Public speaking: why do we get nervous?

Here’s a picture of me being unbelievably nervous before a TEDx talk I gave very recently.

I prepared the talk for about one month. During that time, I was anxious every single day. It would leave my mind at times, but come back soon enough as I remembered the upcoming event.  

I’ve been public speaking for a few years now, and I’d say that out of my limited skill set, it’s probably one of my better skills. So I was confused.

“Why am I still getting so nervous? I know I can do an OK job here”.

I wanted to understand why we get nervous about public speaking, or for that matter, why we get nervous at all. So, I grabbed ‘The Chimp Paradox’ by Prof Steve Peters and set about my task.

 The brain can be crudely divided into seven systems. There’s two key parts for our purpose:

• The Limbic system, which is coined the ‘Chimp’ by Peters, is your emotional brain which uses very little logic, and thinks using emotional energy. It’s the brain we relied on to survive when we were in the jungle. 
  

• The Parietal system, which is coined the ‘Human’, is the brain that thinks rationally. It’s often the voice in your head that says ‘well… this is the right thing to do’.

These are two completely different systems, and they think INDEPENDENTLY of each other. It’s the human that says “yes I’d love to do that talk” and your chimp that’s yells “hell no, that’s scary”.

The biggest, and most important instinct our chimps possess is the FF response (Fight or flight). This is crucial to understanding why we get nervous before a talk.

“In the jungle, a chimpanzees FF instinct is a successful survival response. The problem for us, as humans, is that the inner chimp still believes it is in the jungle and it tries to use this in everyday life”.

Hence, even though there is no serious danger attached to speaking in public, our chimp senses ‘danger’ and attempts to act. It does so by releasing the FF response in the body, in an effort to mitigate the danger.

If you ignore this and don’t respond (i.e. “no, I’m going to do this talk, because it’s important to my goal in life”) something fascinating happens…

In my case:

Fight? I can’t ‘fight’ yet, because the talk is in a month.

Flight? No can do, doing a TEDx talk has been my dream for years, I need to do this.

When the adrenaline of the FF prompt is coupled with negative thoughts (that are created by the chimp that conceives danger) you will go into an anxiety state.

Nature uses anxiety as a means of forcing you to make a decision. Naturally, this will last until you have made a decision.

In public speaking, you make the ‘fight’ decision when you walk on stage.

Ever heard someone say, “Once I got into it, it was fine”?

Anxiety disappears once you have started speaking, because you no longer need it.

Next time you feel nervous before a big talk, smile. You have a healthy brain that is misconceiving danger.

Use grit to carry yourself through the anxiety. You can perform wonders.

Lessons learned in Silicon Valley (+ pictures).

Lessons learned in Silicon Valley. 

I have just visited Silicon Valley with Thomas Young. We were in the Bay area for three days, and it was without question the most intense period of learning both of us have ever done.

In this blog I’m going to try and give a snapshot of our learning points.

Our trip was funded through four sources, which we’d like to extend our highest gratitude to. SantanderUK, Lancaster University Enterprise Centre, Lancashire City Council and the Institute for Entrepreneurship & Enterprise Development – thank you!

The purpose of our trip was to find seed funding for our stealth startup.

Day 1:

We arrived in San Francisco at 5.30pm on Tuesday evening and we were already late. We had booked in to talk to an investor called John Ricci at 7pm at Startup Basecamp.

(Welcome to)

Having already made a (pretty random) (and fantastic) connection with a startup genius in Chicago Airport during our connection, Tom and I were feeling optimistic about our trip.

With no time to stop at the hotel after our 25-hour journey, we headed to Startup Basecamp.

The place looked completely inconspicuous from the outside, just a normal/rundown looking building, you had to go up some stairs and ring a doorbell inside to access the place.

Grand entrance

ü In Silicon Valley startups and spaces creep out of the walls. Just because it doesn’t look impressive from the outside, it doesn’t mean it won’t inside. Go with it.

