The secrets of public speaking

 

"People who enjoy public speaking are luckier than they realise. A much-publicised survey from the 1970s claimed that Americans feared it more than death. In 2012 Karen Dwyer and Marlina Davidson of the University of Nebraska Omaha published a paper that tried to replicate the result. They found that things were less dramatic than that—but not by much.

 

Among the American students they surveyed, speaking in front of a group was indeed the most common fear, beating out financial problems, loneliness and death. When respondents were asked to rank their phobias, death pipped public speaking to the top spot. But this triumph for perspective ought not to be exaggerated. The grim reaper most scared one-fifth of students; but almost as many, 18%, picked having to stand up and talk in public as their principal fear. In sum, this staple office activity causes very many people to feel deeply anxious.

 

There is plenty of homespun advice out there for glossophobes. Just be yourself (which ignores the fact that the “real you” would rather be dead than give a presentation). Imagine that your audience is in their underwear (for reasons that are totally unclear). Speak on things you properly understand (when getting ahead in many jobs requires precisely the opposite).

 

A better source of advice comes from a profession that really knows how to pretend and perform: acting. Drama schools routinely offer communication coaching (if you like listening to journalists being humiliated, you can hear your columnist’s experience at RADA Business, an offshoot of the famous acting college in London, in the latest episode of our Boss Class podcast). “Don’t Say Um”, a recent book by Michael Chad Hoeppner, offers presenting tips from an actor-turned-coach.

 

The advice of professional performers can be condensed into three main messages. First, presenting is a deeply physical activity. Kate Walker Miles, one of the RADA Business coaches, warns against standing with legs locked straight; a slight bend in the knees makes for greater stability. She emphasises the importance of vowel sounds in communicating emotion, which means opening the jaw more widely than you might naturally tend to. Her warm-up exercises include some fairly ferocious massaging of the masseter muscles—think Edvard Munch and you get the idea—and some theatrical yawning. To achieve a relaxed posture, she asks clients to imagine being held up by a “golden thread” of infinite length which rises from the crown of their heads.

 

Second, it helps to slow down the pace of delivery—to allow for pauses, to not rush to fill silences with “ers”, “ums” and other verbal detritus. Mr Hoeppner recommends a useful technique called finger-walking, whereby you walk your index and middle fingers across the table as you speak, and only take a “step” when you know what the next word or point is going to be. Even doing it once is an interesting exercise: by forcing you to take time choosing your words, those filler noises start to disappear and language becomes more precise.

 

Third, don’t focus on yourself (or, in Ms Walker Miles’s phrase, turn “selfie view off”). Too often speakers concentrate on how they are doing—how many minutes to go? have I gone bright red?—and not on the experience of their audience. To help evoke the right emotion, actors have a technique called “actioning”, in which they assign a transitive verb (“pacify”, “bait”, “entice”, “repel”) to their lines in order to clarify a character’s goal. The emotional range of a quarterly update may not match “King Lear”, but executives should still work out what they want an audience to feel.

 

Some of these techniques can feel alien. Imagining that a golden thread is holding you up at the same time that you soften your knees, elongate your jaw and finger-walk your words is definitely something to try out at home first. But the value in them is also clear. Unusual professions often have less to teach managers than they claim (what does free diving have to teach you about budgeting? Answer: absolutely nothing). Acting really does have something to teach about how to communicate.” [1]

 

1. The secrets of public speaking. The Economist; London Vol. 455, Iss. 9449,  (May 24, 2025): 61.