Throughout my life I must’ve given hundreds of talks now, and almost always I’m asked before I talk whether or not I’m nervous. Who doesn’t feel anxiety when speaking in front of a crowd? Here’s a collection of tips I compiled to help prepare for public speaking:

1. Make a list of the key points you want to make and construct it in chronological order. Each slide should portray 1 single message.
2. Practice, practice, practice – all-day-all-night, in front of people if possible and ask for feedback, or even for an audience of your teddy bears
3. Prepare 1 slide per minute. When you’ve mastered that, try the PechaKucha method – 20 seconds per slide. Humans have very limited attention spans so the more movement you have going on the better.
4. Engage the audience – ask rhetorical questions, or even ask interactive questions and set the scene e.g. ‘Imagine you are in deep space…’
5. Be visual. Use lots of images and try to limit the number of equations. Is there a better way to explain what you’re trying to get across without all the math?
6. Scan across the room regularly, try to make eye contact, use hand gestures and make sure to smile. A study on TED talks (see here), found that there was a correlation between the popularity of a video and the number of hand gestures the speaker made.

That’s all I can think of for now. Let me know if I’ve missed any!

Bye for now xoxo