When I first walk into a room with people I'm about to give presentation training skills to, I always ask them the same question. Where are you most comfortable speaking where you least comfortable. And invariably, people say to you I'm least comfortable. When I have to speak to larger audiences. I'm comfortable speaking to 20 but 50 people, the nerves come out, there's usually some threshold. Well, a few years ago, I was over in Asia and I was working with a Member of Parliament in this was a very large democracy, shall we say, more than a billion voters?

And I asked this particular member of parliament. We'll call him Ray, right? Where are you comfortable speaking? Were you uncomfortable? He said to me, Well, I'm very comfortable speaking to small audiences, but I get nervous speaking to large audiences. Now this is someone who had been public in public life his whole life had given thousands Have speeches, but I said, Ray, everybody says that that's completely normal.

And then he said, Yeah, TJ, I'm very comfortable speaking to small groups of 5000 people or fewer, but I get nervous speaking to larger audiences of 100,000 as well, Minister, that's not quite as common, but the basic concept is exactly the same. Once your nerves set, that's when we start to phrase we do all sorts of things, we change ourselves, sound robotic or attempted to read because we're afraid we'll forget. And that's what starts the negative spiral downward. So we'll work on that. Okay, so what did I just do there? I told a story, had a character had a setting, although I had to be a little fuzzy because I didn't want to reveal the competences of a particular client and had a problem had a Little bit of a surprise.

All I was really trying to do is to convey to you that if you're nervous about speaking to larger audiences, that's normal. Everybody feels that but by telling it in a story format, it makes it more interesting and more memorable.