How to Speak Confidently in Public Even If You’ve Never Spoken Before
Liam Sandford
Liam Sandford is a Head of Marketing, public speaking expert, and 2x Best Selling Author including the book Effortless Public Speaking. He helps ambitious professionals and entrepreneurs communicate with impact to get noticed, grow their career, and build their business.
Here is the thing nobody tells you: confidence does not come first. You do not wake up feeling ready and then go and speak. You speak, badly at first, in small safe ways, and the confidence arrives afterwards as a by product. I know that because I used to be genuinely afraid of standing up in front of people, and everything I now teach was built to get me out of that hole. This guide shows you how to speak confidently in public from a standing start: how to handle the fear, how to structure what you say so you never go blank, how to breathe when your body panics, and how to reflect so every attempt makes you a little better than the last.
Why Confidence Comes from Action, Not Before It
Most beginners think they need to feel confident before they open their mouth. They picture themselves on a stage, delivering flawlessly, then compare that fantasy to their nervous present self, decide they are not ready, and put it off. That comparison is the whole problem. You are measuring a beginner against a finished product.
Confidence is success remembered. Every time you speak, even for ten seconds, you gather a small piece of evidence that you can do it and survive. Your brain files that away. Do it again, and you have two pieces of evidence. The reason a confident speaker looks calm is not that they were born calm. It is that they have a deep bank of recent reps to draw on, and their nervous system has learned there is nothing to fear.
The corollary matters just as much: avoidance teaches your brain the opposite. Every time you dodge a chance to speak, you confirm to yourself that speaking is a genuine threat. Reps beat retreat. You do not have to leap onto a stage to start banking those reps, and you should not. You start small.
The Fear Is Normal, and It Is Not the Enemy
The fear of public speaking is one of the most common fears there is. Roughly three in four people report it. That statistic used to feel like bad news to me. Now I read it the other way round: get on top of your fear and you step straight into the top 25 percent of communicators, which is a serious advantage in any career.
I did not always see it that way. My own fear of speaking was real, and it is the reason every framework in this article exists. I did not build the Nano Speech in a seminar. I built it because I needed something simple enough to hold onto when my heart was hammering and my mind had gone blank. The sharpest memory of that fear comes from a university lecture theatre, where the lecturer had a habit of picking on people at random to answer in front of the whole room. I can still feel it: the moment his eyes started scanning the seats, my pulse would spike, my mouth would go dry, and I would silently beg not to be chosen. That is not a character flaw. That is a normal nervous system treating a room full of faces as a social threat.
Reframe Nervous Energy into Fuel
When you feel nervous, your heart rate climbs, your breathing quickens, and your senses sharpen. Notice that this is the exact same physical state as excitement. The body does not have a separate setting for "terrified" and "thrilled." The difference is the label you put on it.
So change the label. Instead of "I am nervous," tell yourself "I am energised and ready." That is not a positive thinking trick you have to believe. It is an accurate description of what is happening: your body is preparing you to deliver at your best. Once you stop fighting the feeling and start using it, that same energy powers a clearer, more engaged delivery.
Climb the Public Speaking Ladder, One Rung at a Time
You would not learn to swim by jumping off the high board. Yet the standard advice for nervous speakers is to "throw yourself in the deep end," which is exactly how people end up with a bad experience that sets them back months. I think about progress as a ladder with five levels, and the rule is simple: you climb it one rung at a time, and you cannot skip.
Level 1: "I won't speak in public." The fear stops you before you start.
Level 2: "I have a fear of public speaking." You are willing, but anxious.
Level 3: "I can do it, but it is stressful."
Level 4: "I am a confident speaker."
Level 5: "I am a competent speaker." Delivery starts to feel effortless.
The point of the ladder is that you do not need to become a Level 5 keynote speaker to feel confident. You need to move up one rung from wherever you are standing. If you are at Level 2, your job this month is not to give a TED talk. It is to reach Level 3.
Start with Low Pressure Reps
The fastest way up the first few rungs is to speak where a mistake costs you nothing. You do not need a stage or a formal audience. You need situations where you get the reps without the pressure environment that makes speaking feel so different from ordinary conversation. Because that is all public speaking really is: a conversation, without the pressure cooker.
