15 min before my talk in Dornbirn I was in panic! A super cool room, more than 100 people, the best media technology support I ever had and I had not prepared a presentation on slides. My idea was to do a dialogue with the people, but the room…

In “Confessions of a Public Speaker” [1] it says that “talking in front of a crowd” is the number one fear that people have. And it is true. Talking in front of an unknown group is stress. My face was pale, my hands sweating.

How can you overcome this? I loved an idea of Berkum: You cannot. Your body will always react this way. No escape. And then I remembered that my voice trainer said something different: “Be with the people, make sure, you are in a conversation with them.” That is the trick! Make them part of the dialogue. Create friends and tell stories.

It helped me also last week in Dornbirn. After 3 minutes involving them into a dialogue by making them part of the talk, my anxiety changed into energy.

[1] Berkun, S. 2009 Confessions of a Public Speaker. O’Reilly Media.