Public Speaking FAQs, build your confidence

No is the quick answer. Most people on my course don't want to be there, so the nerves will be shared by most of the room.

My job is to make the course as safe as possible, but I know public speaking is something lots of people want to avoid, so they come with reluctance. The good thing is that everybody is in the same boat, and quite often there's a sense of huge relief that "it's not just me who feels like this".

On the course I don't ask people to reveal what they do. It might come out, but it doesn't have to. I've had courses with 19 year old students working alongside 45 year old businessmen and a 35 year old teacher. Knowing all that, it becomes my job to make the days as safe as possible to explore what is getting in the way.

Everyone who comes is anxious about coming. That's why the course is full of tiny steps. I've been working with anxious people for 26 years and I know it isn't easy to come. Nothing on the course is compulsory, and yet a lot of the feedback talks about how safe people felt. That's my job: to welcome you and your anxiety, and help you see it differently.

What happens is that the course turns quickly into a very supportive place where your main job is to support other people. It doesn't matter how fearful you are, as long as you bring some curiosity about changing how you feel. And yes, you can make huge changes.
Here's what other people were worried about before they came.

I often get emails like this: “I have great difficulty with public speaking. I have even gone to therapy in a bid to cure this but nothing seems to worked. I feel very anxious, tight chested and short of breath at the mere thought of doing a presentation. Could you help me in any way?"

What is happening here is a combination of fears, memories and adrenaline are overwhelming you.

However it is possible to make a huge difference in how we see public speaking. My job is to make public speaking easier for people.

I've worked with over 8500 people. We over think public speaking massively and we are under the effects of the adrenaline 'fight and flight' squeeze which doesn't make for a great mix.

We need to make public speaking simpler and that's what the course is all about. We need to re-think public speaking - to do so you need a safe place to explore what is going on and with small steps change how you see public speaking.

We are using the wrong skills when we speak. We, as speakers tend to use normal conversational skills when we are speaking to a group. When you have a conversation - you normally get nods, smiles, agreements back from the listener however when we speak to a group ALL that changes. People don't listen in the same way. They are more passive and blank faces are the norm. When we start speaking to those blank faces they don't usually smile (at least not very often) or nod their heads (some people will but again not a lot) so we are left struggling with critical thoughts about our performance, as well as dealing with adrenaline surge.

What we need are the new skills and some re-thinking to be in front of group and that is what my courses are about.

The aim of the course is to help you connect more, be more yourself and more comfortable in front of people rather than learn how put on a performance. When you become more relaxed, more present in front of an audience you can connect more with the audience and create a better experience for the audience and yourself. Public speaking then becomes more conversational and more natural.

On the course we explore and build these fundamental skills in small steps with an emphasis on making it as safe as possible.

For most people yes, though some will always go red. But it isn't quite the right question. The better one is whether you can learn to focus on what really matters, so the shaking and blushing matter far less. That one is a definite yes.

The physical symptoms are wrapped up in whether we think the audience is judging us, and what social risk we believe is in the room. On the course we rethink audiences, being the centre of attention, and the other threats an anxious brain is so good at finding. The shaking is a surface sign of what's happening underneath.

Dethreat the whole process, make it more like a chat, and being the centre of attention stops being such a big thing. For most people the shaking and blushing goes or matters a lot less. No sensible course leader could guarantee it, because there's no concrete fix. It's about learning to be with yourself in a gentler way. And that is the whole point of the course

The course won't help you structure a presentation. What it will help with is the fear, the physical symptoms, the blank brain, the breathing, getting your normal brain back.

It assumes everyone coming doesn't much like presenting or speaking up, and wants to change how they feel about being the centre of attention when there's pressure on. That's mostly work: meetings, presentations, speaking to senior people. It's the same skill at a wedding.

I've had a lot of people from organisations, junior and senior, and they often talk about it holding their career back. Some say it was fine when they were younger and something changed, and now there's a big meeting coming up and they're dreading it.
There's a longer piece about dealing with this at work, including how many people come without telling anyone.

Yes. We tend to over-think public speaking. Anxiety makes us very self-focused, and many of us also struggle with impostor syndrome and feelings of not being good enough. The course teaches skills to be more at ease with being yourself when all eyes are on you.

What's different about my course is that it's a safer place to explore and understand what's getting in the way - and you're with people who are all in the same boat as you. Everyone who comes is struggling in some way with being the centre of attention.

