Everything I've Learned About Public Speaking
Writing/Everything I've Learned About Public Speaking
§ 03 · Speaking<br>Everything I've Learned About Public Speaking<br>I went from blacking out on stage in front of 4,000 engineers to sleeping fine before jet-lagged days of talks abroad. Here's the whole pile of crumbs that got me there — medication, mindset, slides, reps, and putting your talks online.<br>PublishedJun 23, 2026<br>Reading—<br>KindEssay<br>TagsSpeaking
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Today, I can honestly say I'm at the point where I can sleep well even before hour-plus live workshops, on-stage talks that I haven't fully finished, and even multi-round days of workshops and talks and interviews in a foreign country on broken sleep and jet lagged.
I did not start here. I started about as badly as it's possible to start.
This post is about everything I have learned about public speaking. It's published here in honor of everyone who still suffers paralyzing anxiety around this topic — which is most people I meet and work with who are not regularly giving talks and speaking publicly. One of the ways my brain works is to constantly sponge up random crumbs of knowledge from diverse sources until it's able to cobble together a working mental model. My hope is that this article helps you skip ahead by collecting the crumbs I've found most helpful, upfront, in one place.
The worst talk I ever gave
Once at my first startup, in my early 20's, I was asked last minute to prepare a live speech at a gathering of several engineers and tech folks doing a hackathon where our API, BrightContext, was one of the sponsors.
My only public speaking experience by then was the miserable experience we all had in 11th grade doing mandatory presentations about book topics to practice. I remember, like most of my classmates, visibly quaking from the stress while trying to speak coherently about a literary topic while the whole room watched — even though we mostly liked each other and had a good teacher. That was the entire foundation I was building on.
I was juggling a lot of other things, so I whipped together my best first draft of the talk and gave it to my boss, our founder, in our tiny office space in Arlington, VA. He watched with not hidden horror and said, that was super long, and really boring.
Anxiety stage set.
I worked over the draft several times that night and got bad sleep. Even more torturously, my mother — who I was estranged from — decided to show up to this event unannounced, and I clocked her sitting near the front row.
When it was my time to speak, I took the lavalier mic, held it up to my face, made a weird joke about dropping it later that got some chuckles, and then essentially blacked out. I lost all executive function and the ability to speak, heard my own voice catching in my throat which made me more nervous, as 4,000 Microsoft engineers and assorted community members watched on. I barely got the name of our company out, and definitely didn't hit all the key notes about why you should try to use our API, or even what the fuck we did.
It was terrifically awful. And it was capped off by my estranged mother later saying, you did a good job.
I'm telling you this first because I want you to understand the distance. If you're reading this from inside your own version of that hall, throat closing, room spinning — I was there. The gap between that day and now is not talent. It's a pile of crumbs I collected, one at a time, that I'm going to hand you all at once.
Medication: the part most people won't write down
I am the furthest thing from a doctor, in that I am not sworn to first do no harm, and I am not advocating that you blindly accept my experiences as a personal prescription. Talk to an actual physician. This is my experience, not your prescription.
I take propranolol before I need to speak publicly — sometimes even before a large video call, especially at a new company before I am comfortable with everyone, or even on a voice-only remote call with more than one interlocutor when the stakes are higher.
Propranolol is a beta blocker. I first learned about it about two decades ago while reading an article in the newspaper about high-performing concert musicians taking it to steady their nerves. Not ever considering concert musicians the type to regularly get down, I remember finding it interesting that apparently so many took these to steady their body — which allowed their minds to follow.
That is what is most interesting about propranolol. There is no perceptible high, or euphoria, and it is totally possible to continue to feel mental dread, worry, and anxiety before an event when on it — and I regularly still do. What it does do is prevent your body from dumping pure adrenaline into your bloodstream on the regular. It steadies your shaking voice. It essentially blunts the method of action that would normally turn you into a shaky and quaky mess,...