the speech on stage: talking to four hundred people as if to one

Why the stage feels different

A product manager in Bengaluru has given the same walkthrough to her team thirty times. At the company's annual conference, with four hundred people and a camera at the back, her mouth goes dry and she reads every word off the screen.

A school principal in Thrissur has to welcome parents, the chief guest and the PTA on annual day. She knows every family in the room. On the stage she hears her own voice through the speakers and speeds up until the welcome is over in ninety seconds.

A founder in Kochi is launching a new app at a hotel ballroom. An engineer in Dubai has been asked to speak at his college alumni evening, twenty years after he left the campus.

Each of them speaks well in a small room. The stage adds three things: distance, amplification and the sense that everyone is judging. The skills below put the small room back.

Structure: one message, three parts

Before you write a single sentence, finish this line: "If the audience remembers one thing, it is ___." That sentence is your talk. Everything else either supports it or goes.

Then build three parts. Three is easy for a listener to hold, and it works for almost any occasion.

• Conference talk: the problem, what we tried, what we learned.
• Annual day welcome: the year that was, the people who made it, what comes next.
• Product launch: the frustration people have today, what we built, what it means for you.
• Alumni address: where I started on this campus, what the years taught me, what I wish for you.

Say the structure out loud near the start. "I want to share three things tonight" helps an audience relax, because they know where they are going.

The opening line

Most speeches in India open with a long list of thanks and salutations. Some occasions need them, especially annual days and formal functions. Keep them short and warm, then make your real opening line count.

A strong opening is specific: a moment, a picture, a question. Not a dictionary definition, not "Good evening, I am very happy to be here."

"Twenty years ago, I sat in the last row of this auditorium, hoping no lecturer would call my name."

"Last March, a nurse in Kozhikode told us she spends forty minutes every shift looking for paperwork. This app is for her."

"This morning, at seven o'clock, I watched a Class 2 student carry a cello bigger than she is up the stairs to rehearse for tonight."

Write your opening line in full and learn it. The first ten seconds are when nerves are highest. A line you know by heart carries you into the talk.

Eye contact in sections

You cannot look at four hundred people. You can look at one person at a time.

Divide the room in your head into five or six sections: front left, front centre, front right, back left, back centre, back right. For each thought, pick one face in one section and speak that whole sentence to them. Then move to a different section for the next thought.

This does two things. Each person in that area feels you are talking to them, so the whole section feels included. And your own brain treats it like a conversation with one person, which is calmer than addressing a crowd.

Under bright stage lights you may not see faces at all. Pick a spot at head height in each section and do the same.

Pace and pause

Nearly everyone speeds up on stage. Adrenaline speeds up your thinking, and the speakers and the size of the room make your voice sound strange to you, so you rush to get through it.

A large hall needs the opposite. Sound takes time to travel and settle, and people at the back are hearing you through speakers. Aim to speak noticeably slower than you would in a normal conversation.

• Pause after the opening line. Two full seconds. It tells the room something has started.
• Pause after every key point. Let it land before you explain it.
• Pause before a number or a name. "This year, our students raised... four lakh rupees for the cancer ward."
• Pause instead of filling. "Um" and "so" through a microphone sound twice as loud. Silence sounds confident.

Mark your notes with a slash wherever you want to pause. It feels slow to you. It sounds normal to them.

Nerves: call it excitement

The common advice is "calm down". It rarely works. Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard Business School tested a different approach in 2014. Before stressful tasks, including public speaking, people who said "I am excited" performed better than people who told themselves to calm down. Anxiety and excitement are both high-energy states, and it is easier to relabel the energy than to switch it off.

So in the wings, do not tell yourself to relax. Say, quietly or in your head, "I am excited." Then a few practical things:

• Breathe out longer than you breathe in. In for four counts, out for six, three times.
• Hold something steady. The lectern, a small card, or your own hands loosely together at waist height.
• Plant your feet. Hip-width apart. Rocking and pacing use up the energy you need for your voice.
• Drink water before, not during the opening. Keep a glass within reach for later.

Notes or no notes

You do not need to speak without notes to be good. You need to avoid reading.

• Full script: fine for a formal welcome with names and titles you must get right. Print it in large type, short lines, and look up at the end of every line.
• Bullet cards: best for most talks. One card per part. A few words per line, your opening and closing lines written in full.
• Slides: a picture or a short phrase, never your paragraphs. If the slide says what you are saying, the audience reads and stops listening.
• No notes: only when you have rehearsed so many times that the structure is in your body. Keep a card in your pocket anyway.

Rehearse standing up, out loud, at least three times. Once alone, once with a timer, once in front of one person who will tell you where they lost the thread.

The Q&A

Many good talks lose their energy in the questions. Prepare for them like a fourth part.

Write down the five questions you most expect and the one you most fear. Prepare a short answer to each: point first, one example, stop. Then use a few habits on the day.

• Repeat or summarise the question so the room hears it. It also buys you three seconds.
• Answer to the whole room, not only to the person who asked.
• If you do not know, say so, and offer a next step.

"That's a fair question, and I don't have the number with me. If you leave your card with my colleague at the desk, I'll send it to you this week."

"Let me make sure I've understood. You're asking whether this works in smaller towns as well. The short answer is yes, and here's one example."

Plan your final words after the Q&A too. Do not let the talk end on "Okay, I think that's all." Come back to your one message.

"So if you remember one thing from tonight: the nurse in Kozhikode should not be looking for paperwork. Thank you."

Sources

1. Alison Wood Brooks, Get Excited: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Excitement, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144 to 1158, 2014. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24364682/

Published by The Full Stop, the journal of Brightside English. Reviewed by a Brightside senior coach. Corrections: see our editorial standard.