Ask HN: Do you have any tips for overcoming presentation jitters? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you have any tips for overcoming presentation jitters?

9 pointscebert12 comments

I wondered if anyone had any tips for overcoming jitters when presenting in front of an audience on short notice.

I know I need to get better at public speaking. I am okay, but not great. I believe that one way to improve is to practice. With this mindset, I am speaking at a small one-day tech conference next week. This growth opportunity pushes me out of my comfort zone a bit, but it is a smaller conference and should be a lower-risk environment. I feel good about the content and am prepared. One of the areas I am less comfortable with is "the jitters" you get standing in front of a larger audience.

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I used to be president of a toastmasters club and a public speaking competitor.

First of all is practice. The clubs are great for this because they provide constant practice, but practice will help a lot even without anyone else. Keep presenting it over and over and over while driving, at home, to friends.

I asked a world champion public speaker if the nerves ever go away. He said no.

Second, I think talking to the people I will be presenting to before I present helps a lot. Makes me feels like I'm presenting to friends.

A third thing was thinking about public speaking like swimming. The depth of the water doesn't change how you swim, the same way the size of the audience doesn't actually affect what you have to do. So focus on saying and doing the things you gotta do and forget about how deep the water is.

Fourth is definitely write your speech, and write your answers to possible questions, and write as much as you can. After you write it, don't try to memorize it. Reciting uses a different part of your brain to speaking, and while you're delivering memorized lines if your flow breaks and you forget a word you will be lost. Write it to nail the structure and to make sure your ideas are expressible, but in the moment improvise their expression.

If you're interested join a toastmasters club. If you're focused and put the time towards advancing your progress you can finish a good chunk of the program in 6 months and reap a lot of benefits. Still a lot to do after that but it's advanced and diminishing returns.

Agreed on all of these. It's a skill more like juggling than writing. You'll end up relying more on reflexes than something you thought of, and the practice helps to build the reflexes.

In addition to the good suggestions here:

- vigorous exercise the day of, prior to the talk

- deep, yoga style breathing in the minutes before

Your body can only sustain the adrenaline response for so long, so if you have an afternoon talk allow yourself to think about stepping up in front of the crowd to keep it going, so to speak, such that by the afternoon, you're pretty calm.

There's also a mindset. I try to think of some of the most inspiring performances I've seen (surfing in my case) where they didn't just survive but dominated it. The goal is not to just survive the talk but to kick ass (meaning of course, getting your message across).

Confidence comes from doing. Also, record yourself so you can get feedback and improve.

Good luck!

1) Know what you're presenting extremely well. This includes thinking about what questions people may ask, then seeing if your presentation can preemptively answer those questions.

2) Don't just talk. Have a point, something like a thesis, then reiterate that point often without mindlessly doing so.

3) Record yourself practicing and then watch/listen closely for where you think you can improve.

4) Assume that most people aren't revolted by you or immediately thinking you're awful. Most people are forgiving with a couple stumbles or mistakes, as long as your talk is interesting.

For me, the more prepared I am, the more comfortable I am. Going over what I’m going to say, out loud, so I can fix any wording I might get tripped up on, as well as thinking about questions that might come up. I’ll either proactively answer them as part of the talk or at least have an idea of how I will answer them.

If you have someone you can present to that can give honest feedback, that is also helpful. We used to do this internally on my team before our sprint reviews/demos and it helped a lot. Half the time someone would finish up and we had no idea what they were talking about, so we would talk about ways to adjust the message to make it more meaningful.

To go right along with that, I’d say to keep your audience in mind. Who are you talking to? What do they care about? I might write some code that I think is really cool, but no one cares, and I need to accept that. The person I’m presenting to is going to know how what I did can help them and how to use it. They don’t usually care how the sausage is made. In some cases I’ve prepared for a few options, and if the audience is small enough, I ask them how deep they want to dive and adjust accordingly. Finding that sweet spot, where it seems like people will actually care about what is being said helps to put me at ease, as I’m less worried about boring them (if it’s too high level), or seeing their eyes glaze over (if it’s too technical).

