Conquer Your Nerves & Unleashing Your Stage Presence

n this episode, we chat about a common challenge faced by speakers at all levels: nerves. 

Join hosts Dixie and Brad as they share personal experiences and effective strategies to stay calm, grounded, and confident on stage. From pre-stage rituals and handling interruptions to priming your audience and leveraging PowerPoint, learn how to turn nerves into an advantage and deliver impactful presentations. 

Plus, discover insights on post-stage routines and audience engagement. Tune in for an enriching discussion that will boost your speaking prowess!

The Expert’s Journey podcast is dedicated to empowering authors, content creators, experts and professional speakers worldwide.

Join hosts Brad Hauck, author of AI Powered Profits: Use AI to Automate & Accelerate Your Business in 90 Days, and Dixie Carlton, author of Start With the Draft: How to Easily Plan and Write a Non-Fiction Book, as they share practical insights to elevate your speaking career.

Each episode delivers actionable strategies to grow your audience, sharpen your skills, and increase your impact through speaking, publishing, and smart marketing.

Whether you're looking to boost your influence or explore new ways to share your expertise, The Expert’s Journey gives you the tools and direction to succeed.

Transcript

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Welcome to the Experts Journey Podcast where we're all about creating your path to impact. Join your hosts, Dixie, Mary Carlton from Indie Experts Publishing, and Mr. Web Marketing, Brad Howe, as we look at how you can grow your business and influence by leveraging your knowledge for profit. Welcome back to the Experts Journey Podcast. In this episode, we're talking about something that every speaker faces, nerves. Whether you're stepping on stage for the first time or the hundredth, the pressure to perform can shake your confidence. But nerves don't have to stop you from making an impact. We're going to talk about how to stay calm, stay grounded, and own your stage without losing your personality or your power. Good morning, Dixie. Good morning, Brad. How are you going today? I'm going very well, thank you. So you don't own your nerves, I suppose is the best way to put it. You need to own yourself almost sometimes to get on stage. It's a big deal for new speakers when they first start out. 99% of people that I've talked to are scared stiff when they've got to step on stage. And I know for myself, when I spoke the first time on a stage as a speaker, it was quite a large conference, actually, and there were some really big name speakers also speaking. And it was a local conference. I was one of the business owners and I'd done a few little speeches, but they asked me would I step up and speak on that day and do a full 45 minutes. And it was really quite nerve wracking. So there's a lot of things that we need to consider here, but the first thing is, are nerves normal? Oh, God, yes. I can hear everybody in the car listening to this playing. Oh, God, yeah. Yes. We all know that nerves are real. I remember sitting at a table once, breakfast at a conference, and the famous, amazing, extraordinary Ron Tacky was presenting that morning after breakfast and we were all served our plates and all waiting, I noticed that he barely touched his food. I said to him, do you still get nervous? And he said, the day I stop getting nervous today, I should stop doing this and excuse my accent. But he made a very clear point. If you are not nervous, you are not honoring your audience because you have to be there thinking about what you're about to do. And it's not about whether or not you're nervous and have to take medication for that. It's just a matter of saying, am I well prepared? Do I know what I'm speaking about? Is there anything I want to throw in here? As a bonus point, what am I going to do. If I'm asked a specific question, is there anything that might go wrong? Have I covered all my bases? And you do go through and think that. And the idea of not eating before going on stage for a lot of speakers is a normal thing, you know, that's so dangerous. I would have brain fog if I didn't actually think about what I was eating first and depending on how soon after I was going to be eating. But I would be very similar not diving into the big buffet breakfast right before going on stage. It affects the way you think. Yeah, See, I'm the other way. I find that I need to eat because otherwise I will. You know, I'm a big person and I will run out of energy on stage. So I always do eat, but I tend to eat, you know, I won't eat bread and things like that. I'll eat fruit and the meat and eggs and things like that. So I suppose I kind of pick what I eat. But I. Yeah, I always eat before I go on stage. And I don't get nervous as such. I get a little bit of butterflies, which I suppose people would say is nerves in the minutes leading up to getting on stage. But the absolute minute that I step out and I say my first sentence, it's all gone. Yeah, I think it's like. I don't know