How I Overcame My Fear of Public Speaking
By: Fredrik Holm
Tags: Self Improvement, Personal Growth, Entrepreneur, Presentations, Public Speaking

The Breakthrough

While I had become much more comfortable speaking in front of people I knew, the prospect of speaking at conferences and customer events still made me terrified.

The real breakthrough came when I landed a new job at a high-profile consulting firm and devised a personal development plan with my team-lead:

Join a six-weeks Rhetorics evening class at the company’s internal training academy Follow up with additional courses on Effective Presentations and How to Conduct Workshops Facilitate a bi-weekly internal Code Camp initiative within the company

Needless to say, this was one of the most challenging years of my life, but you know what they say: real growth happens outside the comfort zone.

The rhetorics class proved invaluable, but it was mentally exhausting. Speaking in front of a group of people looking for flaws in your performance while everything is recorded and played back is just as stressful as it sounds. But as painful as it might be, it’s probably the most critical piece of the puzzle.

If you never get to watch yourself in action, you will never get the opportunity to eliminate all your little ticks.

The other courses were also rewarding. While they didn’t help much in curing fear of speaking, they provided other gems of knowledge; like how to structure a presentation and design your slides.

Joining the Meetup Scene

At this point, the positive experiences had begun to outweigh the negative ones. For the first time in my life, I had actually enjoyed talking in front of people.

At the same time, I knew that my performances left a lot to be desired and that I could use more practice and training.

Shortly thereafter, a colleague introduced me to Stockholm’s meetup scene. Encouraged by my friends, it didn’t take long until I mustered the courage to do a talk myself.

One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I was hosting a meetup group of my own — and co-organizing a conference.

While the organizational parts of hosting a meetup was a lot more demanding than I had imagined, it was very educational. I got the opportunity to hang out with many great speakers and learned a lot from them: how they prepared, how they handled obnoxious people in the audience, and how they tackled technical issues.

My First Conference Talk

With all the positive energy in the meetup community, I soon started to daydream about giving a conference talk myself. While there usually is a shortage of speakers for regular meetups, conferences are a different ballpark with Call For Papers and selection processes.

To my surprise, it didn’t take long until I got an email from a conference organizer in Poland. She liked my proposal, and I had an invitation.

Happy and terrified at the same time, I started to prepare. Finally, it was time to slay that last fear demon!

If there is such a thing as one tip to rule them all in public speaking, it’s definitely this one:

Know your material well enough so you can turn your back on the slides.

I quickly realized that applied to me, that would mean memorizing the entire presentation. Which I almost ended up doing after spending approximately 80 hours on the material and another 80 hours of rehearsal.

With the talk being 30 minutes, that’ a ridiculous amount of preparation, resulting in a ratio of 320:1 between prep and delivery. To put that in context, the general recommendation is to spend (at least) 10–20 times the length of the presentation.

The Delivery Day

When the big day came, I was eerily calm. Then, some five minutes before the presentation was scheduled to start, the nervousness surfaced. But not in the usual way with shaking knees and trembling hands — more like an out-of-body experience.

After the announcer’s intro and the short round of applause, my inner emotional rollercoaster started to climb. I started a little hesitant, but my confidence grew with every sentence. By the time I switched to my first important slide, the rollercoaster was ready to plunge into the abyss.

From there, I don’t really remember what it felt like. Until I reached the final slides, where I remember hearing myself emphasize the key takeaways, just as I intended.

Judging from the reactions afterward and the recording I watched later, I think I did ok — maybe a 3 out of 5. But that’s of minor importance. What matters is that I did it. For the first time in my life, I had overcome the fear of public speaking on an actual conference stage and delivered a decent performance.