You can't get that combination in one-to-one work. On the course you get to re-think what audiences are while sitting IN an audience. The ground rules make it safer than normal to learn the new skills. Group numbers are small - between 6 and 10 - and each person gets one-to-one help through the course. The course is built using very small steps, which is really important - it makes learning manageable and effective. And on the second day there's the option of gentle public speaking practice, which is impossible in counselling. You also pick up new skills to be with the problematic thoughts and feelings that come up.

If previous things haven't quite worked, the missing piece is probably exposure - which is just a posh name for practice. It's hard to really shift things without it. But often the exposure people get is at work, where the setting isn't safe enough for learning. And exposure doesn't work unless you're learning new skills at the same time. That's what the course teaches.

The course has been solely focused on public speaking and being the centre of attention since 2000. I do nothing else work-wise - this is my focus and I've been studying it for years. I've had the privilege of being able to develop the course for anxious people and keep refining it as I've learnt. It's only me who teaches it.
If you're still not sure, book a free ten-minute chat with me.

We are sometimes shocked about the difference between speaking to two or three people and speaking to a large group. Our reactions don't seem to make sense. Heart-rate increase, dry mouth, sweaty palms, over-thinking along with a blank mind (there is a paradox!), going red, shaky legs. It feels like a huge over-reaction - irrational and overwhelming.

You are not alone. It's not that you are failing (although it might feel like that) - it's because we are using the wrong skills and over-thinking the situation.

We need to use the right skills when we are in front of a group rather than standard conversational skills. That's what I teach.

Yes, The Taking your place in the world course is really suitable for beginners who are scared and also people who have been terrified for a long time!

I know that people are coming who are scared and not sure they can do it. That's why they are coming. So the course has been going since 2000 has been continuously thought about to make the learnings suitable for beginners. I’m always looking for new ways to make the learning easier for people.

Anyone. The courses aren't aimed at a particular group and there's nothing in the course agenda about how to do PowerPoint. There might be business people there, and there might be teachers, scientists, students, fathers of the bride, people going back into education and work, retired people who want to talk to groups about bees. It's usually very mixed.

I only find out what people do after the course. We don't go round asking where people are from or what they do as part of the course. But here is a list I've gathered over the years.

Academics • Accountants • Actors • Actuaries • Architects • Army Officers and ex-Army (most ranks apart from Field Marshall!) • Artists • Arts People • Avoiders of Public Speaking (most people) • Authors • Barristers • Best Men (lots of them) • Brides (not as many) • Business Psychologists • Business start-up people • Cage Fighter (one of them - I was extra polite!) •  Carers • Carpenters • Celebrants • CEOs (often anonymously) • CFOs (often anonymously) • Chefs •  Civil Engineers • Civil Servants • Change Managers • Charity Workers • Church Organisers • City Council Officers • Clinical Psychologists (lots of them) • Coaches • Coders (lots and lots of them) • Comedians • Company Directors • Complementary Therapists • Computer Programmers (not routine for them) • Concorde Pilot (retired) • Consultants for the NHS (lots of them) • Counsellors • Cruise Ship lecturers •  Deep Sea Diver • Designers • Diamond Courier • Doctors (lots) • Documentary Makers • Dominatrix (just one as far as I know) • Editors • Educational Psychologists • Electricians • Engineers • Environmental Consultants • Entrepreneurs • Estate Managers • Events Organisers (lots) • Facilitators • Factory Inspectors • Farmers • Fathers of the Bride (lots) • Festival Organisers • Film People • Fire people • Flavour engineers • Freelance people • Fundraisers • Funeral Directors • Furniture Makers (to the rich and famous) • Gardeners • Geographers • Golf Club Captains (lots) • GPs • Grand Prix Model Maker •  Grooms • Head Teachers (a fair amount) • Health Administrators • Health Visitors • Homemakers • Hypnotherapists • Human Resource Managers and workers (lots) • Investors • Ironing board Inventor • IT People • Job seekers • Judge (just one) • Kitchen designers •  Lecturers • Managers (lots) • Managing Directors (lots) • Mathematicians • Mums returning to work • Naval Officers • Maritime Pilots • Neuroscientists • Novelists (quite a few)•  North Sea Oil workers • Nuclear Submarine Captain (retired otherwise he couldn’t have told us) • Nurses • Occupational Psychologists • Opticians • Osteopaths • Parkour Champion • Painters • Personal Assistants • Personal Trainers • Pharmacists • Photographers • Physiotherapists • Pilots • Planners • Podiatrists • Police Officers • Politicians (not many) • Preachers • Private Chefs • Probation Officers • Professional Gambler • Project Managers • Proofreaders (grate profession!) • Property People • Psychiatrists • Psychotherapists • Psychologists • Public Health Consultants • Public Speaking Trainers • Registrars • Retired people •  Researchers • Sales Reps • Saturation Diver • Scriptwriters • Secretaries • Scientists • Self-Employed • Sex Therapists • Sex Worker (just one as far as i know) • Shamans • Social Workers • Software Engineers • Solicitors • Speech and Language Therapists • Sports People • Statisticians • Story Tellers • Students (lots of them) • Tax Inspectors • Teachers • Tefl teachers • Thai Kick Boxers • Town Clerks • Town Planners • Trainers • Translators • Tree Surgeons • Valve designers • Vets • Vicars • Vineyard owner • Volunteers • Wedding Photographers • Web Developers • X-ray people (otherwise known as Radiographers and Consultant Radiologists) • Young People • Zoologists

