During Your Talk

8. Don’t mention that you’re nervous.

Speakers are often certain that the audience knows they’re nervous. So they say something to acknowledge what everyone can plainly see. Except that literally nobody knows how you’re feeling if you don’t mention it. Moreover, audience members are there to learn something from you (selfishly), and they’re quietly rooting for you (generously). They want you to do well, because that will serve them, and so their cognitive biases cause them to see you as confident.

They can’t feel or see the butterflies in your stomach or your dry mouth. And they admire that you’re onstage. Meet them where they are by leaving out your internal narrative about your nerves.

9. Speak at a normal pace.

Adrenaline will speed you up, and speaking too quickly not only makes it hard for the audience to follow you but can throw you off your game. Making matters worse, as a speaker, you exist on a different time continuum than your audience: what will feel to you like a slow pace with excruciatingly long pauses will feel completely normal to everybody else. So you have to plan for that. Indeed, for conferences where I’ve collected feedback about individual presenters, one of the most common complaints is that speakers were hard to follow when they spit out words too quickly.

Of course, it’s helpful just knowing that normal speed will feel slow to you, because then you can aim for that. In addition, in transition moments in your talk, take pauses to emphasize a point and catch your breath or take a sip of water. You can even build pauses into your deck with occasional visual slides that you don’t intend to speak about. When you practice, you’ll get a feel for where you need to slow down or pause.

Finally, if you’ve practiced with a timer, you should have a sense of where you should be, say, three slides in or after five minutes. If you’re running ahead of schedule, you know it’s time to sloooow down.

10. Plant yourself in one place on the stage.

There’s a very big myth among speakers that moving around the stage makes you seem more energetic and helps people connect with you. It’s a complete lie. If you’re a person who naturally has a lot of physicality, and you can really get behind your movements, flying all over the place and punctuating your talk with incredible physical gestures, great. If that’s not you, and if you are speaking for one of the first times, the absolute best thing you can do is find a spot, stand in it very firmly, and stay there the whole time.

People will see you as grounded and confident if you are standing on both feet very solidly.

You can stand somewhere in the middle of the stage, and there’s also no shame at all in staying behind the podium and standing there very solidly. You can move to the side of the podium and just have it be your friend right next to you (but don’t lean on it, as that’ll look too casual).

What you want to focus on — and this will take a little bit of practice — is standing so that you’re very grounded and aren’t jiggling or shuffling around. It’s great to use lots of hand gestures, but you want your feet to be very planted. Practice. Be surprised at how hard it is at first.

11. Make eye contact with the audience. Sort of.

In many conference rooms, you’ll have what’s called a confidence monitor — a smallish screen on the floor in front of you that lets you see your slides as you speak. It’s very tempting to just look at your slides the whole time, which to the audience will look like you’re staring at the floor.

That matters, because people like it when you make eye contact with them; they feel more engaged. But eye contact can make you feel very threatened (part of the fight-or-flight response comes from a lot of eye contact with a lot of other people). You don’t want to trigger yourself into a bad place by making a ton of eye contact, and it will feel to you like you’re holding people’s gaze for a really long time if you’re looking at them for, like, half a second.

You can cheat your way through this. Think about the room in front of you as being in four quadrants — two in front and two in back, left and right. All you have to do is look at each quadrant one at a time and change quadrants approximately every sentence you speak. You don’t have to actually make eye contact with anybody in the quadrant, but everyone will think you have. This works even in a room where the audience is in the dark and you’re under lights so that you can’t see them.

12. At the very end, signal your talk is over by saying thank you.

Go out strong and avoid the awkward, “Uh, so that’s it…” by saying a definitive “Thank you” to let people know they can leave or ask questions or expect the next speaker — whatever is appropriate for your situation.

After your talk, especially if it was short, you might feel the effects of adrenaline draining away and find that you’re surprisingly tired. Managing nerves is hard work! But hopefully, you’ll also get a rush from having delivered a talk that you not only survived but also used to help other people. That’s a physical feeling that’s hard to get any other way — and it’s a great one.