
Some things I've learnt about public speaking - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2013/06/some-things-ive-learnt-about-public.html
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saraid216
For public speaking, I have a theory of what "confidence" is. It's pretty
simple: confidence is _actually knowing_ what you're about to do. Public
speaking is scary because there are so many things that people haven't
accounted for.

1\. Know your subject. This is usually the easy one. Know exactly how you came
to your conclusions, and why it's valid. You can defend the hell out of it if
you need to, and you can honestly engage with useful criticism.

2\. Know what you're going to say. This comes from practice. Are you worried
about time? Practice and time yourself. Are you worried about how you look?
Practice and video it and watch it. Are you worried about sounding stupid?
Practice and record and listen to it. Get someone else to listen to it.

3\. Know your audience. This is the hardest one. It comes from experience.
What does your audience care about? How can you move your audience from where
they are to where you want them to be? Get to know them. Become familiar with
who they are. This is why talking with your friends is easy, but an auditorium
of strangers is scary. This is also why making eye contact with different
audience members is helpful. You need to respect your audience, and also
believe that your audience respects you.

This was a bit of a brain dump (my best write-up has been lost to /dev/null,
unfortunately), but hopefully you get the idea. I suspect this would serve as
a good core to learning public speaking, though.

~~~
visural
I recently read "The Naked Ape" and a theory discussed there, is that public
speaking is actually an acutely unnatural scenario which we are not well
evolved to cope with.

To stare at someone is generally a threatening gesture, certainly there are
many social cues about when it is appropriate to maintain a fixed gaze, and if
a stare is held to long or without reciprocal give-and-take then it is usually
interpreted as threatening/aggressive.

Now think about public speaking - 100's or 1000's of people all staring at
you, the speaker, at the same time. It's no wonder this triggers a fear (or
fight/flight) response in most people.

It's also worth considering, in our distant primate past, we are used to
communicating with only a handful of other people at a time, outside of the
context of tribal warfare.

I'd be interested if anyone has any more recent research / theories on this.

~~~
saraid216
> Now think about public speaking - 100's or 1000's of people all staring at
> you, the speaker, at the same time. It's no wonder this triggers a fear (or
> fight/flight) response in most people.

This is true for all public performance, though. Sure, in a football game,
maybe it's just triggering all of their fight responses, but that doesn't
explain the downtime between plays. Stage performers of every kind have to
deal with this. And so on and so on.

I'm not suggesting that you can snap your fingers and lose your fear of public
speaking: I'm saying that you can develop confidence. What's the point of a
rehearsal, after all, other than to have something safe and ritualized that
you can fall back on in case of wetting your pants? The things I'm suggesting
aren't easy. They're quite demanding, in fact; you're not going to be able to
get to know most audiences except vaguely and through repeated exposure.

> To stare at someone is generally a threatening gesture, certainly there are
> many social cues about when it is appropriate to maintain a fixed gaze, and
> if a stare is held to long or without reciprocal give-and-take then it is
> usually interpreted as threatening/aggressive.

There are ways to deal with this. My suggestion is essentially to learn how to
break the ice. Give them reasons to laugh or applaud, which fills you up with
positive emotion. Get them to talk to their neighbors, which breaks the
staring effect. Focus and engage with random audience members throughout the
talk. Pace, slowly, which is a posturing response.

------
mikestew
A few things I'd add that aren't directly related to the presentation itself,
though the things could give you more confidence. It also keeps the audience
from sitting there while you try to work around a single point of failure.

1\. If you need slides, code or other digital assets, have them on your
laptop, on a USB key, and a DVD. One or more of those will break, and you'll
just fire up the alternate and go on your way. It's one less thing to worry
about, and therefore: more confidence.

