Scott Berkun, author of Confessions of a Public Speaker, shares his advice about becoming a better public speaker. He reveals step-by-step tips for planning an effective presentation, practicing your talk, controlling anxiety and fear, getting paid to speak, interacting with the audience, and more.

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Do you need more advice about improving your public speaking skills?
Read his book, Confessions of a Public Speaker.

What is it that makes most people panic at the mere mention of public speaking?

Well, there are a lot of things going on and I think it’s a little different for every person, but there’s biology going on for starters. There’s a part of our brains that’s very old, it’s called the amygdala, and it’s probably the oldest part – from an evolutionary perspective – of our brain, and that part of our brain is the part that controls our fight or flight response. That part of our brain is aware of survival skills from two million years ago when we were much smaller and less evolved creatures, and in those situations, whenever you’re standing alone in front of a crowd of other creatures, that tends to be really bad for survival. The creatures that were afraid of these situations, they ran away and some of them survived. The creatures that liked to stand in front of crowds, that were like, hey, this is great! Those were the ones who got eaten and did not reproduce and are no longer with us. So there is a part of us, just biologically speaking, all human beings are programmed in our brains to think that that is a dangerous situation to be in, and so anytime anyone ever gets in front of a room, whether you’re in your elementary school or it’s a sales meeting or something, there’s a part of your brain that will fire that will say biologically, hey, this is bad. We’re outnumbered, we’re cornered, we don’t know where all the exits are, and your brain is just going to respond with this panicky, high heart rate kind of thing. Now, we are not in survival situations very much anymore, so what we tend to do is rationalize. We have all these reasons we invent for why we get afraid and some of those are true as well, but there is a part of all of us that will always be biologically afraid in these situations. And so, in doing research for the book, I wanted to see who gets stage fright, who gets upset and worried before they perform, and it turns out it’s everybody. Elvis Presley, Hank Williams, Henry Fonda – I couldn’t find a single example of a famous performer or athlete who performed in front of large groups of people who didn’t feel some amount of fear. And that means that one key difference, then, is people who recognize that this is just part of the processes and try to get past it, versus people who get hung up on thinking there’s something wrong with them and take it as a personal affront to their intelligence or their ability, that they get scared. So everyone should know, right off the bat, that everyone gets afraid. The difference is, how do you prepare for it and what do you do about it?

What are some effective techniques that you can use to reduce or overcome anxiety and a fear of public speaking? Should you just use that old, “picture them in their underwear” trick?

No, no, that’s a really bad one! There’s no simple trick like that that’s going to work, because that’s trivializing the power of this older part of your brain. There’s no little trick that’s going to convince your brain not to respond that way. There are two very simple things I recommend. The first is, if this response, this fear, is innate and it’s physical, then that means that you can help your body out by getting some exercise that day. Go and help your body exhaust some of that natural, physical tension by going for a run that morning or going for a walk. If you know you’ve got a big presentation tomorrow afternoon, make sure you plan time to go and get some exercise. Go to the gym, go for a walk, do something physical. Also, make sure that you get to the room you’re going to speak in early. Let your body get comfortable with the space so then it’s less likely to be afraid of that situation. It’s going to be more familiar. Now the second thing, that’s probably even more important, but it requires more effort, is to rehearse. I don’t mean simply to look at your PowerPoint deck and flip through the slides, that’s not rehearsing. Any presentation, it’s really you speaking. The slides are just props and what most people do, or a lot of people do, is they spend way too much time thinking about the props and getting them perfect and changing the fonts and making all the stuff, but they don’t practice what they’re going to say. And it’s what you say that’s going to make you nervous or going to make you successful or not. It means that if you’re going to do a presentation tomorrow that’s ten minutes long, the day before or a few days before, once you have your material in rough shape, you should stand up in your room and close the door and practice doing it, and let yourself get comfortable with whatever you’re going to say. Some people find this really embarrassing or strange to do, but I’d much rather feel embarrassed the day before and get more comfortable with what I’m actually going to say, so that when I show up in the room, I’m not worried about my material. I can relax and meet some of the people I’m going to be speaking in front of and get comfortable. So those are two things. One, use your body that day, get some exercise, it helps dramatically. Everyone I’ve told that to, after they do it, they told me wow, I had no idea it’d be so simple. And the other piece is just rehearsing.


