Use breathing and a short routine to calm yourself before you speak.
Before you speak, spend about ten minutes on the same short set of actions every time: check the room, slow your breathing and get your opening ready. Doing this clears away most of the guesswork that feeds nerves, and it gives your body a chance to calm down.
A lot of nervousness comes from what you don't know yet. You may not know how the room is laid out, whether the laptop and screen will cooperate, or how your first sentence will go. A pre-talk routine is a short, repeatable set of actions you carry out before speaking. Its job is to remove as much of that uncertainty as you can and let your body settle. It covers three areas: your breathing, the space you'll speak in, and a handful of small habits.
Wei Ling (an invented example) used to turn up to meetings with two minutes to spare, her laptop half open and a message on her phone still unfinished. Something would then go wrong. The HDMI adapter wouldn't fit, the screen in the room was set to the wrong input, or the clicker's battery was dead. She was flustered before she had said a word, and the first minute of each talk showed it. These days, whenever she can, she books the meeting room for fifteen minutes before her slot. She describes this as "the boring part of presenting" and says nothing else has made as big a difference.
Arrive early enough to set up at an unhurried pace. How early that is depends on how well you know the room. For an important talk somewhere unfamiliar, thirty minutes is a sensible margin. In a meeting room you use regularly, ten may do.
Spend the first part of that time on the equipment. Plug in your laptop and make sure the slides appear properly on the screen. Try the clicker. If there is a microphone, say a few words into it and listen to the volume. If some of your audience will join online, confirm they can both see your slides and hear your voice. Lesson 8.4, Hybrid talks with people in the room and online, has more on that kind of setup.
Next, walk around the room. Go to the spot where you'll stand, look out at the seats, the back row included, and decide where your notes and water will sit. It seems a small thing to bother with, yet when you get up to speak, the room will already feel known to you.
Place a glass or bottle of water within arm's reach of where you'll be standing. A dry mouth is among the most common physical signs of nerves, and one sip deals with it. Stopping for a drink also gives you a natural pause if you lose your place, and Lesson 6.4, When you blank or make a mistake, explains how to use that pause.
Lesson 2.2, Open strong in the first 30 seconds, suggested having your first few lines ready and known by heart. As part of your routine, say those lines under your breath once. When you know precisely how you'll start, the moment most speakers find hardest becomes the part you have prepared best.
Nerves tend to make your breathing quick and shallow, sitting high in your chest. Slowing it is one of the most direct ways to calm yourself physically, and breathing is one of the few parts of the stress response you can deliberately control.
The easiest technique is longer out-breath breathing, where each out-breath is longer and slower than the in-breath. Take a slow breath in through your nose while counting to about four. Let it out through your mouth or nose to a slower count of about six. Keep this going for a minute or two. Hitting the counts exactly matters less than keeping the out-breath the longer, slower one. After a few rounds, many people notice their heart rate drop and the shakiness fade.
Nobody around you will notice you doing it, so you can breathe like this in the lift, walking down a corridor, or in your seat while someone else is presenting. A minute or two before you stand up is a good moment for it. If your voice feels tight as you begin, let out one slow breath before you say your first sentence.
Some people find it helps to call the feeling something else. Reframing means describing your physical state as excitement or readiness instead of anxiety. A racing heart and heightened alertness are physically much the same in anxiety and in excitement, so the label you choose can shape how you react. Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School tested this. In her experiments, people who said "I am excited" before tasks such as public speaking did better than those who tried to tell themselves to calm down.
It doesn't work for everyone, and you don't have to fully believe it for it to be worth a try. Arjun used it before a talk to clinic managers. He says he didn't feel excited at all. Still, telling himself that his body was getting ready, instead of reading it as panic, made the shaking seem less like a warning sign.
Keep the routine short and identical from one talk to the next, so that after a while you go through it without thinking. Ten minutes is plenty for most routines, and a typical one runs like this:
Check the equipment and walk the room. Set out your water and notes. Say your first lines through once. Use the last minute or two for slow breathing.
Starting from these steps, design your own ten-minute routine, then try it before your next meeting, even if it is a small one.
Put together a ten-minute routine for before you speak: some slow breathing, an equipment check and your opening lines. Try it before your next meeting.
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