From Panic to Poise: A Student’s Guide to Public Speaking

Your palms are clammy. Your throat has never been drier. The entire room is staring at you—Judging you? Or just waiting for you to say something? Anything. If you’re reading this article, you may have been in this exact situation during a class presentation, research symposium, or spur-of-the-moment talk. Does it ever get easier?

As a frequent public speaker, often on short notice, I’ve compiled a handful of tips, tricks, and methods to ease your mind when speaking in front of a crowd.

First and most important: relax.

Nothing is harder than putting together a coherent, engaging presentation (or giving it, for that matter) with your nerves fraying. Personally, I find it helpful to take a little time away from work before getting into the presentation frame of mind. I watch birds from my window or make something with my hands, like an origami model or a quick snack. This goes double for the moments before actually giving a talk—nothing will scramble your head more than abruptly switching from a practice-and-review mindset into presentation mindset!

Also of considerable importance is the necessity of practice. You should be prepared but not overly rehearsed or stressed about the minor details of the talk, which can happen if you overpractice.

To avoid beating a presentation into oblivion, I recommend you follow the “one-hour rule.” Divide an hour by the length of your talk, and that’s how many total run-throughs you should aim for. For example, a 20-minute talk fits into an hour three times, so you’d ideally practice your talk three times in advance. Practice more than that and you risk stressing too much over minutiae, while less than that and you risk not knowing the material well enough. A typical poster presentation at a conference is 5 to 10 minutes, so you should practice it maybe six or eight times.

There’s a lot of conflicting advice about using notes during a talk. Do you bring notecards to keep yourself moving forward? A script? An outline? From my experience, less is more. Writing a script to follow opens the door to obsessing over phrasing, as do notecards. Keeping your talk’s skeleton on a single sheet of paper helps you to keep focused on what you’re saying and avoid losing your train of thought.

It’s important to keep moving forward, even if you realize that you forgot to mention something. You can ad-lib a segue to it later, or let it go. You should have time to address questions and elaborate on the details, if necessary. This is another place where practicing a few times really helps, as you’ll be able to catch what you’ve missed and remember to include it on your next run-through.

If you’re presenting a poster, it can be tempting to read the words you’ve written. Avoid this, and focus on bullets and graphics instead.

In every presentation there will come a time when you forget to bring up a point or something will happen that you weren’t prepared for (like a broken laser pointer or a video that won’t play). Avoid spiraling into self-flagellation, especially if you start to stumble over your words in an attempt to pull your speech back together. The trick to recovering? Hint—it’s not imagining the audience in their underwear. It’s remembering that just like you, everyone in your audience is human and has been in exactly the same position. A quick joke, or even an admission that you missed something important, will go miles in reminding not just your audience, but also you, that it’s okay to be imperfect. It takes practice to get used to brushing off mistakes, but once you’re accustomed to handling them, you’ll find yourself recovering more and more easily.

Last, but certainly not least, is to be yourself. I find that people are more engaged if I’m engaging with them and letting some of my personality shine through. If folks wanted to hear a robot read from a script, they’d plug your presentation into a text-to-speech app and move on with their day. They want to hear you, not just your words.

All of these tips require confidence—especially the courage to be yourself in front of a crowd. I don’t have some magic, life-altering trick to instantly gain confidence, but I can tell you this: The appearance of confidence is often just as powerful as the real thing. If you act confident, even if you don’t feel it, you’ll project assurance—and over time you might genuinely start to feel it. This is known as the “confidence-competence loop.” By appearing confident, you feel more capable, which then boosts your actual confidence.

By preparing adequately (but not too much), aiming for a confident attitude, staying as relaxed as possible, and going with the flow you set, you’ll keep audiences more engaged and breeze through talks, even if your heart still races as you speak.