Scott, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. Let’s say you need to give a presentation to fifty small business owners, maybe about how they can use social networking to promote their business. Give us a rough outline of the steps that you would go through to prepare that kind of presentation.

Sure. One of the chapters in the book, I think it’s chapter five, talks about this whole process, and it’s basically the process by which any reasonably smart person would go about making a speech. And the first thing you do is you start making an outline. What are the key points that you want to say? What are the things that you’re hoping when you’re done with your half-hour speech that you’re hoping that people who were there will leave with? These small business owners, they’re busy. What is it that they really want to know? A topic like social media is so broad and it’s so easy to get lost in just trying to be comprehensive, or trying to cover every last aspect, but most people are probably going to come for four or five specific things, and I want to start by making an outline of what I think those things might be. Maybe I have a friend who is a small business owner, I can give them a call and say hey, if you were going to a talk on social media, what are the five key questions or key topics you’d hope they’d cover? And I could do a little bit of research on that. And once I have an outline together, ten or fifteen points, I put them in stacked ranked order – which one of these ten or twelve do I think are most likely to be useful or the ones that I think I can do the best job of explaining? And then that’s my structure for making an outline for a slide deck, or I could go into another level of detail for each of those five things, what are the five sub-points and once I get to the point where I feel like I have enough material, then I’d actually stand up and try to talk through it. And see what happens, and see where I get stuck, or where I realize I don’t have good data, I realize I don’t have a good story. Or maybe I no longer agree with the point that I wrote down, and I actually realize I believe the opposite. I very quickly try to get into a place where I am trying to talk through my points, and the sooner I do that, the more thoughtful I’ll be about the points and the better I’ll understand what I might need to do for slides, or other material that will help support my points, but it’s really important not to focus on yourself. It’s a big mistake that a huge percentage of speakers make. The people are not there really for you. They’re coming because they want to learn something. They’re coming because they have a problem that they’re hoping you can help them resolve. They’re hoping maybe there’s an insight or a framework that you’ve discovered through experience that they can borrow, and that has nothing to do with me and my ego and how smart I am or what my resume is. By the time they show up in the room, they’ve already decided I’m credible and I don’t need to talk much about me anymore. So it’s outlining, really. I think outlining is the way to go.

What about using stories in your presentation? Should you use them and where do you find stories to use to make a certain point?

Stories are the way that we think about the world. We’re narrative creatures, and we tell stories all the time. What did you do today? What do you do for a living? How did you meet? It’s a kind of currency; it’s a social currency that we use all the time. So stories are important. The problem is that most people are not very good at telling stories. That we tend to focus on our part of the story, which is not the interesting part to the listener. We tend to ramble on, most of us, we get hung up on details that really are irrelevant to the people that are listening. The goal is to try to find stories that illustrate your points, but to make them as tight and concise as possible, and that takes work. You don’t realize how long your stories are until again, you’ve rehearsed going through your talk. If you come up with an outline and you’re planning to go for thirty minutes and you practice it and you realize that the story that you just had is one little footnote, it took you ten minutes to tell, then there’s something clearly wrong. And now you realize that you have to learn how to tell that same story using half as much time. Or maybe even one-tenth as much time. And that kind of feedback you get very quickly if you’re rehearsing and watching the clock. And that saves the audience a great deal of trouble. So I think stories are important, but most of us overestimate our ability to tell stories well, and you can sort that out usually by rehearsal.

Do you think sometimes it’s just better to wing it? Do you think you can prepare too much and run the risk of sounding too stilted?

