Speak to the World: Powerful presenting in four simple but surprising steps

How to write a stunning, inspirational and motivating talk

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If you find the prospect of getting on stage and talking to hundreds of people – or even doing a Zoom presentation at work – utterly terrifying, then this is for you.

After publishing my first book back in 2018, I found myself face-to-face with the sickening reality that I had to promote the damn thing, and that this meant public speaking – something I'd been scared of for as long as I could remember.

At first, I did what any self-respecting adult would do. I ignored the problem. A lot. I ignored it even when I started getting booked for talks, which of course only added to my anxiety.

Fast forward a few weeks, though, and I was stepping off the stage to be met by (I'm not joking) tearful hugs and high fives from complete strangers. Aside from the first two or three minutes, I had spent the entire time in front of a few hundred people feeling grounded, purposeful and at home. And what I had said moved the audience to tears. I would never ever have expected this.

I'm not claiming to be an aficionado of public speaking, by the way – just someone who got over a fear and managed to do a good enough job on the day. This article is the first in a three-part mini-series about how I made the shift from terrified to perfectly functional, and how you can too.

Fear of public speaking

“In all, 63.9% of the college students reported fear of public speaking. As many as 89.3% of the students would like their undergraduate program to include classes to improve public speaking. Being female, having infrequent participation as speakers in groups, and perceiving their voice as high-pitched or too soft increase the odds of exhibiting fear of public speaking compared with students without those features.”

Anna Carolina Ferreira Marinho, Adriane Mesquita de Medeiros, Ana Cristina Côrtes Gama, Letícia Caldas Teixeira; Fear of Public Speaking: Perception of College Students and Correlates; Journal of Voice, 2017.

First up, and very briefly, you need to know that if you're afraid of public speaking, then you're not alone. We fear this kind of performance instinctively because we are wired for connection and have a fundamental, evolutionary need for inclusion and acceptance. So the prospect of publically making a fool of ourselves is terrifying. Thankfully, there are ways to bypass or at least minimise this natural reaction.

In this piece, I'm starting with the most practical tips – how to begin working on a talk that feels meaningful and inspiring for both you and your audience.

Empowering preparation (for when you feel disempowered)

Step 1: Have a strategy for beating procrastination

For the talk I mentioned above, because I was so nervous, the urge to procrastinate was strong. By the time I got started, I only had four weeks to write and learn my talk (around my fulltime therapy practice), so I needed a way to get started. I used Mel Robbins’ “5 Second Rule”.

It's beautifully simple: act within five seconds of having a thought like, “I should start writing my talk” and you can circumvent the otherwise inevitable flood of rationalisations for your urge to avoid the thing. These thoughts, as I'm sure you're well aware, will paralyse you at best, or, at worst, have you pulling every book off your bookshelves in order to spend hours arranging them into a rainbow.

To avoid that fate, as soon as you notice the "I should…" thought that you actually want to follow, count from five down to one and make sure that you have stood up and started moving in the direction of the task before you get to one. This sounds too easy, I know, but it works.

Step 2: Define your core intention

Now that you have some momentum on your side, it's time to ensure you'll be delivering meaningful content that you know thoroughly.

My next step was to define a purpose for my talk – my overall intention. To do this, I set out to write one sentence that encapsulated my core aim. I can't remember where I got this tip from so I can't reference it, but it's great. Here's the deal.

Make your sentence start with the word "To…"

Then, continue by describing the impact you want your talk to have on the particular audience you'll be addressing. For example: "To share powerful but simple presentation tips with people who fear public speaking."

This sentence will give you a filter; material that serves your intention makes the cut, anything else gets edited out.

Step 3: Choose vulnerability over virtuosity

Next, think about who you want to be on stage.

For my talk, I wanted to be myself, basically – a human, not a robotic expert – so I chose to open my talk with a personal anecdote, rather than a boastful intro or a bunch of stats. I'm not saying everyone needs to do exactly this, of course. But I'd say it's important to think about the picture you paint within the first few minutes of speaking, because first impressions tend to be quite persistent, and we usually don't have that long to win the audience over if we start out sounding like… I don't know, Elon Musk.

So, who do you want to be on stage, and how can you convey this in the first two minutes of talking?

Step 4: Practise the thing!

Once you have your intentional script ready, the next step is to practise. The only thing worse than listening to an unprepared speaker who keeps checking notes, mumbling to themselves and flicking through their own slides to find stuff… is being that speaker. This, to me, is just terrifying, so I pretty much learnt my first talk verbatim, which was easier than I expected (it took about a week).

If you want to do this, a clever trick is to read through your presentation before you sleep.

Studies have shown that our rate of learning can be significantly improved if we revise before climbing into bed for the night. At first, I worried this might make me too nervous to sleep, but thankfully I found that wasn't the case.

If you do this, don't only practise while lying in bed, though. Once you're familiar with the content, practising on your feet helps you to program in a physical blueprint for the presentation, and also to learn changes in stance, pace and volume, as well as pauses, gestures and facial expressions.

At the end of the day, no matter how you do it, make sure you practice. It makes a world of difference.

Next up… Addressing the fear

So that's the practical stuff out of the way. If you do those four things during the writing stage of your talk – if you plan for procrastination, clearly define your core intention, work out who you want to be on stage, and then practise the presentation effectively – you will feel much more ready and capable come the day of your talk. And, well, you'll deliver a better talk.

But if you're as frightened as I was, then you might need more than just this. So, please tune into my next article for how to reroute that nervous energy into something much, much more helpful.

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Thank you for reading!

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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