Yes, and it works both ways. Practising confidence in daily life makes public speaking easier, and the course makes daily life easier too. They're not really two separate skills. We don't need an audience to practise on, most of us already carry around a hugely critical inner voice.

We spend a lot of time catastrophising, ruminating, over-thinking, especially when we feel watched or judged. Learning to be with those thoughts differently rather than get swept up by them isn't something I only use in a training room, I use it almost daily myself. Getting more comfortable being seen and taking your place is just as useful queueing at the supermarket or speaking up in an important meeting as it is giving a speech.

At least one person says that to me on every course. We live in our own anxiety soup, and think it's just us who feel this way. If that were true, how would I have made a living out of this for the last 26 years? It's very normal to have intense feelings. There's a myth at the heart of social anxiety, that how you feel on the inside is how you look on the outside. It's not true, though you probably won't believe me until you're on the course yourself. Every course, other people in the room seem to look really confident and sorted, even while they're talking about their own anxiety. We talk about that mismatch for a good while after the exercise. The brain distorts our sense of reality when we're anxious, we become hyper self-focused.

No. I'm not a therapist and I won't ask about your childhood or your past. I’m trained in groupwork and I've learnt from clinical psychology research and translated it into the everyday training room, as a new set of skills and reframes for public speaking confidence. You will be learning effective new skills for the future to be a more confident public speaker and how to get out of your own way when you are speaking.
More about my training and where this comes from.

It’s an experiential course (learning through experience and discussion) which builds up the learning in very small steps, sometimes very baby steps!

We learn about audiences, what gets in the way currently as public speakers. So most of the course is focussed on learning these new skills and mindset changes we need to make to make public speaking simpler.

We do this by:

• Keeping the course numbers to 6-10 people so it’s a small enough course to have individual attention and big enough to feel like public speaking

• All exercises are optional, you are not made to do anything at all on the course. You are always in control.

• Individual coaching through the course

• Pair work exercises

• Group conversations and exercises, building confidence and changing what it means to be the centre of attention

• Gentle Public speaking practice, building on what we are learning all the way through the course

• Using ground-rules to set up the learning space to be as safe as possible

• Open to any questions throughout the course

• Clear Course materials and post-course materials

• additional help through coaching can be arranged pre or post-course

Nothing on the course is compulsory, you don’t have to do anything. The course is created for anxious people so its gentle and informal. You are always invited to do exercises so it’s in your control what you do. And there are exercises on the course you can join in with. Remember that everyone who is coming doesn’t like public speaking either, they probably don’t like being the centre of attention and many people will have the impostor syndrome too. Because everyone is in the same boat it becomes a very supportive place, very quickly.

Other people worried about this too, and here's what happened.

You can cancel or move to another course up to 14 days before it starts. Let me know as early as you can either way.

I'm aiming for gentle, because it's hard to learn anything if you're overwhelmed, so gentle is essential for learning. Lots of small steps. But many people who come hate public speaking, so they're moving towards things they don't like, such as being the centre of attention. Being scared brings on adrenaline, and that's tiring, even as we're learning new skills to be with those feelings. Participants have often been worrying about coming on the course, so sleep can be interrupted, and people report being tired, but they also often feel proud of themselves by the end of the first day. So it demands some energy, but the whole point of the course is to move public speaking away from performance and make it more like a conversation, to simplify the whole process. That's one of the reasons my courses are often at the end of the week, so you have rest on Saturday.