No, I think that brain surgery or heart surgery is a good analogy. The people who are in the audience, they’re giving their time, and I know if I had a surgeon come in and say hey, yeah, I didn’t read up today on the surgery, I’m just going to wing it, I’d be very upset about that, because my heart and my brain and my time are very precious to me. If I want the speaker to err one way or the other as a member of the audience, I want them being extra careful. I want them going out of their way and thinking maybe a little too much. And if they come off a little stilted, that will be okay, because if they’ve thought hard about why I showed up, and what my concerns are or what my questions are, or what my interests are, then I can overcome the stiltedness, because they’ll be talking about what I came to hear. As opposed to someone who is super funny and charismatic, but has no idea why I’m there. That’s really hard to overcome. I don’t want to imply that people should try to be perfect or have a very specific way that they’re going to control themselves into saying every word or phrase or point – that’s not the goal. This isn’t a Shakespearean theatrical performance. The goal of rehearsal is to make you as the speaker comfortable with your material so you don’t have to think about it that much anymore. And I find that, for myself, once you get more comfortable with your material and you’re not worried about it, you become more natural. You’re not as fixated on wait, what’s the next slide, or what’s the next point, because you’re so familiar with it that you’re okay making a little side joke, taking a pause to collect yourself, because you’re confident in your material. Winging it’s a really bad idea, unless you are so experienced with the material or you’re so comfortable with the small audience that you are really sure you’re going to pull it off, and even myself, as someone who is very experienced as a speaker, I always think of the audience and I’m like, wow, if they knew I was winging it, would that be what they wanted me to do? My answer is almost always no.

Scott, I can’t tell you how many presentations I’ve suffered through in hotel conference rooms with poor lighting and really terrible acoustics. If you have a choice, where are the best places to present and which ones should you try to avoid?

The best places are hard to get to. The best places are theaters, because theaters are designed to solve all these problems. All public speaking, whether it’s a sales presentation or a lecture at a university, it’s all a kind of theater. You have someone in the front, up on the stage or on a lectern, and you have a bunch of people in rows in the audience. It’s a very old kind of technology for making it possible to hear the speaker in a large room. And so theaters are designed with this in mind, they usually have raised rows and they have curved seating so all people have a better view of the stage. Some conference halls, for business conferences, do have theater-style rooms. If you get can that room, that’s almost always the best bet. The lighting will be better, the acoustics will be better, and it will be an environment that’s really designed for speaking. But those are hard to get, and often, as a speaker, you’re invited somewhere and you don’t really get to choose where you go. So the second consideration, then, is to get there early and if you get there early enough, then you can at least get a lay of the land for yourself and have some time to think through how you’re going to deal with the issues that you have. Often, if you’re invited to a corporation or you’re speaking at an event, there’s a tech person there, and the first thing you can do when you meet the tech person an hour or two before you speak is to do a sound check. Ask them to mic you up or use the microphone on the podium, on the lectern, and try it out. And then you’ll get a sense right away, for what kind of problems you have. And that’ll let you know that maybe there’s a dead spot in the room, or other areas that, if you have a lav mic or remote mic, that you shouldn’t go. And you’re at least getting more informed of the situation you’re dealing with, and you’re going to talk to the person who’s there that can do something about it. Sometimes I’ve been in rooms that are relatively small, and if I’m only speaking for a half-hour or forty-five minutes, I’m actually better off without a microphone, assuming its just 25 or 30 people. Another trick is that if you’re ever in a large room but there’s only 20 or 30 people, you’re the speaker. You’re kind of in control of the room. Ask everyone to move to the front. If they can all move to the front, now everyone can hear you much better and you don’t have to reach the back of the room. And that makes it easier to have the option of turning the microphone off. Every room is different. Every place is different, and you never know how good the tech guy is going to be or what the sound equipment is going to be like. The only real saving throw or the way to mitigate all this is to get there early, and then at least you have a chance to sort it out for yourself. You can get the tech guy involved, or your host involved, at improvising a solution.

What are some things you can do or say that will make your presentation memorable and really stand out? How can you get your audience to remember your 9 a.m. talk until at least after lunchtime?