Check out Vinh Giang's content.

Specific tips for nerves:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6BJVkRe0Yo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zus0ymdsKXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bfzfEHi_iU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGu27C0DtKM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoVd_4-8858 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IBECw9urfU

Join a Toastmasters club. The best way to get better at public speaking is with practice.

I used to bad at presentation. Until I started to think about them as a process. A process where I continuously get better at them, and any slip-ups, mistakes or issues that I make are things that I can improve on for my next presentation. It helped with the jitters as well, because instead of feeling anxious about the "real thing", the presentation just becomes another practice run to improve. But of course, that also requires that you don't just have one-off presentations here and there, but are having frequent ones rather.

One thing I've found helps is to focus on what you can teach the people you're presenting to, rather than yourself. Because really, that's what it's about. And it leads to a mindset that is more amenable to actually helping them.

I used to be deathly afraid of speaking in public to both large and small audiences. Including even giving presentations to small groups of fellow engineers in my field. I never really studied any techniques or solicited advice from others about how to overcome that I just kind of worked through it myself. This is what I found that helped me.

The first and most important thing is practice and rehearse. This is especially helpful for a lecture style presentation where you're either not accepting questions or questions come after and can be in an informal setting rather than a formal question and answer. This allows you to rehearse the role as if you're acting and muscle memory can take over. The danger here is that it can sound rehearsed but generally that's because you've rehearsed it too little. You'll notice actors and actresses when they have a role that is well rehearsed they become so good at it it appears natural because they've rehearsed it so much it sounds kind of silly to think of it that way but that is the way it works. To little rehearsal makes it sound rehearsed a lot of rehearsal can make it sound natural.

Avoiding questions as part of a presentation is another thing that I did in the beginning because when it's free form it's much more difficult to control and understand what's going to happen. So you can get easily flustered and distracted. Moving the questions to an informal or to an after-presentation one-on-one or very small groups of people who are interested in their questions makes it a lot easier because now you're engaging in a conversation. Depending on your speaking opportunities that may not be what's desired so your mileage may vary on whether you can do that.

Finally the last thing that allowed me to become really comfortable with it is coming to the innate understanding that everybody makes mistakes and the audience is on your side. The audience doesn't want to be bored to death so you have to be engaging in entertaining but ultimately the audience is for you and rooting for you and wants you to succeed in your talk. They are there to learn from you and engage with you in a positive and constructive manner. Even if they're critical of your talk or conclusions it is still a constructive thing. Of course if you're a comedian that may not be the case because some people will be there to heckle you but I'm assuming you're mostly engaged in technical talks where that's not the case. Once you can grasp internally that the audience is with you and not there to embarrass you they're there to learn from you and they want to learn from you that helps a lot. Think of yourself when you're the audience member if the presenter stumbles over their words you don't care because you're there to engage with what they're speaking about. Ultimately as an audience member you want to make them comfortable so you can absorb the information. Your audience wants the same thing from you. That is a really hard thing to internalize because we do have the natural fear of getting up in front of people and we naturally feel embarrassed if something goes wrong. So it is difficult to overcome but once you can move to that stage everything gets a lot easier. this makes the question and answer periods that are free form a lot easier as well. Because now you're not worried about making a mistake or potentially saying something in error. You have the confidence to be able to say I don't know or I need to learn about that more or even solicit information from other audience members on something you're not as familiar with.

This moves you into that space of getting out of those jitters because in your head you can associate this as a conversation but instead of one-on-one or three to five people in a small group conversation it's one to 100 but it's still a conversation.

Thanks; these are some great suggestions. It's always nice to hear that this doesn't come naturally to a lot of folks, too.

Getting ready for this talk makes me better appreciate others who present and do talks regularly. It's very easy to critique presentations, which is fair (you don't want to waste people's time), but it's also hard for some to be comfortable presenting anything.

L-theanine. It's generally regarded as safe.

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