2\. Prepare for anything to go wrong. If at all possible, know your
presentation well enough, and practice it enough, that you could do it without
any computing hardware and still make it at least somewhat compelling. It's
unlikely that all of the equipment will die, but something might. Your laptop
won't boot, borrow a computer and use what's on the USB key. The projector
won't work? Just read it off your laptop and make do. Etc. I give hardware
about 30 seconds to co-operate and then just say "screw it" and go on. No
reason for the audience to sit there while I try to figure out which key
combination switches video to go to the projector. Unfortunately, being able
to just go on when a piece of HW goes awry comes from practice, I think,
unless you're just a really confident speaker who can't be flustered.

3\. Don't change your user account password the morning of a presentation.
Your machine will lock and under the heat of the stage lighting you'll be
rendered unable to remember your new password. Or so I've been told. But see
#2. You're such a presentation boss that you didn't need to login to your
machine anyway.

------
nagrom
I'm an academic and attend conferences maybe 3-4 times year, as well as
lecturing. I see a lot of bad talks. Point one is crucial for me. I'll go over
the actual talk or lecture 5-10 times beforehand, more if I'm nervous for
whatever reason.

It can help to have a live audience for your practice talk, but it's not
necessary. Saying the words out loud lets you know _exactly_ how long the talk
is, and where your intended flow breaks down and what you need to fix. You'll
likely speak faster on the day, but your guide this way is much better than
even thinking-through the talk and producing slides.

The difference between a talk that is well practised and a talk that has not
been practised can be the difference between engaging follow-on discussions
and the audience falling asleep. It can be the difference between an
invitation every year and never being invited to participate again.

I partially disagree with the last part about having a structure though. If
you are talking for an hour or more, letting the audience know when there will
be a natural break in the talk can be useful; if you know which pieces of the
talk will be most interesting, you can save your best attention for those.
Everyone needs a break from the concentration of listening well and
deliberately building a break into the middle of the lecture can work even
better.

If you're only talking for 15 minutes then I agree that a ToC is pointless. I
always flag where I'm going beforehand verbally though. I tend to summarise
with three major things that should be taken from the talk body; maybe I'll
bring in three key slides at the end copied from the talk body depending on
the talk. At the end I want everyone to know what I consider to be the most
important parts of the talk.

~~~
btilly
I personally find that I talk substantially faster in front of an audience
than in private. Therefore if I practice for myself, I do not get a sense of
how fast I'll actually be.

~~~
saraid216
This is fairly a widespread and well-known phenomenon. I'd suggest that you
start timing the difference and tack on the appropriate multiplier.

~~~
mgkimsal
I got told years ago to practice talking in front of an audience of stuffed
animals. Practice making eye contact with them, etc. and pace your timing as
if they were real people. As corny as it is, it's helped me.

------
chrbutler
Good stuff here!

Here's some disparate, but good advice I've received over the years:

1\. Imagine your audience is comprised of people you love and are excited to
see and spend time with. This is the opposite of the whole picture-your-
audience-naked thing, and tends to actually put you in the right frame of
mind: calm, kind, genuine.

2\. Practice pre-speaking breathing exercises. Controlled exhalation tends to
calm the spiking physiological events that come with nervousness (e.g.
increased heart rate, shaky voice, sweating). If you can practice this often
before you speak, you can quickly calm those physical responses when you
actually need to.

3\. Prepare and Review... your audience. A core principle of teaching is that
education is mostly review. In your presentation, always begin by preparing
your audience for what you are going to teach them, review material at key
points before you move on to other things, then review everything again before
you conclude. Never give your audience an opportunity to get lost.

4\. Don't over-estimate what your audience knows (this tends to come with
under estimating the value of what you know and are going to share). Take time
to build concepts and review them and you build your arguments. Keep it
simple. No jargon.

5\. Don't underestimate what your audience knows. Balance your material with a
solid foundation of simple, approachable stuff and pepper it with things that
stretch your audience's minds. The balance is key here, but never assume your
audience is not smart enough to track with you.

That's just off the top of my head...

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d23
Honest question: what's the point of cloudflare if it can't keep a basic
content site up? I feel like I've seen quite a few of these branded error
messages that have made me curious.

