7 secrets of public speaking | Present with confidence

Elena Chen
1 min readApr 19, 2022

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Almost everyone is nervous about public speaking, including myself. I still remember preparing for my keynote presentation at an education conference in UC Berkeley about 3 years ago. I was so afraid that I couldn’t fall asleep and became a heavy procrastinator.

I want to send my sincere gratitude to Matt Abrahams, Adam Neil Tobin and Jeff Cabili, who have offered amazing public speaking courses at Stanford GSB or Stanford Continuing Studies. After taking their courses, I have definitely gained more confidence in giving presentations and even started to enjoy them!

I have synthesized my learnings into this week’s video — 7 Secrets of Public Speaking with an acronym of ABCDEFG. They are:

  • Anxiety management
  • Busy audiences
  • Content
  • Delivery
  • Energy
  • Filler words
  • Gestures

I am going to first talk about how to manage anxiety. Then I will use Ric Elias’ Ted Talk (3 things I learned while my plane crashed) to illustrate how to craft engaging content and deliver your presentation effectively.

Hopefully by watching this video, you can also become less nervous about public speaking and seize more opportunities to share your voice publicly!

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