open your mouth - part Ⅲ

It’s been over six years since I wrote the first part of this series. In that post, I described public speaking as something that “frightened me,” talked about turning into a ripe tomato when addressing a room, and promised a series documenting my journey.

Then I wrote a Part II that never left draft. The meetup I was preparing for got cancelled. And I just… stopped.

So here’s Part III — not the planned “structure of your talk” post, but an honest look at what actually happened in the years since.

What changed

The short version: I gave talks. Not at the grand meetup I’d been psyching myself up for, but in smaller, less dramatic settings. Weekly demos to my team. Presentations to stakeholders. Knowledge-sharing sessions at work. A few lightning talks at internal events.

None of these felt like “public speaking” at the time. There was no stage, no microphone, no crowd of strangers. But looking back, they were exactly that. I was standing in front of people, explaining something, fielding questions, and surviving. Each time, the tomato-redness faded a little faster.

The advice I gave in Part I turned out to be the only advice that mattered:

Set yourself up for any type of presentation (even if they’re weekly demos to your team/company) — there’s a lot of carryover!

I didn’t follow through on the series. But I did follow through on that.

What I’ve learned

Nerves don’t go away — they transform. I still get nervous before presenting. But it’s shifted from “I’m going to humiliate myself” to “I want this to be good.” That’s a fundamentally different kind of nervous. The first is paralysing. The second is fuel.

Structure matters more than slides. The best presentations I’ve given had few or no slides. What they had was a clear arc: here’s the problem, here’s what I tried, here’s what I learned, here’s what’s next. People follow stories, not bullet points.

Questions are the best part. I used to dread the Q&A. Now it’s my favourite part. Questions mean people were listening. Questions mean engagement. And “I don’t know, but I’ll find out” is a perfectly valid answer that I wish someone had told me was acceptable earlier.

Teaching is learning. This was the insight from Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu that started the whole thing, and it’s held up completely. Every time I explain something to others, I understand it better. Every question someone asks reveals a gap in my understanding that I didn’t know was there. It’s the most efficient learning loop I’ve found.

What I’d tell 2019-me

Stop waiting for the perfect venue. Stop waiting for the perfect topic. Stop waiting for the fear to go away. It won’t. But you’ll get used to it, and then you’ll start to enjoy it, and then you’ll start to seek it out.

The meetup getting cancelled felt like the universe telling me I wasn’t ready. In hindsight, I was. I just needed to start smaller than I’d imagined.

And hey — I eventually wrote Part III. Only took six years.