You get better at public speaking through deliberate practice. That means you build each talk around one message, rehearse it out loud, get specific feedback on what you actually did and fix one thing at a time.
Those are the public speaking tips I’d give any leader or founder who has to present, pitch or speak at an event.
Say you’re a founder with a ten-minute investor pitch next Friday. Your deck’s got 24 slides. You’ve only ever read the script in your head, and your stomach knots every time you think about the questions they’ll ask. You can fix a lot of that by Friday, and none of it needs you to become a different person.
Build every talk around one message
Pick one message you can say in a single sentence. Then make every slide and story earn its place against it. TED’s Chris Anderson gives speakers the same advice: limit your talk to one major idea and make it “the through-line running through your entire talk” (TED, 2016).
It works because working memory holds what you’re hearing while you make sense of it. And it’s limited to around three to five meaningful items in young adults (Cowan, 2010). So I’d rather give a room one message and three points it remembers than eleven points it doesn’t.
It’s how my keynotes work. They share one spine. The opening and the close change with each audience, and the middle barely moves. With founders, I call it the golden thread: the story that runs through every slide of the pitch. And my TEDxSwansea talk had one job, which was to show how AI and VR can rebuild education in the real world.
Try this. Write your message in 15 words or fewer. Then go through your slides and ask of each one whether it helps that sentence land. If it doesn’t, cut it or move it to the back-up slides.
Rehearse out loud and on your feet
Rehearse the way you’ll deliver it: out loud, standing up, at full volume, with the clicker in your hand. Read your notes in your head first if it helps you prepare, then stand up and say the whole thing.
Experience on its own won’t make you better. In a 2008 overview of research on expertise, the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson noted that observed performance doesn’t necessarily go up with professional experience. He traced expert performance to deliberate practice instead. That’s training focused on improving particular tasks, with immediate feedback and chances to repeat and refine (Ericsson, Academic Emergency Medicine, 2008). So twenty years of presenting the quarterly numbers won’t, by itself, make you a better speaker.
Saying words out loud as you study them also helps you remember them better than reading them silently. Psychologists call it the production effect (MacLeod and colleagues, 2010). Those studies used word lists, so for a talk I’d treat it as a nudge.
Spend most of your rehearsal time on the first two minutes, the last minute and the handovers between sections. They’re the bits you want on autopilot when the adrenaline hits. And don’t learn the whole thing word for word. Learn the order of your points properly, so you’ll find your way back if a line goes missing.
Record yourself and ask for specific feedback
Record a full run on your phone and watch it back, then ask one or two people for feedback on something specific. Watching yourself is uncomfortable. It’s also the quickest way I know to see what the audience sees, because you can’t judge your own pace or posture from the inside.
I’d watch it three times:
- First, turn the sound off and look at your hands, your feet and where your eyes go.
- Then play the audio only, and listen for your pace and for where the fillers creep in.
- Finally, watch with both and ask whether your one message came through.
Then pick one thing you’ll fix before the next run, and only one.
Feedback helps most when it carries real information about the task. A 2020 meta-analysis pulled together 435 studies on feedback in learning. Information-rich feedback had roughly twice the effect of simple correction, and reward or punishment had the smallest effect of the three types compared (Wisniewski, Zierer and Hattie, 2020).
So “that was great” won’t help you much. Ask questions that force a specific answer, like “What was my one message?” or “Where did you stop following me?” Specificity is respect, and that cuts both ways.
The gap between “that was great” and useful feedback is part of why Ian Pardo and I built Speak360, an AI speaker-training platform. Most people can’t book a speaking coach before every presentation. And a colleague’s “looked fine to me” doesn’t tell you what to change. Our belief is simple: anyone who wants to get better should be able to.
Slow down and let the pauses work
Speak a little slower than feels natural. And pause on purpose, especially before and after the line you’d most like people to remember. I think of a pause as giving the room time to catch up. In a 2010 study, listeners were more likely to recognise words they’d heard straight after a silent pause (MacGregor, Corley and Donaldson, Neuropsychologia, 2010).
