Sarah Jenkings

Five simple ways to improve the delivery of your next presentation, performance or speech

Your throat is as dry as dust. Your heart is hammering its way out of your rib cage. Your palms are slippery with sweat. This isn’t the moment before you leap out of a plane, at an altitude of 35,000 feet, in the manner of Mr Tom Cruise, as Ethan Hunt, performing a Halo jump. No, these are the long seconds stretching out into eternity as you stand on your own, before a group of people – all of whom are expecting wise, profound and entertaining words to come out of your mouth. With elocution worthy of Sir Patrick Stewart, of course.

Sound familiar? If so, you’re not alone; according to research conducted by the School of Communication Studies at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, around 75 per cent of us suffer anxiety when it comes to public speaking. For 10 per cent, that anxiety mutates into pure panic. “This is your nervous system going into fight or flight because you’re being stared at by lots of people,” says Ms Caroline Goyder, an author, expert speaker and voice coach to an array of individuals constantly put in the spotlight, including news presenters, actors and FTSE 100 CEOs. “And the primal part of your nervous system is saying it’s not a safe space to be.

“The thing to understand is that you can steer your nervous system out of fight or flight, into rest and digest – the other side of the nervous system. What actors, singers and jazz musicians learn is that you can slow down and centre yourself, so that when you walk out in front of an audience, it feels like you’re in front of your friends.”

Want to stop becoming a shivering wreck every time you’re in a meeting, or giving a best man speech, or wrangling a crowd of unruly children at a birthday party? We speak with Ms Goyder to find out how.

01. Relax

When you enter fight-or-flight mode, everything starts to go downhill – when you desperately just want to get the talk, speech or presentation you’re in the middle of, well, over with. For Ms Goyder, the solution is as simple as understanding the body language of the fight-or-flight response – tense shoulders, a tense jaw, your breath going up into the chest, a speeding up of everything – and adjusting it accordingly in order to trigger the opposite rest-and-digest response. “Relax your shoulders,” says Ms Goyder. “Breathe low and wide, relax your gaze so that it’s peripheral, soften your jaw and tell your system that you’re safe. When you do that, you can speak to anybody and it’ll feel OK – as long as you’ve practised it.”

02. Fix your text neck

We’re all guilty of what Ms Goyder calls “text neck” – when we lean into our phone screens while checking Instagram, or composing an outrageously witty tweet, so that our heads come forward off our curved spines. As it turns out, this is pretty much the most effective way to kill any confident voice that may have been lurking within you. “Understand the damage that text neck does to your voice,” she says. “It makes your voice thin and flat. If you have a meeting, think ears over shoulders as you walk in. That will really help your voice to be more centred, more powerful, because it positions the larynx in the right place, and it helps you breathe deeply.”

03. Take time to pause

When we’re speaking in public, there’s often a temptation to just power through. For Ms Goyder, this simply isn’t conducive to clear, confident speech. “All speech is out-breath,” she says, “so a pause is really important, because it’s where you take an in-breath. And the quality of your in-breath, is the quality of your voice.” But it’s not just a case of breathing in in any old way; to ensure your voice has a timbre as rich and vibrant as that of Sir Christopher Lee (or close enough), you need to be taking those in-breaths the right way, and plan your speech to accommodate these pauses. “When you breathe in, it’s good to think low and wide, rather than shallow and high. And that is something to practise,” says Ms Goyder.

04. Twist your tongue

“If you find that you stumble over your words sometimes, if you lack articulation and clarity, it’s easy to work on,” says Ms Goyder. “In the morning before you go to work, just do a little bit of a tongue twister, just move the mouth around. Maybe say a line, or say the days of the week and really overdo the clarity.” Think Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, instructing Eliza Doolittle to recite “the rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” 50 times each morning. “If you do that before you get to work,” continues Ms Goyder, “the articulators [your tongue and lips] start to work more accurately, and you’ll start to sound much more clear.”

05. Project your voice

Let’s face it, some of us simply aren’t blessed with the big, booming voice we’d like. If you’re one of those people whose voice is more, erm, Mickey Mouse than Mufasa (and is constantly bombarded with comments of “Sorry, can you say that again?”), Ms Goyder suggests projecting your voice to the back wall of the room you’re in. “Just imagine that there’s someone at the back of the room that you want to send your voice to,” she says. “And even as you look at the people in the room, maybe they’re sitting around the table in front of you, just have a sense of your voice bouncing back off that wall. That gives you a little bit of easy, relaxed projection, and, often, that gives people a different level of presence.

We’re not going to sit here and tell you that investing in a load of fancy new workout gear is automatically going to make you fit. Unless you’re already operating at the absolute limits of human athletic potential, there’s no magical running shoe capable of lowering your marathon time more effectively than simply training a bit harder will.

