How to Use AI to Improve Your Public Speaking Skills (Without Increasing Anxiety)
Liam Sandford
Liam Sandford is a public speaking coach, marketing leader, and 2x Best Selling Author, including the book Effortless Public Speaking. He helps introverted professionals and leaders take control of public speaking anxiety and use speaking to market themselves, build influence, and communicate with impact.
Public speaking improves by starting small and scaling up, not by throwing yourself in the deep end. When people attempt high stakes speaking situations before they are ready, they often create negative experiences. Anxiety spikes, preparation feels insufficient, and speakers struggle to feel positive about the outcome. Over time, these experiences compound into a cycle where speaking becomes something to dread rather than improve at. This cycle can stall growth for months or years if not addressed deliberately.
AI can play a role in breaking this cycle when it is used correctly. While it cannot replace real speaking practice or remove anxiety, it can reduce friction in preparation, sharpen thinking, clarify messages, and help speakers extract concrete learning from every rep. Used strategically, AI becomes a speaking assistant in developing comfort, confidence, and competence in public speaking.
Why Throwing Yourself in the Deep End Creates Negative Speaking Experiences
Throwing yourself into the deep end is often framed as confidence building, but in public speaking it frequently creates the opposite effect. Exposure is valuable, but when it is unstructured or exceeds a speaker’s current readiness, it becomes overwhelming rather than educational. High stakes speaking situations force speakers to juggle content, structure, delivery, audience reaction, and self-monitoring all at once, which increases anxiety and reduces clarity. Throwing yourself in the deep end over and over again doesn’t create that confidence, it reinforces the negative experience and increases anxiety which ultimately slows improvement. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Starting small and scaling up from there is the way to become a confident speaker, even if you are carrying years of negative speaking experiences.
How High Stakes Speaking Creates Anxiety That AI Can Help Prevent
When you attempt a high pressure presentation before you are ready, anxiety can become overwhelming. Attention shifts inward, monitoring appearance, tone, and perceived judgment rather than the message itself. Ideas become harder to access, memory fails, and structure collapses. You leave the experience frustrated, embarrassed, or exhausted, not informed or motivated.
AI can prevent this by helping define the scope of a speaking rep, ensuring that early efforts are low risk and focused. For example, AI can help reduce a complex talk into a one minute explanation of a single idea. It can also suggest ways to present the information to a friendly or simulated audience first. By keeping early reps small and structured, speakers gain exposure without triggering overwhelming anxiety. Low pressure situations are where you can build comfortability speaking in public.
Why Being Underprepared at Public Speaking Leads to Negative Reflection
When you feel underprepared, reflection becomes emotionally charged rather than constructive. You might think, “I’’m terrible at speaking’ rather than noticing the things that went well. These vague negative reflections reinforce fear and avoidance, creating a long term barrier to improvement.
AI can prevent this by turning preparation into focused, actionable work. For example, it can:
Summarize key points into concise statements
Generate talking points to clarify the central idea
Suggest what success looks like for the specific rep
By preparing efficiently, you can enter even small speaking moments with clarity. This makes your post presentation reflection actionable and prevents experiences from becoming negative loops.
How Negative Public Speaking Experiences Become a Self-Reinforcing Cycle
When speaking goes poorly, if you aren’t careful it can take over your mind. The experience can shape how you think, feels, and behave the next time a speaking opportunity appears. A single negative speaking experience can subtly recalibrate expectations, increasing perceived risk and lowering confidence before the next rep even begins. Over time, these experiences compound to form a negative association with public speaking.
What makes this particularly difficult is that the cycle often feels rational from the inside. Avoidance feels like self-protection. Anxiety feels like evidence that speaking is genuinely dangerous. Poor performance feels like confirmation of an underlying lack of ability. Without intervention, you can easily create the conditions that make it harder to improve.
This is why public speaking anxiety so often persists for years. The issue is not talent or intelligence. It is the compounding effect of unintentionally created experiences that teach the wrong lessons.