We know a great deal now about how our brains work when we’re sitting in a lecture hall and listening. There’s a lot of these myths and pet theories about attention, and how to be memorable, and the science bears out some fairly simple things. One is that brevity is good. If you have a thirty minute slot, then you should be trying to plan for 20, 25 minutes. When you end early, you will almost always make people happy. The people who hated you will be happy that you left the stage a little early, and the people who loved you, the people who liked you, well the stuff that resonated with them, they’ll have a few minutes to digest that and let that sink in. So you should always plan on going a little bit short. Most people never actually achieve that because they don’t practice, so they don’t actually know how long the material will take, so I think that’s part of it. By far, the most powerful thing though, I think, is really about how well you aim your material. Most people who talk to me about speaking or they ask for advice about speaking, we get so hung up on these superficials about trying to be funny, or trying to be inspiring as if it’s this abstract kind of pixie dust that you can just sprinkle on your material. The most inspiring thing, I think, is the people in the audience came there for very specific and very simple reasons. It’s fairly simple what people want when they’re in the audience. They want a clear message, they want stories that resonate with them, that sound true and not made up, and not simply self-aggrandizing stories. They want some guidance in how they can apply that stuff to their lives when the lecture’s done. That’s simple language, those three or four things. It doesn’t require being attractive, it doesn’t require having a voice like James Earl Jones. That just requires some diligence to sit and think really carefully about how to structure 20 minutes or 25 minutes to have that effect on the particular audience you’re speaking to. An audience always knows when they’re being treated with respect in that way. That the speaker really cares about them, and really cares about helping them solve this kind of problem, and clearly did their homework in how well researched and the quality of the stories that they tell. That’s what’s rare, and that’s the thing that will make you memorable even though you spoke at 9 a.m. The clarity of someone’s thinking and how on-target they were with what the message was that the audience came to hear, that’s what will make people remember them, not just at the end of the day, but after the event is over. It’s that kind of clarity that’s rare, I think.

Everyone’s been to presentations where “that guy” keeps asking questions, interrupting, correcting you, otherwise thinking that he’s the speaker, not you. How do you handle that situation?

There’s a bunch of these situations, and there’s a section towards the end of the book which is, what to do when things go wrong. I’ve been speaking for years, and I’ve done probably hundreds and hundreds of lectures, and I’ve had projectors die, I’ve had the power go out. Everything that can go wrong has happened to me at least once, and so I wanted to make sure there’s a chapter in the book that talked about all these situations. They don’t happen that often, but often people want to know, what should I do if that happens, and this is one of them. First, it’s a good sign that you get any questions at all. Even if you get the annoying guy whose questions go on for 20 minutes, it’s still a sign that they stayed awake and they want to hear more from you. That’s always a sign of respect, even if they give you a difficult question. That means that you’ve one well, you’ve scored at least a few points. Someone like that who asks really long questions or keeps asking questions, the burden is on the speaker to act as a host. Often, your host actually won’t act as a host because they’re not confident enough or they don’t have a microphone. If you have a microphone, everyone in the audience is expecting you to be the moderator for the room. Now if someone asks more than one question, that’s easy. That means that the speaker shouldn’t call on them again. And if the person asks a question without raising their hand, then the speaker should interrupt them and say, hey, this is just like kindergarten or high school, please raise your hand before you start talking in the room. And once you say that, everyone knows that that’s probably the right rule of etiquette and everyone will follow it, and now you’ve just neutralized the person who keeps asking questions because, unless you call on them again, they’re not going to start speaking. For the person who goes on for too long, there’s a certain threshold the you should have in your head – maybe it’s a minute – that if they’re talking for that long and have not started a question yet, then they are asking to be interrupted. And if you start talking over them, they’ll stop because you’re the speaker, and you’ll say, excuse me sir, can you please get to the question, and everyone in the room will have a sigh of relief when you do this. It will seem confrontational, you might come up with a way to soften that a little bit, but everyone in the room will appreciate when you do it, and often the person who is rambling kind of appreciates it too, because you’re helping them redirect their thinking to get to the point where it’s a question. Often, this stuff goes on because the speaker is still a little afraid to take control over the room and doesn’t want to be a jerk by interrupting people, but it’s really for the best benefit for everyone who is there, for the speaker to be the facilitator of the room, not just the speaker.

What about local Toastmasters groups? Do you recommend joining them to help you practice and improve your public speaking?

