20 lessons from ten years as a public speaking coach

I started this practice in London in 2016. Ten years, something over four hundred executives, clients in more than twenty countries, and a hard disk full of first recordings that all sound roughly the same.

That last part is the reason for this piece. When you record the first session of four hundred people who arrived convinced they were uniquely bad at something, patterns emerge that none of them could see and that I did not expect either. Most of what I believed at the start has been revised, and the revisions are more useful than the original beliefs were.

Here are twenty of them, in no particular order beyond the one they arrived in.

1. Almost nobody’s problem is the one they booked for

The most consistent finding of ten years. Someone books because they are “terrible at presenting”, and the recording shows a person with a perfectly serviceable voice and no structure. Someone else books for “confidence” and turns out to be speaking at a hundred and ninety words a minute.

I used to take the stated problem at face value. Now the first session is a diagnosis and nothing else, because working hard on the wrong thing is the most expensive mistake available.

2. Everybody speaks faster than they think

Nearly every client I record is running faster than they believed, and almost nobody accepts it before the playback. Not most. Nearly every one.

It is the single most reliable finding in the work, and it is invisible from the inside because your internal sense of pace is set by your own thinking speed, which is faster than anyone else’s ability to follow you.

3. You cannot hear your own voice, and I mean that literally

Some of what reaches your ears when you speak travels through the bones of your skull rather than through the air. The voice in your head and the voice in the room are physically different signals.

Everyone knows recordings sound wrong. Fewer people follow it to the conclusion, which is that the room’s version is the accurate one and the one in your head is the artefact.

4. The recording does the teaching

I used to think I was the mechanism. I am not. I am the person who presses record and then knows what to point at.

Nobody has ever argued with a playback. Plenty of people have argued with me.

5. Confidence is downstream of structure

The order runs the other way from how it feels. People who know exactly what comes next look confident, and people who look confident get treated as though they know what they are talking about, which then makes them confident.

Trying to install the feeling first is working backwards up the chain. Give someone a shape for the talk and about half of what they called nerves goes with it, because the thing they were dreading was drying up, and drying up is now unlikely.

6. Fear of freezing is fear of having nothing to return to

Related, and worth stating on its own. People do not lose their place. They lose a place that was never marked.

Build a talk with four or five landmarks you could recite in a corridor and losing your thread becomes a two-second recovery rather than a crisis.

7. The nerves do not go away, and I stopped promising they would

The experienced speakers I work with still get nervous before anything that matters. So do I.

What changes is that the nerves stop taking the voice with them. That is a smaller promise than the one the industry likes to make, and it has the advantage of being one I can keep.

8. “Be more confident” is not advice

Nor is “relax”, “just be yourself”, or “imagine them in their underwear”. None of it is actionable, which means none of it is advice, whatever grammatical form it arrives in.

You cannot decide to feel calm. You can decide how fast you breathe, where you stop, and how loud you are. The test I apply to my own coaching now: could somebody do this in the next ten seconds? If not, I have not said anything.

9. The pause is the cheapest improvement and the hardest to make

It costs nothing, it drags your pace down with it, and it is where you take the breath that powers everything else. If a client only ever fixes one thing, I want it to be the pause.

It is also the one people find hardest, because a silence feels roughly three times longer to the person standing in it than to anyone listening. That distortion never fully goes. You just stop believing it.

10. Filler words are a pause somebody was too uncomfortable to take

“Um” is not a speech defect. It is the sound of somebody who needed a moment and could not tolerate the silence, so they filled it.

Which is why counting your ums does nothing and getting comfortable with silence fixes it in about two sessions.

11. Seniority makes the feedback stop

The higher you go, the worse the information you get about how you come across, and the higher the cost of coming across badly. Those two lines cross somewhere around director level and never uncross.

Nobody in the room is going to tell a chief executive that they lose people three minutes in. They adapt around it instead, which from the inside feels exactly like everything being fine.

12. The people best placed to tell you are the people least able to

Your manager’s view is entangled with your promotion. Your peers are competing with you. Your team cannot say it because the power runs the wrong way. Your partner stopped hearing it years ago.

