The Southwestern College Sun: notes on a student newspaper

Public speaking tips won't save you once you're already standing up there. You're one minute into your talk. And it's going wrong. Your words are coming out faster. And faster. The ums start falling out of your mouth. Then your mind goes blank, and your next sentence is just gone. And the whole room is silent.

Freeze. You're not bad at this. But the problem is that you walked into public speaking level four, and skipped the first three. So let's rewind, and play through the three levels you skipped, so that the next time you have to stand up and speak, you'll be the most confident speaker in the room.

One week before the talk. You did practise for it. You practised like this. You read your notes. Again, and again, in silence. That makes you very good at reading. But on the day of the talk, nobody is going to ask you to read. Reading your notes again trains your memory. It doesn't train your delivery. Your pace, your ums and your face only change when you say the words out loud, in real time, standing up.

So that is level one of public speaking: practising alone, and out loud. You stand up and say your talk out loud. How fast did you speak? You'd swear it was nice and slow. It wasn't. The person who is talking is the worst judge of their own speed, and right now that person is you.

So instead, you should record yourself, and then review the footage. Check your pace, how confident you sound, and how your face looks. If you don't want to do all of that yourself, you can use an app like Confidently. It uses AI to score your overall confidence, your voice and your face. It also gives you short improvisation exercises, so that speaking confidently becomes a habit. It can be a game changer if you struggle with confident speaking.

Now you'll want to practise your whole talk, from start to finish. But don't do that yet. Because in more than eight thousand scored practice runs, the clearest ones were the short ones, between twenty and fifty-nine seconds. Once a run went past a minute, people became less clear. So practise one part of your talk for fifty seconds, and review it. Then go again, and this time swap one um for a breath. Do that five times. That's level one cleared. Now you sound good. But so far, only a plant has heard you.

It feels like you're ready. So let's test that, and play the talk again. This time you sound steadier. But then you look up, you see all the faces, and your heart starts to pound. Freeze. You practised the words. But you never practised with faces looking at you. And an empty room never makes your heart race.

So you need real faces to practise with. Just not a full room of them yet. Let's rewind to level two: speaking to one person. Say the opening of your talk to a friend: the first thirty seconds, word for word. Then ask them one question. Did anything lose you? Something did lose them. So you make the talk smaller: three things to remember, two examples and one message, all written on one small card.

But one friendly face is not the same as a room. So that brings you to level three: speaking to a small group of three to fifteen people. But so far, your whole audience is one friend and a plant. The hard part of level three is finding enough people who will sit and listen to you. A local speaking club has them. Or you join a live practice group like AmberWillo, from your own sofa. It's a small group on video, with up to fifteen real people looking back at you. And now your heart starts to pound, for the first time during practice. This is the one thing that practising alone can never give you: the real feeling of an audience, before the real day. You keep talking anyway, with your heart pounding. And that is the whole point.

This approach has a name: gradual exposure. You face a slightly bigger audience each time, until a room full of people stops feeling like a threat. But does an audience on a screen really count? In one study, speaking to a supportive virtual audience lifted how confident people felt in real life afterwards. And when your round ends, you aren't left guessing how it went. You get a confidence score and coaching notes, so you know what to aim for in the next round. That's level three done.

So now you're ready for level four: the real room. It's the same room, the same audience, and the same talk as before. But this time, you're relaxed. You feel like you've done this dozens of times already. Because you have. You've said these words out loud to your phone. You've said them to a friend. And you've said them to a small group of real people. So you walk on, and your first thirty seconds come out word for word. Your pace stays steady. And where you used to say um, you now take a breath. You look up at all those faces, and this time they don't throw you. You've stood in front of faces before. So this time, when you finish, the room is not silent.

In real life, you don't get to rewind a talk. But you do get the days before it. So use those days. Level one is practising out loud for one minute, every day, and Confidently makes that easy. Level three is practising in front of real faces, and AmberWillo brings them to your sofa. Both are free to start, and the links are right below this video. So start today: fifty seconds, out loud. Go.