why I do that, but it's always the same. It's always this slight bit of, you know, adrenaline, more than nerves, I think is probably the best way to put it. It's the adrenaline in my body. But as soon as I hit that stage, I'm home. I know where I am and I absolutely love every minute of it. But one thing that happens to me that's really weird is my ears block up. So, you know how. I don't know if you get this, but when I'm dehydrated, my ears block up. And it's one of those things I know straight away if I haven't had enough water that day. But for some reason, every time I get up to go on stage, I've got to make sure that I have quite a lot of water before I get on stage. And I've got to have water on stage as well because I can hear myself talking inside my ears. It drives me nuts. But it's just this weird thing that my body does. I don't know why. Maybe I drink too much coffee or that. It's like I've done everything. It makes no difference. Every time I've got to make sure I stay super hydrated before I hit the stage. Oh, that is funny. Yes. No, I haven't heard that one before. And no, I don't get a lot of. I know a lot of people worry about whether or not they've had too much fluids and that they're gonna, you know, get halfway through the hour or so that's presenting and suddenly realize they need to pee. That's a big thing with some people. So, you know, you do go through your prep. So let's talk about the prep. Before you get on stage, you'll think about what you eat. So you won't necessarily eat what you normally might tuck into for whatever the meal is. You might eat a little bit. Enough, you know, extra protein, enough to keep your brain going without sort of having your energy levels go up or down too much. You'll go to the bathroom, you do your wardrobe check. And, you know, many of us have had wardrobe malfunctions on stage. So, you know that you can only do so much. But you'll do your wardrobe check, you'll do your. For the girls, we'll go and make sure our lipstick, you know, the right, you know, not sort of brushed up on our teeth and things like that. We'll make sure that our microphones are ready and that we are connected in with the sound guy or the tech guy who's going to make sure that everything flows off stage. So there's all of those things that you do. But I think when, as you say, you get to the point where you then have that anticipation, that adrenaline that starts to build, and then you step on stage and if you know what you're doing and you know you're ready for this, then everything just kicks in and you are home, you are ready, so you can deal with whatever then comes up because you're a professional. You've been doing this for years and you know how to do this. I, however, sat next to a woman at breakfast at a big international conference a few years ago. It was a professional speakers conference. And this woman was the. I think she was the closing keynote for the Sunday morning. She was absolutely extraordinary. I won't tell you what her topic was because that will give away who she was, but she got up on stage and she talked about what she does as a leadership specialist. But she came from a background of very high energy, very high risk. Sports, we'll call it sports. And so she was someone who knew absolutely what it was like to live at the very edge of high focus, intense discipline and mastery. When she finished and she was extraordinary. When she finished, she got a standing ovation that went on and on and on. We all just loved her. And she got off stage and I happened to be the person who was sitting next to her. And she came off stage and she grabbed my hand. We were all still standing, grabs my hand. And she said, oh my God, is that all right? And I remember thinking, yeah, yeah, seriously. And then we sat down after Swisden and we're still sitting with coffee and iced tea. Were you really nervous? And she said, oh my God. She said, I am always standing there with my heart in my mouth wondering if I'm going to get through it. And she said, I've never been able to lose the nerves. And I said, but you are extraordinary. Look at the life you live and the things you do. And she never makes any difference. I'm not nervous doing that, but I'm always nervous doing this. And she said, I'm always self doubt. Yeah, it was extraordinary. I think, like, you know, we talk about the practices that we do before we go on stage and it raises a really interesting point with me and you talk about sports people, people too, is that some people have these routines that they do and they can't get on stage if they don't do the routine. And that can be really dangerous. You know, you've got to have the right socks or you got to, you know, do certain things. So, you know, for me personally, I tend generally if I'm speaking, I wake up early and I go for a walk. Especially if I'm in another city, I'll always go for a walk and then I'll come back and shower and I'll have breakfast and, you know, go about my day the way I would normally do it. And the reason I do my walk is because I'm awake early and I will always walk