At Stanford, I’d start my public speaking workshops by telling students about the scary and exhilarating experience of being asked to introduce my former boss — U.S. Senator Ed Markey — with ten minutes to prepare.
It was the summer of 2020 (COVID summer #1) and I’d been working virtually on the campaign for the past few months. Days before the September 1st primary, I drove up from New Jersey to see the last stretch of the senator’s bus tour.
I arrived in Springfield, Massachusetts on a Saturday afternoon. A few minutes before his bus is scheduled to show-up, the press secretary tells me the campaign usually has a young person introduce the senator. No one was scheduled for this stop.
“Do you want to improv for a minute or two?” she asked.
I heard myself say yes — and proceeded to plan out my thoughts on my phone in the back of a supermarket parking lot.
Here’s me, on the left, waiting to speak (Visible: Worn out blue Nikes. Not visible: My accelerating heart rate and increasingly dry throat).
Fortunately, I had a few tools to help me deal with my nerves.
Breathe
You walk up to the front of the room you set up your slides you turn around and you already start to talk and you notice that you’ve already… run… out … of … breath.
When you’ve got everything set up, take a beat, breathe deeply, look around, and then launch into your presentation or speech. You can also incorporate breathing throughout a presentation, taking strategic pauses between sections. These pauses signal to the audience that you’re moving to something new.
More importantly, breathing calms us down and reduces our stress levels.
Practice, Practice…. Practice
It’s hard enough to speak well when we’re prepared and rested. It’s much harder when we haven’t done due diligence. Practicing doesn’t preclude glitches. It does put us in the best position to succeed.
Most times we have to publicly speak will be, and certainly should be, short. For a five minute presentation or speech, you can run through the full thing a dozen times in an hour — though it’s probably a good idea to reflect and adjust between rounds (if you missed it, here are a few words on how to do just that).
For my 90 second intro at the rally, I spent five minutes brainstorming and the last five minutes doing some quick run throughs. As a bonus, practicing reduces our reliance on notes and enables us to maintain more eye contact.
Lower Stakes
Public speaking often has significant stakes — from pitching a client to convincing someone to support a policy position. The mistake many of us make is to internalize such stakes as existential.
Lowering stakes is about recognizing three things.
First, while speaking is part of the equation, other variables matter too. The best speech or interview of your life may not lead to the outcome you desire. Other times, you might falter and still make it through.
Second, audience perception is limited. My longtime classical guitar teacher always advised to keep playing if I messed up at a concert. Chances are, he said, that the audience wouldn’t notice. They would notice if I scrunched my face, stopped playing, and called attention to it. We have, in other words, a window for error that the audience won’t even construe as error.
Third, lowering stakes is the best way to thrive when the stakes are actually high. It’s hard to do well when we fixate on all the things we’ll miss out on if we screw up. Great presentations are often conversational — like someone at dinner telling us about a cool thing they learned, with a bit more polish. To strike that conversational tone, we have to treat formal public speaking like any other kind of speaking we do daily.
Overall, my intro at the campaign event went pretty well. But it was also really scary — and that can be true of impromptu situations like this one or a presentation we know about months in advance. Almost everyone feels nervous before they speak. The good news is that breathing, practicing, and lowering stakes can ease the pressure.