Speaking with Confidence
Lesson 15: Your practice plan
Goal: start a four-week plan that builds speaking into your normal week.
Confidence comes from reps
You don’t get confident and then speak. You speak, survive it, notice it went better than you feared, and confidence follows. The research on speaking anxiety says the same: regular, gradual practice with feedback is what works (Lesson 2). So the plan is about doing, little and often.
A four-week plan
Pick the two situations you circled in Exercise 1. Then:
| Week | Focus | Every day | Once this week |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Voice | Read a paragraph aloud, slowly, with pauses (Lesson 3) | Speak in the first ten minutes of a meeting (Lesson 8) |
| 2 | Off the cuff | One 90-second impromptu answer from your topic list (Lesson 5) | Give a three-line update: done, next, need |
| 3 | Structure and stories | Tell one of your stories in under a minute (Lesson 7) | Run a meeting, or a part of one, with an opening and a closing summary (Lesson 9) |
| 4 | A prepared piece | Rehearse a five-minute talk (Lesson 13) | Give it: at work, to friends, at a club, or on a video call to someone you trust |
Five minutes a day is enough. Miss a day, carry on the next.
Keep a speaking log
After anything that counts, write three short lines:
- What happened
- What went well (always find one thing)
- One thing to try next time
After four weeks, read it back. Then record the same 60-second answer from Exercise 0 and compare the two. Most people hear a real difference.
Get feedback
Feedback speeds everything up. Ask a colleague or friend before you speak: “Could you watch for one thing: do I get to the point quickly?” One specific question gets a far more useful answer than “How was it?” (Lesson 11).
Find people to practise with
Practising alone gets you started. Practising with other people (a club, a mentor, a coach) is what keeps you going and shows you what you can’t see yourself. Lesson 16 covers how clubs work, why mentoring matters in both directions, voice coaches, and what’s out there if you catch the bug: contests and paid speaking.
Keep it everyday
A club is practice. The real thing is the meeting on Monday, the phone call you’ve been putting off, the question you nearly didn’t ask. Keep using your voice in all of them.
Exercise 15
Put the four-week plan in your calendar: five minutes a day, plus the weekly item. Put a reminder at the end of week 4 to re-record your Exercise 0 answer and compare.
Sources
- Ebrahimi et al. (2019), Psychological interventions for the fear of public speaking: a meta-analysis, Frontiers in Psychology
- Hattie and Timperley (2007), The power of feedback, Review of Educational Research