How Anxiety, Avoidance, and Poor Reps Reinforce Each Other in Public Speaking
A difficult speaking experience increases anticipatory anxiety for the next one. The body remembers discomfort faster than it remembers content. When the next opportunity approaches, the speaker begins to rehearse the feeling of the last experience rather than the task ahead. This anxiety raises the psychological cost of practice, making even small preparation steps feel heavier than they should.
As a result, avoidance becomes more likely. Speakers put off preparation, delay practice, or mentally disengage from upcoming speaking moments. This avoidance reduces the number of speaking reps they actually complete, which slows familiarity and skill-building. When the next speaking moment finally arrives, the lack of recent practice makes performance feel even more difficult, confirming the speaker’s fears.
This creates a closed loop. Anxiety leads to avoidance. Avoidance leads to fewer reps. Fewer reps lead to poorer performance. Poor performance feeds anxiety. Each pass through the cycle strengthens it, making speaking feel increasingly high-risk and emotionally loaded.
AI helps break this cycle by lowering the activation energy required to speak. Instead of facing a large, ambiguous task, speakers can use AI to quickly clarify what they are saying, how long it needs to be, and what success looks like. By providing preparation support, rehearsal guidance, and structured feedback, AI helps transform speaking reps that would normally feel threatening into experiences that feel contained, intentional, and learnable.
Why AI Helps Break the Cycle Through Better Reps, Not Motivation
Many people try to escape the negative public speaking cycle through motivation alone. They tell themselves to be braver, push harder, or stop overthinking. While courage can get someone onto the stage, it does not redesign the experience itself. If the rep is still too large, too vague, or too high stakes, the outcome is likely to reinforce the same negative pattern.
Effective improvement comes from better reps, not stronger willpower. Reps need to feel manageable, focused, and capable of producing clarity rather than overwhelm. This is where AI plays a practical role. It helps speakers design reps that are appropriately sized and intentionally structured.
AI contributes by:
Identifying the smallest useful speaking moment to practise, rather than defaulting to full presentations
Guiding the speaker in structuring that moment using the Nano Speech Framework, so there is always a clear Open, Body, and Close
Helping the speaker reflect on and analyse the outcome in specific terms, rather than emotionally
When reps are designed this way, each speaking experience produces something that you can build on instead of self-judgment. This gradually converts emotional loops into learning loops, replacing fear with understanding and competence over time.
Why Starting Small Is Essential for AI Supported Improvement
Small, deliberate practice is the foundation of accelerated learning in public speaking because it allows speakers to stay within a zone where learning is possible. When the task is small enough to manage, attention stays on communication rather than self-survival. This is the condition under which skills actually develop.
AI is most effective in this context. It excels at refining clarity, structure, and focus, but only when the task itself is well defined. Starting small creates the conditions for AI to add real value rather than generate noise or false confidence.
How AI Supports Small, Low Risk Speaking Reps
Starting small allows AI to operate with precision. A focused, contained task reduces cognitive load and emotional pressure, which makes preparation and delivery feel achievable. AI can help speakers:
Condense complex ideas into a single sentence that can be spoken aloud
Test whether that sentence makes sense to a listener without additional explanation
Highlight areas of vagueness, assumption, or unnecessary complexity
By limiting the scope of the rep, AI helps speakers practise successfully without triggering overwhelming stress. Each rep feels doable, which increases consistency. Over time, these small successes accumulate, building familiarity with speaking and weakening the anxiety avoidance loop.
How Small Wins Rebuild Public Speaking Confidence Through Clarity
Confidence does not come from surviving high pressure situations. It comes from repeatedly understanding what you are doing and why it works. Small wins rebuild confidence because you feel good about elements of your presentation. You know what landed, what improved, and what to adjust next time.