A few reps you can bank this week:
Share a single idea out loud in a team meeting rather than typing it in the chat.
Offer a short toast at a family gathering.
Order your coffee by describing it, not just pointing at the menu.
Record a 30-second video to camera and post it.
Each one builds familiarity, and familiarity quietly dismantles the fear. If your anxiety runs deeper than everyday nerves, it is worth working through where public speaking anxiety comes from before you scale up, so you are climbing on solid footing.
A Sensible Order to Build In
If you want a clear sequence, build in these stages and do not rush them:
Speak to yourself, out loud. Not silently in your head. Real public speaking needs an audience of at least one, and that one can be you. This is where you notice your pacing and clarity.
Speak to one trusted person. Share a story or an insight and focus on communicating, not performing.
Speak to a small group. Deliver something short and structured.
Step into public settings with prepared content and a real audience.
Each stage earns you the confidence to attempt the next. This is the difference between comfortable, confident and competent: you get comfortable first, and the rest follows.
Use the Nano Speech So You Never Go Blank
The single biggest hurdle for a beginner is not fear. It is not knowing what to say, and in what order. Give someone a structure and half the fear evaporates, because the fear of going blank has nowhere to live.
The Nano Speech is the only structure I use, and it works at any length, from a ten second answer to an hour long keynote. It has three parts.
Open. Hook the audience with a question, a short story or a surprising fact. Never open with an agenda. An agenda gives the audience permission to think about something else.
Body. Deliver your main point in one single sentence, then back it up with a story, some data or an example. If you cannot say your point in one sentence, you are not clear enough on it yourself yet.
Close. Finish on an action or a question worth chewing on. Not a summary. A repeat of what you just said wastes the most valuable moment you have.
Why This Builds Confidence Fast
Because the shape never changes, every conversation you have counts as relevant practice. When you order a coffee using open, body, close, you are rehearsing the exact structure you will use on a stage. That is why the reps stack up so quickly. Start in small chats, bank the successful reps, then scale up to longer pieces, bigger rooms and newer topics using the identical framework. The Nano Speech is both the easy way to start and the way to grow.
Prepare Your Ideas, Not a Script
Preparation matters. Memorising, on the other hand, is the trap that catches almost every beginner. I learned this the hard way once by scripting a speech word for word, forgetting a single line, and finding I could not recover, because I had memorised words instead of understanding ideas. A memorised speech is fragile: lose one line and the whole thing wobbles.
Prepare like this instead:
Pin down your core message. One idea the audience should leave with. Just one.
Outline your Nano Speech. A few bullet points for the open, body and close is enough to guide you.
Rehearse out loud, with your gestures. Speak as though the audience is in the room, not as though you are proofreading.
Prepared this way, you keep the clarity of a structured speech but stay flexible enough to adapt if something shifts on the day. And do not rehearse too much. A frantic final run through on the morning of the speech does more harm than good. When you have very little time to prepare, this outline first method is also the fastest way to get ready without spiralling.
Breathe When Your Body Panics
Shallow, rapid breathing is one of the first physical signs of fear, and it feeds back into the anxiety: your body reads the shallow breath as confirmation that something is wrong. Controlling your breath is the quickest way to break that loop, because it is one of the few automatic responses you can consciously override.
Box Breathing
Run this in the moments before you speak, when you feel the nerves starting to run away with you:
Breathe in for four seconds.
Hold for four seconds.
Breathe out for six seconds.
Two or three cycles is enough to steady your voice and sharpen your focus. If the panic hits mid speech, use a faster version: in for two, hold for two, out for two. That is a six second intentional pause that reads to the audience as poise, not as a stumble. They cannot see you breathing. They just see a speaker who is comfortable taking a beat.
Handle Mistakes Without Losing Your Nerve
Mistakes are not the enemy of confidence. How you talk to yourself about them is. Aim for recovery, not perfection. The best speakers are not the ones who never slip; they are the ones who slip and carry on so smoothly that the audience never notices.
After each time you speak, run three questions:
What went well?
What did I learn?
What will I do differently next time?
