What to do in the ten minutes before you speak

The short answer

Four things: slow your breathing, warm the voice up, reread only your first and last lines, and stand in the room before you have to speak in it.

That is the list. Everything else people do in those ten minutes is either rehearsal they no longer have time for, or anxiety wearing preparation’s clothes.

Accept the deadline you are actually working to

Ten minutes out, the talk is what it is.

This is worth saying because most of what goes wrong in those ten minutes comes from refusing to accept it. People reread the whole deck and find three things they now want to change. They rewrite a line in their head and then deliver a hybrid of the old and new versions. They ask a colleague whether it is any good, which is a question with no useful answer at this range.

None of that improves the talk. All of it costs you attention you are about to need. The only sensible posture this close is: the content is finished, and my job now is to arrive in a state to deliver it.

The four things

Breathe slowly, deliberately, for one minute

Roughly six breaths a minute. Five counts in, five counts out, for sixty to ninety seconds. Do it somewhere you are not being watched, because doing it self-consciously in a room of people does not work.

This is the only item on the list with measurable physiological effects, and the mechanism is worth understanding: under adrenaline you over-breathe, that drops your CO₂, and the drop reduces blood flow to the brain. The fog and the lightheadedness are downstream of breathing, which means they respond to breathing.

It is also the only thing you can genuinely decide to do. You cannot decide to feel calm. You can decide how fast you breathe, and the rest follows more than you would expect.

Warm the voice, somewhere private

A cold voice sits high and thin, which is exactly the register nerves already push you towards. Ninety seconds of humming, some gentle sliding from low to high, and a few sentences spoken aloud at full volume will fix it.

Full volume matters. Speaking your opening under your breath in a corridor trains nothing, because the thing you are worried about is projection and you have just rehearsed the opposite. Find a stairwell, a car, or a bathroom.

Almost nobody does this and it is the most visible difference between a first sentence that lands and one that has to be repeated.

Reread two lines, not the whole thing

The opening and the closing.

Those are the two moments the room is guaranteed to be listening, and they are the two that most reward fluency. If you know your first sentence cold, you get through the ninety seconds where nerves are highest on autopilot, and by the time you need to think you have usually settled.

Reading the whole talk now does the opposite. You will find something you do not like, you will not have time to fix it properly, and you will walk on stage having just lost confidence in your own material.

Stand where you are going to stand

Get into the room early. Walk to the spot. Look at the back wall from it.

Rooms are almost never what you pictured, and the surprise of it is a cost you do not want to pay in your first thirty seconds. Where is the light. Can you see faces or is it dark past row three. Is there a lectern you did not expect, and is it too high. Is the clicker working.

Two minutes of this removes a whole category of small shocks, and small shocks are what make an opening wobble.

What not to do

Do not add caffeine. You already have adrenaline doing that job. Have your normal amount if you normally have some, because a withdrawal headache is not an improvement, but this is not the morning for a third coffee.

Do not have a drink. It takes the edge off the feeling and takes the edge off the delivery with it. Speakers who have done this can never tell; rooms always can.

Do not run the talk in your head at speed. Silent mental rehearsal at four times normal pace is not rehearsal, it is worrying with a script. It also trains exactly the rushing you are trying to avoid.

Do not ask anyone whether it is good. Either they say yes, which you will not believe, or they hesitate, which you will think about for the next ten minutes.

Do not check your phone. Two minutes in your inbox will hand you something to think about that has nothing to do with the room.

The thing worth knowing about the feeling itself

Nerves peak in anticipation and drop once you start. For most people the worst moment of the entire experience is standing at the side waiting, and it improves sharply within about ninety seconds of the first sentence.

That is useful because it reframes what you are feeling in the corridor. It is not a forecast. It is the highest point, and it is about to get better rather than worse, which is the opposite of what it feels like at the time.

The speakers I work with who have been doing this for years still feel it. What they have is not an absence of nerves but the experience of having felt exactly this and then been fine, thirty or forty times, and that memory is what steadies the first sentence.

Where this sits

This piece assumes the preparation is done. If it is not, or if the fear is bigger than the occasion, public speaking fear is usually a breathing problem covers the mechanism and the training that actually shifts it, and how to structure a talk covers the half of nerves that is really just not knowing what comes next.

The first fortnight of the public speaking course is spent here, and there is a lesson on it in the free course.

Common questions

What should I do right before a speech?

Slow your breathing to about six a minute, warm your voice up somewhere private, reread only your first and last lines, and get to the room early enough to stand where you will be standing. Everything else at this point is either rehearsal you no longer have time for or worry dressed up as preparation.

Should I read through my notes before going on?

Read the opening and the closing lines only. A full read-through this late finds problems you cannot fix and shakes your confidence in a talk that was fine. The two lines you want fluent are the ones everybody definitely hears.

Does caffeine make public speaking nerves worse?

For most people, yes. It raises heart rate and jitteriness on top of adrenaline that is already doing the same job. If you normally have coffee, have your usual amount rather than none; a caffeine headache is not an improvement.

Why do my nerves peak before I start rather than during?

Anticipation is the worst part for almost everyone, and it usually settles within ninety seconds of starting. Knowing that is itself useful: the feeling in the corridor is not a forecast of how the talk will go.