I used to be terrified of public speaking. I was also terrible at it - I mean really, truly awful. I spoke too fast, jumped around, interrupted myself - I cring

I used to be terrified of public speaking. I was also terrible at it - I mean really, truly awful. I spoke too fast, jumped around, interrupted myself - I cringed as much at the thought of what the poor audience had to experience as at my own anxiety. I didn't do anything fancy to get over my stage fright. I simply took every opportunity to speak publicly that came my way. I knew I was going to suck, but I also decided that the only way to stop sucking was to force myself to get better at it. Each time, I tried to focus on one specific area of concern, e.g. talking too fast. I would practice giving the talk very slowly and record myself talking. That turned out to be very helpful, because I realized that I was actually talking a lot faster than I thought I was talking. Repeatedly doing this helped me to recalibrate my perception of how fast I was talking. Over the past several years, I've noticed a few things: * My pre-speech anxiety has declined from full-on trembling hands, quavery voice, nausea and so on to a mild nervous excitement that I can manage with slow, deep breathing. Once you've actually experienced giving a terrible talk, you get a more realistic (i.e. less catastrophic) sense of how bad it is. * My talks themselves definitely suck less than they used to. I'm still not what you could call a good public speaker, but at least I look and sound reasonably comfortable on stage. I've gotten slower, though not slow enough, and I am generally able to stay on message. * I tend to use my slides as cues for what I want to say at each point. This occasionally backfires when the stage is set up so that I can't easily see them. My goal is to be a good public speaker. Maybe in five or ten years I'll get there. In the meantime, it's a work in progress.