That’s not to suggest, though, that upgrading the contents of your gym bag isn’t a good idea. On the contrary: it’s a great one. Whether you’re stepping onto the treadmill or into the office on your first day of a new job, dressing appropriately is a statement of intent. It shows commitment. And what better time to commit to something than now?

To help you on your way, we’ve listed four of our favorite training disciplines for 2020, along with a suggestion of what to wear for each. The four disciplines – all of them as old as the hills – have been chosen because they’re a) easy to pick up and b) offer near-endless scope for improvement.

1. Calisthenics For Core Strength

Why bother lifting weights when you can lift yourself? That’s the argument behind calisthenics, a fitness discipline that uses the effects of gravity on your own bodyweight to build strength, and whose catalog of exercises includes some of the more spectacular things you’re likely to see at the gym, such as the muscle-up and the human flag. 

The benefits? It’s a weight-free workout for a start, which means you don’t need to invest in a stack of dumbbells. In fact, you don’t even need a gym membership: just take a look around your local park, where you’ll often meet guys with upper bodies that put the clientele of the average $150-a-month gym to shame. 

The calisthenics crowd’s impressive physiques also serve to dispel a common myth in the fitness world, which is that the best way to pack on muscle is to pump iron. Yes, there are limits to the gains you’ll be able to make with body-weight exercises alone, but those limits are beyond all but the most seasoned athletes; and besides, weighted calisthenics is always available for those ready to take their workout to the next level.

A straightforward progression for beginners is to start with the humble press-up. Once you can easily do 20 in a row, move onto dips, first on a pair of parallel bars and then on gymnastic rings. Rings offer an extra plane of lateral movement compared to bars, forcing you to use your core muscles in order to stay upright. 

When you can comfortably support your weight on rings, try a raised L-sit (pictured), first with your knees tucked in and eventually with both legs fully extended at 90 degrees to your body. This exercise, which works the abs and hip flexors, is much harder than it looks: if you can hold it for 10 seconds, you’re doing well.

2. Yoga For Flexibility

If you go into yoga expecting it to be easy, it’s likely to be a chastening experience. By extending your normal range of motion and forcing you to support your body weight in strange positions for extended periods of time, it works muscles you didn’t even know you had; it’s not unusual for newcomers with impressive physiques and good stamina to leave their first yoga class shaking like a leaf. 

Keep it up, though, and you’ll soon be rewarded with a body that’s supple, balanced and far stronger than it appears. That’s to say nothing of the well-publicised psychological benefits of yoga, which include enhanced mental focus and reduced stress, nor its power to encourage a more spiritual outlook on life.

Perhaps the most appealing thing about yoga, though, is that no matter how good you get, you’ll always be able to find room for improvement. This is summed up by one of its simplest, most iconic poses: the downward-facing dog (pictured). Anyone who has ever given yoga a try will be familiar with this pose, which forms a key part of the Sun Salutation sequence and deeply stretches your hamstrings, back and shoulders.

Easy to learn but nigh-on impossible to master, the downward-facing dog is a pose that rewards long-term consistency and commitment, and in doing so encapsulates, in miniaturized form, much of what yoga – and, indeed, fitness in general – is all about.

3. Skipping For Cardiovascular Fitness

It’s telling that for all the money and resources available to professional boxers, their preferred tool for cardio training is… a piece of leather string with a wooden handle on each end. But while the skipping rope itself might seem rudimentary, skipping as a form of exercise is anything but.

A high-intensity workout that requires both coordination and balance, skipping is ideal for anyone looking to build stamina and explosive power while maintaining poise, and because it moves your arms and your legs simultaneously, it does a great job of simulating the fatigue – if not the punches – you’ll receive during a single round of boxing.

There are countless variations, too: once you’ve mastered the simple rope skip, you can try throwing in lateral movements, single-foot hops, arm crisscrosses and much more. As with yoga, it’s an accessible form of exercise with infinite potential for improvement – and the added benefit of working your brain as well as your body.

4. Kettlebells For Power

Originating centuries ago in Russia, kettlebells differ from more conventional dumbbells in a few crucial ways. Firstly, they don’t have a grippy, knurled-metal or rubber handle. This allows them to shift within your grip, enabling a whole new range of dynamic movements while also working your grip strength harder than a dumbbell of the same weight.

Then there’s the shape of a standard kettlebell, which lends itself to swinging movements such as the one-armed kettlebell swing (pictured). Not to be attempted until you’ve mastered the two-handed variation, the one-armed swing works out your legs, glutes, arms, shoulders and back – or pretty much your entire body, in other words. The slight rotation of the torso forced by the one-arm variation works the oblique muscles in your core, too.

A great progression for anyone who’s getting tired of dumbbells or looking for a new, dynamic discipline to work into their regimen, kettlebell training is also an essential first step for anyone thinking of getting into powerlifting, a sport with which it shares several core exercises, including the clean, snatch and swing.