We met a huge array of personalities when we arrived. A guy called Oliver was running a FinTech startup competing against PayPal, there was someone called Matt who was a PhD student running a startup that used Behavioural Economics to it’s advantage.

After listening to a few people pitch and hear the feedback they got, it was our time to pitch. We had been awake for over a day and back in UK time it was about 5am. Tester! 

We made the following learning points from our pitch and others’ feedback:

ü Identify your problem clearly and precisely before you do anything else. It’s good to start your pitch to a VC with about 20 seconds of basic description about your product, then go straight into the problem you are solving in a ‘problem>solution’ format.

ü If you’re trying to raise substantial amounts of money, you’re going to need traction with your MVP first. Investors out here are in such high demand that you will be pretty easily dismissed if you haven’t got data about your users yet. Try using your network (family and friends) to build small seed money if you haven’t got traction yet.

ü Don’t use notes. And don’t wear a suit. One guy made a real rookie error of bringing a page of notes and wearing a full suit. Mr Ricci told him straight away to put the notes away when he started. Embarrassing. Peter Thiel says this about wearing suits.

Day 2:

On Wednesday were up early to travel from San Francisco to San Jose to meet an influential VC in the Valley (we’ll call him ‘S’). The range of transport methods here are crazy, check it out:

Bikes

Skateboard

Ganster...

Segway

Scooter...

Monster double-storey train a.k.a Caltrain

We opted for the Caltrain, which took us about 1.5 hours to get down to San Jose. However, not having much money for Taxi’s, we ended up taking a dubious path across the freeway to arrive at our final destination. Not advised.

Feeling far more energetic than yesterday, we sat down at a place called ‘Vito’s’ with S.

 

Our table

 

On a side note before we get on to our learning points from today, the service in America is unbelievable. Our waiter was actually showing us video’s of the food we could eat and checked on us constantly. We think it’s more of a culture thing though. Everyone is friendly here. The cleaner in the train station went out of his way to help us.

Back to the meeting. The time in this meeting seemed to pass incredibly quickly. S taught us so much. We went through out Pitch Deck with him too.

ü For seed funding: Once you give the investor a solid reason to help you, you just need to show him that “you’re not dicks” (his words not ours). Our reason to help came from having a remarkably strong team for Sourcely, as well as a personal connection from one of our team to S. Most of the time we spent was building rapport with S to convince him we were good guys. Probably about 25% of the discussion was on the product. If yours is good, investors will get it.

BUSINESS = RELATIONSHIPS

ü Use connections to get stuff done. Smaller point, but if you’re trying to reach out to a VC or an accelerator, make sure you say, “XYZ recommended us to speak to you”. This makes the recipient accountable to not just you but their colleague.

We stopped at Google in the afternoon, here’s some pictures. Google have modelled their offices to look like a University campus. I recommend reading 'How Google Works'. It’s brilliant, and talks a lot about the reasons why Google Campus is like it is.

Groovy colours

Free bikes for Employees to use

Check out the T-rex

Kids in a candy shop

As a side note, never give Tom Young the map. His famous last words as we walked to Google from the train station were ‘Yeah its well close mate’ (Manchester accent)… an hour walk later in the blistering sun and we arrive. Safe to say we Uber’d it on the way back.

Day 3:

On Thursday we were up at 7am again. Our body clocks had adjusted by now so things were easier.

Today we planned to visit an Accelerator programme we had been accepted into called ‘Founders Space’ (Instagram had offices there in the early days).

Founders Space had a business event on that day that we were able to attend. We forged lots of connections on this day, including an EU investor; a Silicon Valley based recruitment firm and members of the Taiwanese government.

Some impressive people, amongst many.

Everyone is out here for the same reason; this makes the culture for networking absolutely awesome. Speaking to people is easy and exciting.

