On the Pleasure (and Perils) of Public Speaking
Although I never intended it to happen, I have become someone who makes a living from public speaking: over the past twenty years I’ve given a lot of talks. Sometimes it’s a masterclass with twenty or so people, other times it’s a keynote delivered to hundreds of anonymous faces from the centre of a brightly lit stage. There have been some wonderful moments, where I’ve felt at one with an audience hungry for every word. And then there have been some, erm, less wonderful moments, like the time in Mumbai when an evening indulging in street food exacted a humiliating and very public price the following morning as I walked to the lectern.
Given how tough most people find public speaking – indeed how tough I found it when I began and still sometimes do – I thought I’d share some of the most useful things I’ve learned about how to deliver a great talk.
On the question of slides or no slides … I’d love to be able to stand alone in the middle of the stage and give a talk completely unaided. But having a few well prepared slides has always helped me. They provide structure and pacing. And there’s less chance of drying up when you can always just skip along to the next one.
But there’s a few caveats here. The first is to make those slides as visual as possible: more pictures, fewer words. Keep any text down to a minimum. If the audience have to read your slides, you are no longer holding their attention. When you’re speaking they’re going at your pace and you’re in control, when they’re reading they’re going at their own.
And if you’re going to use slides, take a little time to make them look nice. You don’t need to go to town, but if you choose a clean sans serif font, stick to the same point size, select 1.1 line spacing and keep everything centred, then even the most exacting designer in the audience will be unable to quibble with your deck.
Should you have a script? Well, when it comes to a script I’m an all or nothing kind of guy. In the event that I ever got invited to give a TED talk – we can all dream – I’d probably have a script. It’s a short slot that’s as high profile as it gets and I’d want my words to be just right. But I would learn that script verbatim and try not to deviate from it. Until the invite from TED arrives, I’m happy to have a good sense of what I want to say for each slide, say two or three key points, and then adlib as I go. I find this keeps things fresh and informal.
The difficulty comes when people fall between these two stools and hedge it. They have a script in their presenter notes or on paper and they half read and half improvise. This means the audience is getting the worst of both worlds and, alas, they usually know it.
Oh, and when I say I adlib around the slides, the one bit of my talk I do usually take the time to script and learn are the first few sentences. I do this because I like to get off to a good strong start. Stumble right at the beginning and it’s really hard to recover.
As an audience member I find it excruciating when a speaker suddenly realises halfway through their talk that they’re running out of time. They either dash awkwardly to the end or resolutely plod on with no regard for the collapse of the schedule that will follow in their wake. There’s one solution to this. And it’s painful but failsafe … rehearse. Once your talk is prepped, run through it with a stopwatch, slides and all, ideally in front of a friend or a loved one who can give you some gentle pointers on content and delivery, along with a lovely warm dollop of encouragement. I’ve found that my actual running time is usually rehearsal time + five minutes, so I build this in.
On the day If you’re speaking at a venue you don’t know, always arrive early. You want to try and get a look at the stage before you have to walk on to it if you can. And be super nice to the AV team. Make sure you ask their names. They often get overlooked at big events and theirs is a tough gig, so acknowledging them is important. There’s also a subtler point here, which is that when I’m on stage I’m aiming for some positive human interaction with the audience, so beginning backstage with some warm, upbeat conversation puts me in the right headspace.
Before you go on, if you can, take a little time outside the room where you’ll be presenting to sit quietly for a few moments, say five minutes, just to be present and breathe. As the adrenalin builds your brain is going to shift into overdrive and it’s important to compensate by making an attempt to relax. With your feet flat on the floor, and a straight spine take some slow, deep breaths. I find it a bit weird to close my eyes in a public space, so I focus on something natural, leaves or grass or sunlight, and concentrate on my breathing.
And while we’re on the subject of nerves, in my experience, the more you fight them, the more pronounced they become. Acceptance is what it’s all about. In a few moments you’re going to stand up in front of a bunch of people, many of whom you don’t know, so of course you’re bloody nervous. Nerves are totally natural. Your brain’s doing what it’s supposed to do which is to put you on hyperalert. But this also means you’re sharp, you’re ready, you’re primed, you’re good to go.
By the way, it can be really tempting in those final few moments, when you’ve switched to hyperdrive, to think maybe I should change the running order, or what if I tweak the opening words …? Don’t give in to this. It’s your brain messing with you. Trust the slides. You’re prepped, you’ve rehearsed, so stick with the plan. Same goes if you start losing your way on stage. Trust those slides. If you’ve done the prep they will carry you.
OK, this is an obvious one, but it bears repeating, slow down. While you are in a heightened state of fight or flight, your audience – who’ve maybe just had lunch or who’ve had to sit through another less able speaker droning on – are most likely in a depressed state of snooze or scroll. Because of the sudden rush of neurotransmitters pulsing through your grey matter, you won’t realise how quickly you’re talking. So you have to compensate by speaking more slowly than you think you should. Slow. It. Down. This also has the added advantage of giving you more time to work out what you’re going to say next.
Think back to a really terrible talk you’ve attended. Got one? OK, I’ll hazard a guess that the speaker was speaking as if the audience wasn’t really there. That they were speaking at you, with little regard for your response to their words. When you stand in front of an audience there’s an invisible wall between you and them. Your job, early on in your talk, is to break the wall. There are different ways to do this. I like to ask the audience how they’re doing and then speak directly to someone who gives a particularly emphatic – or lacklustre – response. Sometimes I’ll wave to people in the back row and start chatting to them. Acknowledging the audience engages them and that’s what this speaking gig is all about really. Plus it makes them less anonymous which in turn will make you feel more relaxed.
And if you’re lucky enough to raise a laugh – this is a tip I learned from listening to comics talking about their stagecraft – then give the audience the space and time to laugh. An inexperienced speaker will often squander a positive audience response by speaking over it.
So what if, in spite of all the planning and rehearsing and line spacing and breathing and being nice to the AV crew, something goes wrong? Acknowledge it. Whatever you do, do not pretend it didn’t happen. It’s a weird thing, and maybe a testament to human solidarity, that the more you mess up, the more likely you are to get the audience on side. So long as you don’t pretend you didn’t mess up. I remember a talk I gave in Berlin; as I clicked on my first slide, my computer crashed. Terminally crashed. The awkwardness that followed was agonising. And in the end I had to give the talk without slides. But weirdly, the talk went down really well. Largely, I think, cause the audience felt so sorry for me.
And finally, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be familiar with the troubling phenomenon that is self-doubt: that pesky demon who loves to whisper in your ear that you’re just a bit rubbish. Now, when it comes to public speaking – and this is maybe the reason I keep doing it – there are those occasions when everything just works, and I come away feeling like I nailed it. There are few better sensations when this happens. Then there are times – e.g. Mumbai and Berlin – when things go terribly wrong. But mostly I come away not being entirely sure whether I was any good. What I’ve learned is that in these situations it almost always went better than you think. I know this from receiving emails and speaking to people afterwards. I’m usually my toughest critic and maybe you are yours too, so do keep this in mind as you sip reflectively on your well-earned post-talk pint.
Sharing ideas is one of the best things we human beings can do. We all benefit. But this requires brave people, like you, to step up on a stage and speak into a microphone from time to time. It’s weird, uncomfortable and nerve wracking, but it’s almost always worthwhile.
Good luck with your next talk.
If - after reading all this - you’re brave enough to consider having me speak at your event, you can drop me a line here.