A few weeks ago, I decided to get better at speaking in front of people.
Not the vague kind of decision where "public speaking" quietly joins the list of things you will improve someday. A hackathon was coming up, I knew I would have to present, and my body reacted to that fact alone.
That was the moment. This is holding me back, and I am done letting it run me.
For a long time, I simply did not have to speak in front of people very much. At university, I could get through most things without presenting. Then COVID moved the ordinary reps online. After that, I spent a lot of time building alone. The distance grew, and public speaking became more charged the further away it felt.
I was still social. I could talk for hours at a dinner or founder event when it felt natural. But the second attention became official, a room, a turn, a stage, something flipped. My pulse would climb. My breathing would go shallow. My throat would feel thick. Sometimes I got the strange fear that I would not be able to swallow. Sometimes I was not even the one speaking. I would be sitting in the audience, already worried that people might turn around and notice I was nervous.
What confused me was that the reaction had no matching fear in my head. I was not worried about failing or embarrassing myself. I knew nothing bad would happen. Mentally, I was already there. My body still reacted to the room like a threat.
So I started working on it. I read Dale Carnegie's The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking. I started Patsy Rodenburg's The Right to Speak. I watched talks about stage fright, breathing, attention, and the loop of being anxious about looking anxious. I treated it like a research sprint: read, test, keep notes. And in a slightly dramatic but honest way, I more or less told the universe I wanted to become someone who could speak in front of people.
What the research suggested
What surprised me first was how many people this affects. There was much more research, therapy advice, and practical language for it than I expected. That helped. It made the whole thing less private and less mysterious.
There were names for things I had felt in my body: attention turning inward, the illusion of transparency, and physical activation that can become panic or excitement depending on where it goes.
One pattern kept coming up. Once the body reacts, monitoring the reaction can make it louder. Was my voice shaking? Could they see it? Did I look as nervous as I felt? Every check makes the sensation feel more threatening, which gives the body more to react to.
So I mapped the loop: sensation, checking, threat, more sensation. Seeing it that plainly turned it into a system I could interrupt.
The first useful part was knowing what my body would probably do next and having a move ready for it. Notice the signal. Do not inspect it. Put your attention back on the room.
The next useful part was to stop trying to prove that I am calm. Every check feeds the loop. So that became the experiment I wanted to run. What happens if I stop trying to prove I am calm?
The practical advice was simple too. Know the first sentence. Know the last sentence. Keep a few beats in between. Do not memorize the whole talk, because one forgotten line can make a memorized script collapse. Breathe out longer than you breathe in. Have recovery lines ready, so a pause gives you a way back.
- "Let me slow this down for a second."
- "The key thing to notice here is..."
- "What I mean is..."
- "Let me come back to the main point."
Putting it to the test
At the same time, the universe took my wish very literally. Within days, opportunities to speak in front of people started lining up. The biggest one was an invite to Anthropic's first Claude Founder House in Berlin. I assumed it would be a small meetup. It turned out to be a real stage with more than 500 people in the room.
A few weeks earlier, that sentence alone would have wrecked me.
This time, I just ran the plan. The fear did not disappear completely, but it also did not get to run the old spiral. Because I was not inspecting every signal, my body had less to amplify. I used the activation as excitement, put my attention outward toward the room and the thing I had built, and enjoyed being on stage. I was not calm exactly. More like: I am here, my body is awake, and I can do this.
I also found out, in real time, that the audience does not see the movie playing inside your body. There is a name for it: the illusion of transparency. I knew my pulse, my throat, the exact second my attention wanted to collapse inward. They mostly saw someone talking about something she had built.
The bigger surprise came afterward. People said they were impressed by how confident I was on stage and asked about the product. The old story was that if I was anxious, people would see it and the whole thing would fall apart. That is just not what happened. I was nervous, I spoke anyway, and some people read me as confident. That rewired something.
What changed
I had thought I needed to intervene until my body had no reaction at all. I did not need the reaction to disappear before I could speak. The trick was where the energy went. Turned inward toward my pulse and whether people could tell, it became panic. Turned outward toward the room and the point I wanted to land, it became presence.
Same adrenaline, different direction. So instead of telling myself to calm down, I told myself I was excited, which sits right next to a racing heart in a way calm never does. It sounds too simple, and it mostly worked, because I was not fighting the energy anymore. I was giving it somewhere to go.
For a demo, the rail was concrete: problem, why I built it, what it does, how it works, what I learned. The product carries half the room, so I do not have to be the whole performance.
And something that is easier said than done: do it before you feel ready. You do not become comfortable with public speaking by understanding it. You become comfortable by doing it, badly at first, and noticing that you lived. Every rep is evidence. Not "I felt amazing," just "I did it." For someone with stage fright, that is proof.
I had pictured a future version of me who walks onto a stage, enjoys the room, and talks about what she built. Standing in Berlin, I realized I did not have to wait years to become her. I could borrow her that day. Once you have seen yourself do the thing, the old story gets much harder to believe. It went from "I am too anxious for this" to "I might be anxious, and I might still be good."
After Berlin, it did not feel like something I had survived. It felt like something I wanted to do again, and I have already done it twice since at demo nights.
I will get nervous again, and my body will still react. But nervousness no longer means I have to step back.
If someone with the same kind of stage fright asked what helped me, I would give them this: build a rail. Breathe out longer than you breathe in. Let the reaction come along. When the adrenaline hits, give it somewhere to go. Say the next sentence anyway.