Thoughts on Public Speaking (2014)
speaking.io
speaking.io
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.
For example, this sequence:
This is an open problem -> We've got those results -> This is how we did it -> We used this methodology
Is very different from this sequence:
We used this methodology -> This is how we did it -> We've got those results -> This is the problem we solved
From your pink-cheeked and robust audience.
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.
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.
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.
He's on trial, not you.
Remember this: people really want to hear what you have to say. They want to believe you. They want you to succeed.
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.
Stay strong, brother.
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.
but if I just finish something physical (exercise etc), I am calm and cool as a cucumber and have no fear.
This, I find, can give some relieve from the most debilitating effects of anxiety during speaking.
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.
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).
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.
>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.
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.
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.
1. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLanzwyndb8YV4euD0Lei...
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.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/Social-Engineering-Art-Human-Hacking/...
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.
I did a quick search and I could not find out whether Adobe Acrobat has this functionality.
[0] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/View-your-speaker-n...
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.
The more you practice it, the more comfortable, the more structured and the more natural you become.
I've been in Toastmasters for almost 7 years now. And it seriously changed me for the better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also I should be practicing and finishing my slides, not on HN right now.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 would like to try 2) and see how it goes.
I don't have that long monologues in front of friends. If I would learn just outline, the audience would ended up hearing just that.
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).