If you wanted to be a brain surgeon or a guitar player, the best advice you could get would be to go and actually start doing those things or watch people actually do those things. A lot of people think about playing guitar and they watch people play guitar, but that’s not the same thing as sitting down with a guitar and actually doing it. So Toastmasters is great. Anything like Toastmasters is awesome because, what is it? Well, you show up and all the people who are there, every week it rotates, that someone is supposed to speak that week. And then after that person speaks, they get feedback from other people who are interested in becoming better communicators. The dues are minimal. People usually are afraid of Toastmasters, that it’s some kind of cult or club. No, it’s this very simple group of people who are interested in better communication and in helping each other positively get better at this stuff, and it gives you experience speaking. I mean, in a lot of ways, that’s much better than reading a book on public speaking, because you’re getting your own personal experience actually doing it, and then getting feedback on what you actually did, I mean, that’s awesome. The poor man’s Toastmasters is to get a video camera, which almost everyone has now on their phone or their laptop or somewhere, set up a camera, stand up at your desk, and do five minutes of a presentation you’re working on, and then watch it. And all of a sudden, you’ll notice lots and lots of things that, wow, I didn’t’ realize that I say “um” a lot! I didn’t realize that I put my hand to my nose after every sentence. You’ll notice lots of little things that make a difference to the audience that you can start to work on if you have the courage to just watch it yourself, which a lot of people don’t. Toastmasters, I think, is great. Watching yourself on camera is great, also. Anything that gives you actual feedback on what you do has got to be one of the fastest ways to get better at speaking.

What if you’ve been speaking for awhile and you’ve got some good presentations under your belt and you’d like to maybe start getting paid for public speaking. What’s your advice for someone trying to go that route?

There’s a chapter in the book about the money in this, and it’s actually available for free online, the chapter’s called, “How to Make $30,000 an Hour” and it’s kind of a joke about the higher-end speaking fees. So you can find what some really famous people get paid to show up and give a talk. People like Bill Clinton or Malcolm Gladwell. These are people who get paid $50,000, $100,000 to show up at events or at graduation ceremonies or wherever, and they get paid the equivalent of a six-figure salary for a few hours work, and everybody goes wow, that’s, aw, I wish I could do that! What do I have to do? And the short answer is, well, you probably need to be as famous as Bill Clinton or Malcolm Gladwell. That the reason why they get paid so much is because a lot of people know who they are, there’s a certain kind of expertise or prestige that an event gets from having them there and speaking, and that’s a large part of why they’re paid that. People will come to those events because Bill Clinton’s going to be there or Malcolm Gladwell or Sting or whoever. This is counter-intuitive to some people that it’s not directly about how good you are as a speaker, it has to do with your value to that particular community to have you there at the event. To be paid to speak, you probably have to be seen as an expert on something. In some field or some community, you have to be seen as a leader or an expert. And then, in that community, there’s probably events where you won’t be paid to speak, but you’ll be invited and people will listen to you speak and maybe they’ll buy your book or they’ll go to your website or they’ll hire you to do whatever you do as an expert and you’ll gain credibility for that field. And then eventually there will be more prestigious events that do pay. They don’t pay a whole lot but they’ll pay something, and when they invite you to speak you’ll get paid for that. And slowly, over time, you’ll build credibility and reputation and fame for that field and eventually you’re one of the more prestigious people in that field and you’re invited to give keynote lectures, which tend to be paid more than just ordinary speaking engagements because you’re kicking off the event. And so it’s a very local thing. There’s no magic way to do it. It’s less dependent on speaking than people think. Toastmasters runs an event every year for the best public speaker in the world. I don’t know that those people will get paid very much to speak, because unless you’re speaking at conferences about speaking, their expertise doesn’t translate well into what drives people to want to come or pay tickets to go to events. It’s all very local, it’s fairly simple when you start to think about it, how much money would you pay to go see someone lecture? $10, $20, $50? Who would you go see? It’s probably an author or a musician or a famous person in some specific field that you’re interested in. And so, to get into that, you have to become an expert, become a visible expert, and get a reputation for speaking well about that thing, and then over time, that translates, possibly, into speaking fees.