Everyone with enough exposure to have an accurate opinion has a reason to soften it, and the softening is not malice. It is just what being in a relationship with somebody does.

13. Say what is already working, and be specific about it

I got this wrong for years. I catalogued faults, because faults are what you are paying me to find, and I produced clients who became self-conscious about habits that were doing them no harm at all.

Some of what people do under pressure is worth protecting. If I cannot name what is already good, I am not diagnosing, I am performing rigour.

14. Deadlines make better clients than ambitions

“I’d like to be a better speaker” produces four sessions and a polite fade. “I’m presenting to the board on the eleventh” produces someone who does the homework.

I no longer treat the short-notice enquiry as the compromised one. A fortnight and a fixed date is often the best engagement I get.

15. Turning work away is most of what makes the rest credible

I do not coach children, I do not do LAMDA or exam preparation, and if there is a stammer or a diagnosed condition involved the right professional is a speech and language therapist rather than me.

Saying that in the free session costs me bookings and it is the fastest way I know to be believed about everything else. A coach who takes everything is selling hours.

16. Publishing the whole method for free does not cost bookings

There are fifty-odd free lessons on this site and the entire method is in them. Every year I expect that to reduce enquiries and every year it does the opposite.

The reason took me a while to accept: knowing what to do and being able to do it under a hundred people’s attention are unrelated problems. Reading about pace does not slow anybody down.

17. Published prices filter better than a sales call

Putting the numbers on the page means the people who arrive have already decided the price is fine. The conversation starts at whether I can help rather than at what it costs.

It also removes the version of this business I did not want to run, which is one where the number depends on how much you seem able to pay.

18. Ten minutes a day beats an hour a week

The session is where you find out what to practise. The practice is where the change happens, and it happens in short, frequent, slightly boring increments.

Clients who do ten minutes daily improve. Clients who do an intense hour the night before a session do not, and they usually conclude that coaching does not work on them.

19. You cannot want it more than they do

This one took the longest and cost the most to learn. I have worked very hard on behalf of people who were not going to do the work, and the effort produced nothing except my own frustration.

Now I say it out loud in the first session. It sounds blunt written down. In practice it is a relief to both of us, and the people who were always going to do it are unbothered.

20. Nearly everyone is much closer than they think

The thing I most want anyone reading this to take away.

The gap between how people sound and how they think they sound is almost always in their favour. Four hundred first recordings, and the number of genuinely poor speakers I have met is very small. What I meet instead is capable people running slightly too fast, not stopping, and carrying a belief about themselves formed by one bad experience years ago that they have never tested since.

Most of this work is not building something. It is removing two or three habits and then getting out of the way.

If you want to test any of this

Record two minutes of yourself, standing, saying something real rather than reading. Listen for pace, then for pauses, then for whether your sentences finish downwards. Three passes, because you cannot hear all three at once.

That is most of lesson one, done without me, and plenty of people need nothing else.

If you want the version with somebody listening, the first thirty minutes are free, recorded, and end with a written list of what is actually in your way, whether or not you book anything afterwards. Or start with the free public speaking course, which is the same material I teach, in order, at no cost.

Common questions

What do most people get wrong about public speaking?

They diagnose themselves as nervous when the recording shows a structural problem, and they treat delivery as a personality trait rather than a set of physical habits. Both are wrong in a useful direction, because habits and structure are trainable and temperament is not.

Does public speaking anxiety ever go away?

Mostly not. The experienced speakers I work with still get nervous before anything that matters. What changes is that the nerves stop taking the voice with them, which is a smaller promise and an achievable one.

How long does it take to improve at public speaking?

Four sessions changes how one specific talk goes. Six to eight is what it takes for a habit to survive pressure, and pressure is the only test that counts. The between-session work matters more than the sessions.

What is the single fastest improvement most speakers can make?

The pause. It costs nothing, it drags your pace down with it, and it is where you take the breath that powers everything else. It is also the hardest, because silence feels about three times longer to the person standing in it.