Your bonus tip is practice. There's no getting around it speaking gets easier, the more you do it. So try to practice your speech. But I wouldn't advise practicing the whole thing over and over again. Instead of doing that, break it down into pieces of five minutes and practice those in different environments at different times. For example, if you have a great story that you're opening with, it's about five minutes, down the pub with your friends.

If you've got some information that's very technical and tricky that you need to convey to people practice it in the next board meeting that you have where you need to report on an update. Then by doing all these set pieces in different places at different times, not only are you helping yourself to memorize it, and pronounce it, but you're getting very good at honing down that information into a way that works every time. Then when you come to do a speech, all you have to do is click together those different set pieces That's how I work. And I've been increasingly working in comedy, as many of you know, in the last three years. And it really stuck with me when I first did my very first stand up gigs. And I was talking to a comedian who was much more experienced than me.

And I said, stand up comedy. bit daunting, isn't it? And you know what he said to me? He said, Hmm, I suppose so. But only if you haven't done a lot of it. I realized, of course, it's like anything, it's just practice.

And sure now, three years later, and I've done a lot of comedy gigs, and I now find it very easy to go on stage and make people laugh. It doesn't even occur to me now that they won't. So I want to encourage you to see practice as a very important element of speaking and to believe that you will actually come to a point where you can enjoy speaking, if you just do it more. Take a look at a clip that we've uploaded. Of Me explaining there at a conference and embarrassing a young man