effort to figure out what style works best for you.
One more thing - involve the audience.
A famous professor who was on a panel I was moderating decided to poll the audience on the topic in the middle of the discussion section, which worked great. I’ve done something like that once or twice when appropriate, which is rare. However one guy I know has a speaking pattern which makes many statements into kinds of questions. Something like, “we know this is a good technique, yes?” I don’t think I could do that myself, but it seems to work. When you listen you are drawn into thinking about answering the obvious question.
Excellent. Rhetorical questions, I think of this technique – you’re inviting your audience to think along with you, as though you’re teaching them something new and exciting, rather than just giving some sales numbers they could easily read for themselves.
Similarly, even though I do well at public speaking, my body continues to ignore the historical evidence and becomes so anxious that I’m practically vibrating the first few minutes…so picture someone who manages to appear confident while his voice trembles. Propranalol makes a big difference - even though it doesn’t reduce my overall anxiety, taking 10 mg an hour before speaking to a large group makes the trembling go away.
Luckily we don’t do sales numbers, but I have seen him use this talking about workshops and tutorials at a press conference I run, addressing trade press guys who care nothing about any of this. But here is how you can handle sales numbers.
Normal way.
In the first quarter, sales were up by 5%. The widget division accounted for 80% of this increase.
In the second quarter sales were down 25% due to our major product being recalled for blowing up at customer sites.
His way.
In the first quarter sales were up by 5%, which was very good, right? We all know the widget division got 80% of that, don’t we.
In the second quarter we had some troubles, yes? We all know what happened, don’t we. We had a little problem with our product, right?
Actually the questions are done by voice inflection, not the words I use here.