every day anyway. So I think you've got to be really careful that it doesn't become this, this habit that you have to do. Because if things don't work out right, and they often don't, if you can't follow your routine, it's going to make it very difficult for you to get on stage. It needs to be something that you can, if you know your content, you should be almost able to. If someone walks in a room, says we need a speaker, you should be able to get up and actually walk on stage and speak. Now some people would say that's impossible for them and I understand that. But for anyone who's been speaking for a while, that shouldn't be Too difficult. As long as you can come up with something in your head you're going to talk about and then run from there. I also find, like what you were talking about with that speaker, where they come off stage and they say, how was that? I mean, honestly, I do that every time because often the way I speak, I give quite a lot of information because I'm talking about technical stuff or whatever and people are making notes. And so I'm not getting a lot of feedback from the floor. And so I don't know how I'm going. And that can be quite nerve wracking. When you're looking around the room, you're kind of trying to find a smile to settle your own nerves on stage and to assure you that you're on the right track. And yet at the end, people come up and say, oh, that was great. I took these notes, I want to discuss this with you. And that's so confusing to me, but I understand it. I know that that's what happens. And even where I used to put like say a thousand bullet points that I'm going to talk about in a speech and I cut it right back to say 10. It didn't make any difference because I still seemed to be delivering information in a way that people wanted to take notes. So, yeah, everybody faces nerves in different ways, but we're also affected in different ways by what's going on in the room at the same time, not just what's going on in our heads. Yes. And I think that comes down to one thing we need to do is always remain fully present on stage. So even if we're sitting there in our heads and second guessing whatever we think is coming out of our mouth and whether it's coming out right, we have to move past that, but we have to stay present. We can't be sort of half pie thinking about, you know, whether or not the car's going to, you know, being pounded if you didn't pay the right level of parking fees or something, you know, you can't have like little worry things coming in at you from left field that are completely irrelevant. You have to stay centered and you have to stay present. One of the things that when I mentioned Ron Tacky before, I learned from him a really good chip years ago, he said, because he'd used me as a particular, the benchmark person in this particular situation. And he said he always finds one person, preferably two, who he can lock in on. And he said they're usually the person in the audience too. You can see by the way, they have very expressive faces or they have very expressive body language. And apparently I do that. And he said, I always lock in on one or two of those people and I will look at what they are doing, I will look at whether they are wandering off. I will look at whether they are starting to pay attention to something else going on in the room. And he said, if I can see that person sitting there, you know, folding their arms or unfolding their arms or taking notes or nodding occasionally, then he said, I will know that I'm okay if that person every time I find. And it won't be someone that I know. He said, it'll always be someone I've never met before. I need to lock in on that person. And that will get me through absolutely without worrying about whether or not I'm hitting the right mark. And I thought that was always good advice. Yeah, I think when you have those rituals, you have those routines, you have those things that, you know you do. And for me, one of those things is who's the person in the audience that I can be watching to see how they are perceiving what I'm doing. That's one of my routines. But the other one is to do some heavy, some deep breathing and shake out the arms and the end of my arm, take the four breaths and hold the breath and take the breath out slowly and just center myself and stand in the right position. While I'm waiting to go on stage, I'll do these little things that no one would necessarily know, that I'm just taking some deep breaths and calming myself and adjusting my posture and looking at the audience. Those are the sort of things that you can do that you can count off in your head as part of my routine of going on stage and know that, yes, I've done this, I've done this. Now I'm doing this. Now I'm ready. And you time it, you know, like this is a 30 second ritual or one minute ritual. Yeah, look, that's a great idea. And it actually, you know, you've got your before you go on stage sort of ritual that you do. And, you know, we all have our little things that we kind of, you know, do. For example, I'll have a glass of water and I'll