Some things I've learnt about public speaking | Hacker News Reader

Some things I've learnt about public speaking

blog.jgc.org

65 pointsjgrahamc13 comments

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.

Those are all good points, but the number one cited phobia is "fear of public speaking". There's a lot going on under the hood there that's only partially addressed through solid preparation.

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.

> 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.

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.

While all of those things are very important - I don't think that's all there is to stage fright. I certainly know folk who have nailed all of the things you talk about and still have major problems with fear. Hell - I still get cold sweats before any talk I give and I've been doing it for years.

A process of acclimatisation seems to help some folks - I talked about this in more detail over at https://medium.com/speak-up/18cfbc7c5a78

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.

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.

> I always flag where I'm going beforehand verbally though.

This is absolutely fine. "Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em; tell 'em; tell 'em what you just told 'em." is a legitimate principle. But it's one of the pieces of advice that's often over-applied: you should only do it when a deep dive happens.

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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