It lasts if you keep practising, and the course is built to make that possible. At the end of every course I ask people what actions of confidence they're going to explore over the next two weeks. An outer practice, something out in the world with other people. And an inner one: letting go of problematic thoughts, being kinder to yourself.

That's what makes the difference. Most of the psychological skills we learn can be used in normal life, and if you practise them regularly you build trust in yourself.

Here's what people have done since, sometimes years later.

Ideally, come before you need it. The skills are useful for everyday life, not just the specific event you have in mind. But I've had people book two days before a huge speech, and it's worked. The one thing to know is that being right up against the deadline can make it harder to relax into the learning, because there's real pressure riding on it. With no deadline pressure, there's more room to relax into the learning itself, rather than needing it to work immediately.

Over two days, I invite you to change how you see public speaking, one small step at a time. We start with a question: what is your anxious brain telling you about audiences? Usually the answers point to judgement, pressure, not being good enough, everyone watching.

Then I ask: are you doing any of that to me right now? Are you judging me harshly, because I'm the one at the front? We start talking about the two audiences, the threatening one in your head, and the real one you're sitting in, mostly thinking about themselves. From there we keep going: audiences, being the centre of attention, difficult feelings, pauses, taking your space. Each one becomes far more possible.

If tips worked I would be out of business. Take the most common one offered, "Practice, Practice, Practice." It works for some people BUT for lots of anxious people it's terrible advice, as you are just practising being more and more scared. You do need to practice, but you need to practise new skills, not just repeat old habits.

"Look for a friendly face" totally misunderstands audiences. Audiences are passive listeners, they've stopped being active listeners, so they don't smile or nod that often. That's NOTHING to do with you, it's just what we all do in an audience. We need to learn that blank faces are normal, and to find new ways of being with a blank faced audience.

We do psychology and reframing presenting so that it becomes smaller and more like a chat. To do that we need to learn to be gentler with ourselves and rethink being the centre of attention. So yes, something very different is going on here. We are learning the fundamentals- of being you in front of people, and being okay with that even if you start off very scared. Public Being

Two is fine, that's my limit, no more than two people from the same organisation on any open course. I stopped running in-house courses entirely back in 2019 for the same underlying reason, it isn't as safe as a mixed group. Too many people from one workplace brings office banter and in-jokes into the room, which makes it harder for everyone else. And more importantly, would you really want to talk about your anxiety or shame in front of a room full of colleagues? The mix of strangers on an open course is what makes it safe, it's far easier to be honest with people who don't know you outside that room. Honestly, it's not the best business decision, in-house work pays better, but the depth of change people get in an open group is worth more to me than the money.
There's more about why I work this way with organisations.

Yes, of course, and it changes every time, different people in groups will make the learning different, and I'm always trying to change something so I keep improving it. People who come back often say they got a different course entirely, because they were in a different place, they got the course in a new way. Most people find one course is enough, but I've had a few come back four to eight times, I have been teaching this for over 25 years!

It's in-person, it's a two day course, it's real.

We need to change what being the centre of attention means, we need to understand audiences very differently and we need to move away from the idea of performance to a conversation approach.

You really need an audience in real life to change how you see them and to realise the reality is very different from the audience we carry around in our heads. In person is great also for realising that it's not just you who feels like you do. And all of this is very normal. We are humans with a wonky brain and we need to learn new skills and we can do that far more effectively in a group. As a trainer it gives far more of an idea about how to help every individual coming. I love the effectiveness of group learning because you will learn a lot from other participants as well as me.
Course dates are here, in Bristol, London and Manchester.

Smart casual although on summer days I've been know to wear shorts! But if you are happy in a suit its okay too.

Day one is 9am to 5pm. Day two is 9am to 4pm.

I'll be there from 8:30am and you're very welcome to join me. I might still be setting the room up. Please arrive by 8:45 so we can start at 9.

There's 45 minutes for lunch and two breaks, roughly 10:45 and 2:30, depending on how chatty the group is.
Sometimes we might run over by 5-10 minutes on the first day BUT we never ever break the 4pm deadline on the second day.

It depends on the city.

Bristol. Lunch is included in the course fee. The venue hosts several trainings a day, so it's well set up for it.

London. There's a good café on the ground floor of the October Gallery, around £11 for lunch. You can also bring your own or go out. Bloomsbury has plenty nearby.

Manchester. Bring your own or go out. There's a dedicated space for us to have lunch together, so bring your sandwiches.

There's 45 minutes for lunch.

Whatever you do, it's your break