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Comment by callumprentice | Hacker News Reader

In the early 80s I got an, at the time, revolutionary new, inexpensive home computer and brought it along to the local university computer club monthly meetup. It created an awful lot of interest and I was asked to give a "short informal talk to a few people" at the next event. I declined countless times but eventually I was persuaded to do it - after all, How Hard Could It Be? I turned up the next month and got asked to report to LT2 whatever that was.. LECTURE THEATER 2!! must have been 400 people in there. I'd like to say I gave an insightful, detailed presentation on the hardware and software aspects of the device. I did not. I was so nervous that I don't even remember most of it but I am sure it was simply awful. Since then, I've never been able to speak in public in any shape or form. Getting help or training is on my bucket list of things to do one day but as much as I want to improve, the idea of it literally makes me quake.

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Check out Toastmasters then - it helped me a lot. https://www.toastmasters.org/

Interesting, thank you and I see there are an unbelievable number of affiliated clubs near where I live.

A lot of companies (though probably not many startups) do offer presentation skills classes. They don't beat practice but worth checking out.

I definitely found the big room effect scary at first even if I should probably have felt less pressure than presenting to my CEO in a small room.

Yeah. My company has a modest education budget per employee and I've been told that improving my communication skills is a perfectly acceptable use of it - time to put it in action!

I find it uncomfortable. I'd probably hate acting classes. But, even as someone who does a lot of presenting, classes are really useful and I've benefited when I've pushed myself to take them. You'll probably find it more useful in the long run that something about the framework du jour which you can probably do equally well on-line.

A book “confessions of a public speaker” has quite a few very nice and useful anecdotes and tips.

And a random personal anecdote:

I had a really difficult time even at toastmasters dealing with my Uhms and Umms. Having someone count them somewhat works, but I decided to experiment by just watching my daily speech to be the same “quality” as public speech, and try to suppress the garbage words even during no-stress moments.

It took maybe half a year of practice, but as a result I started to speak slower and (probably :) clearer in the day to day life, and this during the public speaking too, with zero effort.

Edit-append: the most useful exercise is taking the projector, presenting in an empty room as if for the crowd, recording this “from a seat” and watching yourself. Extremely weird at first, but you very quickly see the areas to focus on. And since you must rehearse any talk anyway several times (at least that is the case for me), it is a zero-cost and high return activity.

Sounds like great advice - thanks. I did have to give a (kind of) public talk recently and it wasn't great but one of the things you mentioned helped me a lot - namely, slow down. I felt like I was talking much too slowly at first but slowly realized it was okay.

Happy if it will be of use!

There are two things at play with being too fast:

first, you know what you are talking about (thus are giving a talk) - and tend to want to give as much info as possible.

the second, and more important one, is the adrenaline rush that every performance gives.

It probably is this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachypsychia

Consequently rehearsals help (they remove the worry about what to say)

Also one thing that helped me a lot is taking “dominant” poses five minutes before getting on stage. I can’t find the study that claimed it to work - but it did.

Later I have read the research that had claimed it didn’t work - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28946020/ is one of the studies I could find quickly, but for me this technique still works, so maybe it’s the power of the placebo :)

Video has helped me to calm my hand motions down. And editing podcasts makes me ever so aware of the verbal tics that I (and my guests) tend towards.

My High School debate coach loved to sit in the back of the room during practice with his hand in the air counting the number of "Uhmms". Disconcerting at first, but then you start actively trying to keep the count from increasing, which backfires for a while, and then you get past it.

That's fine, and extremely common! I know some accomplished speakers and more than one of them have shaking hands for the first few minutes of a talk. They're just used to it. Some people get over their fear of public speaking, others get over their fear of the fear.

You're in good company. Fear of public speaking is (one of?) the most common phobia(s). For one example, Warren Buffett was terrified of it - and took specific steps to overcome it, including taking the Dale Carnegie course on public speaking - and when he withdrew from fear before it began, signing up for it again. https://www.inc.com/carmine-gallo/3-steps-to-overcome-stage-...

The key seems to be repetition - just do it, realize it is OK, and do it again.

Good luck!

For some reason it helps some people to admit to the audience that they are nervous about speaking there. Depending on the context you could even mention exactly this anecdote and ask them to therefore bear with you if it turns out to be not as smooth as you were hoping for?

Thanks for all the extremely supportive comments and suggestions. I've been inspired to go investigate the seeming multitude of resources out there that I had no idea existed.

Maybe one day, I'll make a post to HN describing my first talk to a big crowd and how much I enjoyed it :)

Thanks all.

May I suggest - ummoapp.com - not affiliated in any way, just a happy user.

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