The order is deliberate. You start with what went well, because those wins are the reps you are trying to bank. Here is the rule I hold myself to: if you would not give that harsh, nit picking feedback to a friend who had just spoken, do not give it to yourself. Reflect like a coach, not a critic. Done that way, reflection becomes a loop that compounds your confidence instead of eroding it.
Common Beginner Hurdles, Solved
The Fear of Being Judged
Worrying what people think is the most common fear of all, and it lives entirely in self focus. The way out is to turn your attention outward. Stop asking "am I doing this right?" and start asking "how do I make this useful for them?" Once your attention is on serving the audience, there is very little left over to spend on worrying about yourself. Lead with a topic you know well, so your authority comes from the content, and lean on the Nano Speech so you always know your next move.
Going Blank Mid Speech
This is exactly what structure protects you against. Outline your Nano Speech in bullets rather than a script, highlight the key stories that double as memory triggers, and rehearse the transitions between sections until they run on their own. If you do lose your place, a short pause and a glance at your framework gets you back. You are never relying on memorising every word, so there is far less to lose.
Filler Words
"Um," "like," "you know" and "so" tend to slip out while your brain hunts for the next word, and too many of them chip away at how clear and confident you sound. They cluster in three moments: when you are unsure what comes next, when your speech has no structure, and when anxiety has you overthinking mid sentence. All three shrink when you use the Nano Speech, because each section tells you what comes next. Beyond that, do two things: pause instead of filling, since silence beats an "um" and gives the audience a moment to absorb your point, and slow your pace, because speaking too fast pushes the fillers out.
If a presentation has genuinely gone wrong and knocked your confidence, that is recoverable too. It is worth knowing how to rebuild after a bad presentation so one rough experience does not become a lasting fear.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to feel confident speaking in public?
There is no fixed timeline, because it depends entirely on your reps, not the calendar. Someone who speaks up in one small setting every day will build confidence far faster than someone who gives one big talk a year, even though the second person is technically doing "more" speaking. Think in reps, not weeks. Confidence tends to be recent: a run of small wins in the last fortnight does more for your nerves than an impressive talk you gave two years ago, which is why consistency beats intensity.
Should I record myself to improve?
Not while you are still building your confidence. Recording and rewatching tends to backfire for beginners, because you scrutinise every flaw and feed the very self focus you are trying to escape. Recording is a useful tool later, once you are comfortable and want to refine specific mechanics. Early on, keep your attention on the audience and on banking reps, not on reviewing footage of yourself.
What if my mind goes completely blank and I panic?
Two moves, in order. First, breathe: a single round of the fast box breathing, in for two, hold for two, out for two, buys you a calm six seconds without the audience noticing anything is wrong. Second, look at your Nano Speech outline and find the next section. Because your notes are a handful of bullets rather than a full script, you only need to locate roughly where you are, not the exact sentence you lost. Structure turns a blank moment into a brief pause instead of a collapse.
Do I need a big audience to practise?
No, and chasing one early is a mistake. An audience of one, including yourself, is enough to make it real practice. The skill you are building, holding a clear structure while managing your nerves, is identical whether you are speaking to one person or a hundred. Bigger audiences change the stakes, not the technique, so build the technique where the stakes are low and scale the audience later.
Is public speaking really just the same as a normal conversation?
Largely, yes. The mechanics of making a point clearly, telling a story and reading your listener are the same in a chat over coffee as they are on a stage. What changes is the environment: an audience, a spotlight and a sense of formality turn an ordinary conversation into a pressure cooker. Most of learning to speak confidently is learning to keep doing the ordinary thing you already do every day, even once the pressure cooker is switched on.
TL;DR: How to Speak Confidently in Public
Confidence is success remembered. It is built rep by rep, not summoned before you start. Speak in small settings first and let the proof stack up.
Reframe the nerves. A racing heart and shallow breath are your body preparing you to perform, not a warning to run. Relabel that feeling as energy.
Use the Nano Speech. Open with a hook, deliver one clear point in the body, close on an action. The same shape works for a coffee order and a keynote.
Prepare ideas, not a script. Memorising word for word is the trap that makes beginners freeze. Outline your open, body and close, then rehearse out loud.
Climb the ladder. Move up one rung at a time, from "I won't speak" to "I am a confident speaker." You cannot skip rungs, and you do not need to.
More From Liam Sandford
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