AI accelerates this process by making improvement visible. After each rep, AI generated feedback can provide clear signals of progress, such as clearer openings, tighter explanations, or stronger closes. Instead of relying on vague feelings, speakers can see evidence of improvement. This reinforces motivation, encourages continued practice, and gradually replaces fear with grounded confidence built on clarity.
Using AI With the Nano Speech Framework to Reduce Overwhelm
The Nano Speech Framework gives you a structure that is engaging, easy to have conversations with your audience, and stay on track. One of the main reasons public speaking feels overwhelming is that too many decisions are being made at once: what to say, how to say it, what order to say it in, and how long to keep going. By breaking speaking into a clear Open, Body, and Close, the framework limits the number of variables a speaker needs to manage in any given moment.
AI becomes most useful here not as a replacement for thinking, but as a thinking partner that helps the speaker make those decisions deliberately and efficiently. Instead of holding everything in working memory, speakers can externalise parts of the process, reducing anxiety and making practice feel more achievable.
How AI Supports the Open of a Nano Speech
The open is often the stage that generates the most anxiety. This is where you worry about first impressions, relevance, and whether the audience will engage at all. AI can assist you by:
Helping define the relevance of the idea to the audience
Crafting a concise framing statement that captures attention
Removing unnecessary information to reduce mental clutter
By working with AI to articulate why an idea matters, speakers begin with clarity rather than uncertainty. AI can challenge vague openings, tighten language, and ensure the first sentence will resonate with your audience. With a clear, AI supported Open, speakers start with confidence, knowing exactly what message they are communicating and why. This reduces the likelihood of rambling starts, which often trigger early anxiety and undermine the rest of the speaking experience.
How AI Sharpens the Body of a Nano Speech
The body is where ideas can become sprawling or unclear, especially when speakers try to say too much at once. AI helps speakers focus on one idea at a time by:
Identifying the core message
Removing tangents that distract from clarity
Testing whether the logic flows and examples support the central idea
Using AI at this stage allows speakers to pressure test their thinking before speaking. By asking AI to summarise the core idea or challenge assumptions, speakers can spot weak logic or unnecessary detail early. This will help you to improve your narrative to land the message you want with the audience. Being able to deliver your body in one sentence, and then back it up with data, stories and examples is the way to do it. AI can help you craft this so you are clear and can deliver clearly to your audience.
How AI Strengthens the Close of a Nano Speech
A weak close often leads to a poor overall experience, even if the rest of the presentation went well. Ending without clarity can leave speakers feeling unfinished or dissatisfied. AI can help craft a close that:
Gives the audience a key action they can take right away
Reinforces the relevance of your main idea
Invites audience contribution in an engaging way
By using AI to refine the final sentence or call to action, you can ensure your presentation ends with purpose. This matters psychologically: people tend to remember the end of an experience more vividly than the middle. By ending the presentation well, you can ensure you remember the experience positively which strengthens your confidence and progress as a speaker.
Using AI to Prepare Just Enough for Public Speaking
Over preparation can be as detrimental as under preparation. When preparation becomes excessive, speakers create pressure to perform perfectly rather than communicate clearly. AI is most effective when it helps speakers prepare just enough to speak with confidence, without locking them into rigid scripts or overwhelming detail.
How AI Reduces Preparation Friction Without Creating Dependency
AI accelerates the preparation process by helping you:
Turn vague thoughts into structured points
Organize ideas logically and clearly
Avoid overcomplicating content for small reps
This lowers the friction in preparing for your presentation effectively. Instead of staring at a blank page or endlessly refining notes, speakers can move quickly from idea to articulation. Importantly, AI does not remove the need to think or speak, it just removes unnecessary friction. This approach keeps preparation manageable and sustainable, allowing you to build on the things that work for you in your preparation each time you speak in public.
