Welcome to the first in a five-part mini-series that will guide you through some techniques that will not only help you produce a higher quality of speech but will also stop you feeling horrendously nervous and even sick before you give the speech.

There are many occasions in our lives where we need to give speeches they could be at weddings, parties or even within academic situations, or even within our jobs.

So there is no running from them really.

At some point you will probably need to give a speech in your life.

As a professional presenter and a professional entertainer on in front of large audiences on a regular basis.

However, I’ve not always been confident speaking in front of large audiences. So I’ve got some great techniques I developed over the years to help me get over those fears and to make me feel confident when speaking to people. I will share them with you within this series.

The first technique that will share with you today and it seems so obvious it’s one of those “am I really telling people this” moments but , know your material.

That’s the first step to a confident speech, know your material.

Know what you’re going to be talking about get a plan, an idea of what you’ll be talking about. Find the information you already have that you’re comfortable with and include that within your presentation.

Now, people get flustered because they think “I’ve got to deliver this presentation and tell people about things I don’t know” and trust me if you plonked me on a stage somewhere and told me to speak about nuclear differentiation machines or something like that, that I’ve got no idea about, I would be nervous too.

Now with the techniques I’ll share with you you can kind of fluff your way through I’d probably be able to bluff for a short while but I’d soon feel nervous, I’d feel the eyes burning into me as I deliver to the nuclear fusion audience and they realise I’m not only bluffing but I’m doing a bad job of it as well and I would start to feel very nervous and I would lose confidence quickly.

So you really do need to know your material, know what you’re going to be talking about and focus on the things that you do know. Because there is always that a nagging voice in the back of our heads when we give a talk especially if someone is asked to provide a question that we need to answer and that is “do I have the answer” am I just talking gibberish?

Well if you know the subject that you’re talking about you’ll be able to answer any question you’ll be able to feel confident about answering those questions and you will be able to deliver the information in a way that makes sense, because it makes sense in your head.

When you don’t know the material in can be muddled in your brain or if you have just learned the material it might not make sense to you and if it doesn’t make sense to you and you try to describe it it’s not make sense to anyone else either.

And that’s where the nervousness and the trepidation feelings really come from is this feeling of going into uncharted territory.

Whereas if you said to anyone in the world that has a strong hobby say its about stamp collecting because that seems to be the ‘go to’ hobby of the world. If you said to a stamp collector, “look I need you to just give a quick presentation about stamp collecting” they wouldn’t feel nervous about presenting about stamp collecting.

In fact, they would be able to give more and more information they would be able to talk about it probably until everyone in the audience gets bored, but they wouldn’t feel nervous because they know their material.

So the first thing to do if you’re planning a speech right now is to think about what things you know, what think you already have a good grasp on that you can bring into the speech and they can act like crutches for you to hold you up and help you feel confident.

That is not the only technique, of course, to conference speech so tune in to the next section of this mini-series, part two, in order to find out how to take your speech that next level.

Until then take care bye-bye now.