Check your pace on the recording. Mark your notes with a slash wherever you want a pause, and rehearse those pauses the same way you’d rehearse a line. If you lose your place, stop, look at your notes and take a breath, and don’t apologise. A few seconds of quiet while you find your place is fine.
Use your nerves instead of fighting them
Before a big talk, try getting excited instead of calming down. Alison Wood Brooks found that an overwhelming majority of people believe calming down is the best way to cope with nerves before performing. Her studies covered karaoke, public speaking and maths. People who reappraised their anxiety as excitement felt more excited and performed better than people who tried to calm down. A line as simple as “I am excited”, said out loud, was enough to make the switch (Brooks, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014).
Look, your heart’s going to race either way. I’d point it at the opportunity and save the energy you’d spend fighting it.
Practice helps too, and it’s the part you control. A 2025 review of 26 studies with 2,253 participants found that psychological approaches, including exposure to speaking and changing how people think about it, reduced public speaking anxiety (McWilliam, Beattie and Callow, 2025). It fits what I wrote years ago about getting over live video nerves: repetition takes the edge off. If nerves are stopping you from doing your job, a GP or a qualified therapist is a good next step. Everything here, Speak360 included, is practice, and it doesn’t replace treatment.
Handle questions without losing the room
Plan for questions the way you’d plan the talk, and bring every answer back to your one message. Write down the five questions you’d least like to be asked, and rehearse short answers to them out loud. Then, on the day:
- Repeat or rephrase the question. The whole room hears it, and you get a second to think.
- Answer in a sentence or two, then link it back to your message if it fits.
- If you don’t know, say so, and follow up.
- With a hostile question, answer the concern underneath it and leave the tone alone.
- Thank anyone who goes off-topic, and offer to pick it up with them afterwards over a coffee.
For founders, the questions are where investors find out whether you know your business. The deck isn’t the pitch, you are. There’s more on that in my piece on pitching for startup funding.
A public speaking tips checklist for the day before
Back to that Friday pitch. Run down this list on Thursday, and if you can’t tick something yet, that’s where your last hour of practice goes:
- Your message fits in one sentence of 15 words or fewer, and every slide helps it land.
- You’ve rehearsed the whole talk out loud and standing at least three times, with extra runs of the first two minutes.
- There’s a recording you’ve watched back in three passes, and you’ve fixed the one thing it showed you.
- Someone you trust can tell you your message in their own words.
- Your notes show where the pauses go.
- You’ve got short answers ready for the five questions you’d least like to be asked.
- And when your heart starts racing, you know what you’ll say to yourself: “I am excited.”
How Colin helps
If your team has talks, pitches or conference slots coming up, I can help them build one clear message and get properly rehearsed. That might be a keynote that sets the standard for how your leaders present. Or it might be a workshop where people build their message and rehearse it with specific feedback in the room.
I speak myself, including at TEDxSwansea, and MSN put me at number one in its “Top 10 Leading Speakers to Follow in 2025”. For the practice in between, there’s Speak360, the AI speaker-training platform Ian Pardo and I built.
If you’d like to talk about a keynote or advisory work for your team or business, get in touch.
Related questions
How do you start a speech?
Start with your audience’s problem. Your thanks and your CV can wait. In my keynotes, I open by saying the audience’s own question out loud. It tells the room straight away why the next twenty minutes are worth their attention.
Can anyone learn to be a good public speaker?
Yes, if the practice is deliberate. A 2014 meta-analysis found deliberate practice matters but explains less of the difference between people than has been argued, and far less in professions than in games, music or sport (Macnamara, Hambrick and Oswald, Psychological Science, 2014). So practice isn’t the whole story. Still, I reckon anyone who practises this way will make steady progress.
What makes a good presenter?
A good presenter makes one thing clear and respects the room’s time. They know their message, they’ve rehearsed it on their feet, and they listen to questions as carefully as they talk.