Why AI Should Support Clarity, Not Completeness
AI should help speakers feel ready to speak, not finished. Overly detailed or scripted preparation creates rigidity, making speakers more anxious about deviating from their notes. By focusing on clarity and structure rather than exhaustive coverage, AI supports flexible delivery and real learning. This aligns directly with the Nano Speech Framework, where the goal of each rep is not perfection, but progress. When AI is used to support clarity, practice stays achievable and effective, allowing speakers to accumulate high quality reps that steadily build comfort, confidence, and competence.
Using AI to Rehearse Adaptability Instead of Scripts
Flexibility is a stronger skill than memorization. In real speaking situations, audiences interrupt, time runs short, questions surface unexpectedly, and ideas need to be explained differently on the fly. Preparing for these realities requires adaptability, not perfect recall. AI is particularly effective here because it allows speakers to practise responding, adjusting, and thinking aloud without the pressure of a live audience. This shifts rehearsal away from rigid performance and toward genuine understanding.
Why AI Generated Scripts Increase Risk of Failure in Public Speaking
Scripts shift attention from meaning to memorization. When a speaker relies on a script of any kind, (both human written and AI generated), confidence becomes tied to recalling exact phrasing rather than delivering a clear message. The moment delivery deviates from the script, through interruption, time pressure, or audience reaction, your anxiety will spike. This creates negative experiences because your presentation is bound by how well you remember what the script says. This increases fear of public speaking and will slow your progress to becoming a confident public speaker.
How AI Builds Adaptability Through Challenge
AI can simulate some of the real world speaking challenges, including:
Audience questions or objections
Requests for clarification
Scenarios of partial misunderstanding
By prompting you with unexpected inputs that the audience might come up with, AI forces you to explain ideas in multiple ways rather than repeat memorised lines. Rehearsing responses aloud to AI generated prompts strengthens understanding and reveals gaps in clarity. Over time, this builds a deeper mental model of the idea, allowing you to stay composed and flexible during live interaction. The result is competence that transfers across contexts, audiences, and formats, rather than confidence tied to a single prepared version.
Using AI to Reflect After Speaking and Prevent Negative Memories
Reflection determines whether a speaking rep helps or harms. Without structured reflection, speakers often default to emotional judgments such as ‘that was bad’ or ‘I’m not good at this.’ These impressions linger and shape how you ultimately feel about public peaking. AI helps slow this process down and replace emotional reactions with objective analysis, preventing isolated mistakes from becoming lasting negative memories. For more on how to use AI to help overcome negative public speaking experiences, check out the Ultimate Guide to Using AI for Public Speaking.
How AI Turns Emotional Reactions Into Useful Feedback
AI can help analyse a speaking rep by breaking it into Nano Speech components:
Was the open relevant and attention grabbing?
Did the body remain focused on a single idea?
Was the close concise and memorable?
By reviewing each component separately, you can gain specific insights instead of self-criticism. AI can highlight where clarity existed and where structure weakened, helping speakers see improvement alongside gaps. This approach replaces vague self-judgment with structured insight, turning each speaking experience into data for improvement rather than a verdict on ability.
Common Ways People Misuse AI in Public Speaking
Misuse of AI in public speaking is rarely obvious or careless. In fact, it often looks like discipline and effort. Speakers spend more time refining ideas, optimising phrasing, and polishing structure, yet their confidence and comfort do not improve. The issue is not the tool itself, but how it is positioned in the learning process. When AI becomes a substitute for speaking rather than a support for it, it quietly reinforces the same avoidance patterns that created public speaking anxiety in the first place.
Another subtle problem is that AI can reward intellectual engagement without requiring emotional exposure. Thinking about speaking feels safer than speaking. When AI is used primarily for analysis, drafting, or optimisation, speakers can remain cognitively active while emotionally disengaged. This creates the illusion of progress without the experience of growth. Over time, this mismatch leads to frustration, because the speaker feels prepared on paper but fragile in real situations.