Scott, are there any blogs or websites or newsletters that you follow related to public speaking and giving presentations? Any that you can recommend?

Yeah, Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds. He wrote this great book called Presentation Zen, and his book is focused a lot more on visuals and aesthetics for public speaking. He goes a little further into that, but the core of the book is about thinking of how to get past these ugly useless PowerPoint presentations and to making them things that will support what you’re saying. And so his blog is one of my favorites.

What are the biggest public speaking mistakes you see both new and experienced speakers making?

The biggest one is ego. It’s people who are so wrapped up in themselves and trying to seem smart and focused on what they want to talk about today. I think many, many speakers get wrapped up in the ego of “Well, I was invited to speak, therefore I’m going to talk about what I want, and I…” it’s very much about them. People spot that very quickly and it’s a turnoff. That even if some of their message is good, the fact that they’re structuring it on them, no one wants to spend an hour listening to someone’s resume. That’s got to be one of my biggest complaints. That usually sets people on the path to other mistakes – misreading your audience, and making assumptions about who they are or their level of expertise. If you’re speaking to a group of accountants and you’re talking about the basics of how checkbooks work or something, to bore your audience for an hour, it’s just a crime. By the same token, to talk over your audience’s head, that probably means you have a presentation that you’ve done before and you just assume you could do it exactly the same way. Which is also fairly selfish. A big one, it’s more tactical, has to do with breathing. And the need that our minds have for pauses. A lot of speakers, maybe because they’re nervous or they’re afraid of losing the audience, they never breath and they never take a break in what they’re saying, and that makes it very hard to listen to. There’s never a pause between their words or their sentences. We have pretty good evidence that our minds need those breaks to digest what someone just said. That serves a purpose for learning, it serves a purpose for comprehension. And part of that is the cousin to people who don’t take breaks are people who “um” and they fill their pauses with “uh” “uh” “eh”… those sounds are what we use in conversation to prevent the other person from speaking. We’re letting them know that we’re not done yet. But if you’re at the lectern with a microphone, you don’t need to do that. And what you’re doing instead is you’re filling the space with sound, and making it much harder to listen to. You even catch people who are pundits on television or radio commentators who “um” a fair amount, which is an incredibly disruptive thing to do. It’s one of the first things that people will catch about themselves when they see themselves speak on video and they watch it. “Oh my God, I um every time!” and you can work your way out of that through practice. Every person who you hear who has good diction and pauses well and doesn’t “um,” they didn’t start out that way. They learned and they practiced through rehearsal and watching their videotapes to work themselves out of that habit. And that helps everything, because it makes all the ideas and comments and stories they tell. It gives them room to breathe.

If you could only choose one piece of advice about how to improve your public speaking, what would it be?

If I only get one, then it has to be practice with a video camera. It has to be practice. Most of the places I go and speak, I’m often speaking at events, I watch a lot of other speakers and within five minutes I can usually tell, this person has never practiced this before. Those little things they’ve done already, that if they watched themselves on video, first five minutes, they would have caught this stuff. There’s something ironic about this. We all, in our lives, by the time we’re in college, young professionals, we’ve seen thousands of speakers. We’ve seen dozens of teachers and professors lecture to us. We know, intuitively, the things that you’re supposed to do that make it better and the things you shouldn’t do that make it worse. We really do all have a good set of basic instincts about this, but we turn that off when it’s ourselves. We forget to apply to the same kind of judgment. And if you practice in front of a camera, or you practice and get feedback from people who are going to be honest with you, then you’ll hear some of that feedback and you’ll get opportunities to correct those things very quickly in the development of a lecture or a talk or sales presentation or whatever it is. You’ll discover and recognize quickly all the little things that when you add them up make a huge difference. Just through practice. Practice in a format that you get feedback, whether it’s through a camera or through having someone watch you and give you some good notes.

Scott Berkun is the author of the bestselling book Confessions of a Public Speaker. He has also authored two other bestsellers, Making Things Happen and The Myths of Innovation. He offers services in speaking, consulting, and training on creativity, management, and a fun mix of everything else.