About 75% of the population fear public speaking.

That’s roughly 3 out of 4 people!

The official term is Glossophobia, which apparently doesn’t mean fear of lip gloss but, translated literally from Greek, means: “fear of the tongue.”

Most people who've given presentations (or even toasts) know the specific squish of anticipatory dread; the terror of watching people watch you, the choking awareness onstage that you have no control over your own somatic responses. It's enough to make you swear off the whole enterprise, if you could.

Patrick Winston (February 5, 1943 – July 19, 2019) was a computer scientist and a celebrated professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who argued that the fear of public speaking stemmed from lacking skills. Anxiety, he believed, could be managed if a person understood the basic ground rules. (This is excellent advice for all aspects of anxiety.)

Every January, for over forty years, Winston gave a talk called “How to Speak.” Students who’d never taken his class began watching the recording online, telling others about it, until it racked up millions of views. All for a lecture on how to give a lecture.

His argument, roughly, is that good speaking is a formula. Knowledge plus practice plus talent, in that order, with talent doing the least amount of work. Which is a relief, if you think about it.

Below, I’m sharing the 1 hour and 3 minute video, and after the jump, I detail the exact techniques he covers, and how to put them into action.

For sensitive viewers: Winston often sounds winded, and for us super anxious folks, that can be hard to manage. (Hence, the transcript after the jump.)