Using AI to Avoid Speaking Instead of Supporting It
One of the most common misuses of AI is allowing preparation to replace delivery. Generating outlines, improving phrasing, refining transitions, or perfecting structure can feel productive, but if the content is never spoken aloud, the fear associated with speaking grows stronger. Each additional round of preparation raises the stakes of eventual delivery, increasing pressure and hesitation. The speaker becomes more invested in the content while remaining untested in delivery.
AI should shorten the distance between idea and action, not widen it. Its role is to remove friction that blocks speaking reps, not to create a comfortable holding pattern where reps never happen. Speaking ability improves through exposure to one’s own voice, timing, and presence, not through endless refinement. Reps must still be spoken aloud, imperfectly and repeatedly, for learning to occur. AI works best when it accelerates the moment of speaking, not when it delays it.
Scaling Difficulty Faster Than Clarity
AI can create a false sense of readiness by producing coherent, articulate content faster than a speaker can fully understand or internalise it. Because the output sounds polished, speakers often assume they are ready to perform at a higher level. This leads to premature scaling: longer talks, more complex ideas, or higher stakes audiences before clarity is stable. When delivery outpaces understanding, anxiety resurfaces and performance feels fragile.
The problem is not ambition, but misalignment. Difficulty should scale as comfort speaking scales. AI should be used to stabilise understanding at each level, not to leap ahead of skill development. When speakers skip stages, negative experiences return, reinforcing fear and avoidance. Progress should remain incremental, guided by comfort, clarity, and positive feedback from actual delivery, not from how good the content looks on the page.
How to Integrate AI Into a Sustainable Public Speaking Practice
Long term improvement in public speaking is not driven by breakthrough moments or one off performances. It comes from systems that make consistent practice achievable over time. AI becomes valuable when it is integrated into a repeatable process that supports preparation, delivery, and reflection without overwhelming the speaker. Sustainability matters more than intensity.
A sustainable practice respects energy, attention, and emotional bandwidth. AI should reduce the cognitive and emotional cost of speaking reps so they can happen frequently. When the system feels light enough to maintain, you will practise more often, reflect more clearly, and improve faster. Without this structure, even powerful tools become sporadic and ineffective.
Pairing AI With Frequent Low Stakes Nano Speeches
AI works best when paired with regular, low stakes speaking reps that feel safe enough to repeat. Nano Speeches provide a clear container for these reps, while AI supports each stage of the process. Before speaking, AI helps clarify the idea and reduce ambiguity. During rehearsal, it challenges understanding and highlights gaps. After speaking, it structures reflection so learning is extracted quickly.
This tight loop transforms even small speaking moments into meaningful learning opportunities. A one minute explanation, a short update, or a brief insight becomes a full rep when supported properly. Over time, frequency matters more than intensity. A steady rhythm of low pressure reps builds comfort, confidence, and competence far more effectively than occasional high stakes performances that carry emotional risk.
Scaling Speaking Challenges Only After Positive Reps Accumulate
As speakers consistently finish reps feeling clear, constructive, and capable of improvement, difficulty can increase safely. This might involve longer Nano Speeches, unfamiliar audiences, or more nuanced ideas. The key is that challenge is introduced only after positive reps accumulate, not as a test of courage but as a natural next step.
AI helps ensure that each increase is scaffolded with appropriate preparation, adaptability training, and structured reflection. Instead of forcing confidence through exposure, speakers build confidence through evidence. Each completed rep becomes proof of capability. Over time, this creates momentum that feels grounded rather than forced, and confidence that holds under pressure because it is built on repeated, successful experience rather than motivation alone.
TL;DR: How to Use AI to Improve Your Public Speaking Skills
AI improves public speaking when it helps prevent negative experiences and supports deliberate progress.
Throwing yourself in the deep end increases anxiety and avoidance
Use AI to design small, low risk speaking reps
Apply the Nano Speech Framework to every rep
Let AI reduce preparation friction and sharpen clarity
Use AI after speaking to extract learning and prevent negative loops
More From Liam Sandford
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