There were four startups pitching on this day. Here are some lessons we learnt listening to the feedback from the pitches:

ü Avoid using videos in your pitch. It puts your pitch in danger of tech failure and shows you kinda can’t sell… The guy had a nightmare with his deck because the videos weren’t responding quickly. It completely negated his efforts with his pitch.

ü Stick to your time. Don’t waste investor’s time. One of the pitches was (brutally) stopped because it went 15 seconds over. Some will be more strict than others but as a rule try to get it done in the time to save having to recover from embarrassment.

ü 70 Team / 20 market / 10 product. This seems to be a rough rule of thumb for exciting investors. The team behind your product are HUGELY important. If you have a remarkable team, then you can pivot and tweak your product. A good team can also act as pre-validation for your idea if you haven’t built an MVP yet. Investors love a good team.

Last day:

Today we had left free to allow us to set up meetings during our time out in Silicon Valley. As an indication of how able you are to set-up meetings and connect with people out here, this was what our schedule looked like (bear in mind we didn’t have anything on Friday planned):

-       8am call

-       9am call

-       11am meeting

-       5pm evening meeting

-       8pm networking event

ü There can be no doubt Silicon Valley is the space to connect with tech entrepreneurs and investors.

In the afternoon, Tom and I took some time out to visit Stanford University, which is situated in the heart of Silicon Valley: Palo Alto. Here are a few pictures from our time at Stanford:

Stanford lecture hall

"One of our many libraries"

Leading to the main square

Our humble chapel here at Stanford..............

In a word, our trip was incredible. In a remarkably short space of time, we were able to build strong links to VC’s, new friends and startups.

Silicon Valley is an amazing place to learn about entrepreneurship, and we have been so lucky to have the opportunity. We’ve included some other pictures of the trip below.

What is left to say is thank you once again to the sponsors, and keen an eye out for information about our new startup. Information to come soon.

How to talk so people listen.

In preparation for my upcoming TEDx talk on turning ideas into action (May 2^nd), I’ve been (desperately) looking into simple ways to make my talking style more impactful.

These points came from ‘Talk Like TED’ and are ways to amplify any subject matter so it sounds more powerful…

Gestures.

The first simple way to make your point more powerful is by using gestures.

‘Are gestures necessary? The short answer is yes. Studies have shown that complex thinkers use complex gestures and that gestures actually give the audience confidence in the speaker.’

In the book, Gallo says that in order to make your body language coherent with what you’re saying, you need to practise relentlessly.

When you have completely internalised your content, you can then make your body language fully coherent with what you’re saying. If you don’t know what you’re saying next, your gestures will reflect it.

Ø  Inspire confidence in your message by practising your talk, and using gestures to clarify what you’re saying.

Speed.

Speed up your delivery…

‘Most people slow down their rate of speech when they give a speech or a presentation, making their verbal delivery sound unnatural. Don’t deliver a presentation. Have a conversation instead.’

Interestingly, the ideal rate of speech for a face-to-face pitch of conversation is 190 words per minute. However, this is not a rigid guide…

You should not slow down your pace beyond that of your normal conversation style.

Ø Once you’ve nailed what you want to say, match the pace of your verbal delivery with your natural conversation style.

Story.

The best talks tell a story (I wrote a bit about ‘pathos’ (emotional appeal) in my blog on Jeremy Clarkson). You can use stories to reach people’s hearts and minds.

‘Brian Stevenson, the speaker who earned the longest standing ovation in TED history, spent 65% of his presentation telling stories. Brain scans reveal that stories stimulate and engage the human brain, helping the speaker connect with the audience and making it much more likely that the audience will agree with the speaker’s point of view.’

It is stories that will truly sway your audience towards your point of view.

Ø During your presentation, think very carefully about how you can paint your point with a story. Try to spend over 50% of your time telling stories that convey your message effectively.

I’ll be trying to incorporate these three points in my TEDx talk in May. 

I look forward to your feedback!