breathe and those sorts of things. And you know, jump up and down, loosen up, you know, do the old boxer thing. But you know, also one of the things that I've seen that really can throw people and put them like really on edge is if they get an interruption when they're on stage. So for me, as you know, I'm a firefighter. I'm on call 24 hours a day. I've got to make sure I turn my phone off, because otherwise I can sometimes get a page when I'm on stage. And it's. It's happened. Luckily, it was only during training sessions. So I just kind of laughed and everybody laughed, you know, because it worked the whole room up. I'm like, oh, we're all awake now, aren't we? But I will turn my phone off when I'm actually on stage. You know, keynoting or speed speaking. So that's, you know, recovering from that can be really difficult. And if you're in the middle of a speech and the fire alarm goes off, or someone comes in the room late and makes a loud noise or, you know, knocks a glass over, whatever you can, it can interrupt that whole flow. And what I've seen is people have a very hard time picking up where they left off. So one of the reasons I use PowerPoint for when I'm on stage is because I have all my cues on my PowerPoint. I might only have 10 or 15 slides, and they might only have pictures and a sentence or something like that. Not lots of information. I just don't do that. I practice until I can get rid of all the information off the slides. But if I get interrupted on stage, I can look at my PowerPoint and get my prompt, or I can jump to the next slide rather than trying to go backwards. And that will lead me automatically in because I will have practiced my speech so many times. And practice also helps drop your sense of nerves and all those things, because you've been through it, you're comfortable with the content, you're comfortable with what's coming up next. And therefore, if you do get interrupted, you jump to the next slide, your brain clicks into place, and off you go again. Yes, it's really important to think about what you do when something goes wrong. I have a friend who literally fell off the stage. One walked too far and went off, off he went. And, you know, he raised his hand and said, hey, it's all good. And he was a bit of a comedian anyway, so he was able to sort of COVID that with a good deal of laughter and bring the audience along with him. But I've also seen speakers freeze on stage and you know how duck they get. One of the things that I always found useful, I do use PowerPoint. I don't particularly like PowerPoint, but I do use PowerPoint because it's a good way of guiding the process of what I'm going to say. But if I didn't have PowerPoint, I've always still got a quadrant in my head on one page of the things that I'm going to go through. So I can always come back to, where was I? Okay, I'm up to number three, I'm up to number four, and I've got that mapped out in my head so that if I have technical issues, it's not going to throw me. Because technical issues used to just purify me. And so not having the PowerPoint work right used to be the big catalyst for me to suddenly shake in my boot. But now I'm so confident of what I'm saying, and I can wing it. And I think this is also something that you grow into as a speaker, you knowing how to interact with the audience. Even if you're doing a keynote, sometimes you want to just turn around and say, you know what, let's try this. Why don't we do this as a quick exercise? Let's check in with each other. So having those little things where you can say, I guess it's like your toolkit, you might have a. Okay, now I'm just going to throw this out to the audience, or now I'm just going to get you guys to do a little bit of work. And you may have additional icebreakers that you might just suddenly throw into the middle of something. So if you've got a problem, for example, where you just. You need to sneeze, you know, you've got something coming up with your throat, or you've got a twitchy contact lens, and you just need to turn around and have a good rub of the eye. You can just turn around and say, hey, I'm just going to get you guys to do some work for a minute. How about we do this. Ask each other this question or. Or think about for a moment, or write these three things down and you rep the audience to take the heat off you for, like, 20 seconds, 10 seconds even, and just deal with whatever you need to do so that they can help you carry through when you have those interruptions that are of your own making. Absolutely. And one of the things that I've noticed that can make people really nervous, and it's a mistake in a way that we do. But what we ask a question, and we get people to work on it, and then we're going to ask someone to give me their answer. And what happens a lot of times is the room Goes silent, and no one wants to put their hands up. And your. Your nerves can go like that because suddenly you're, like, all gored on stuff, you know? So what I tend to do to put little processes in place so that I don't get those nervous bounces on stage is I will. When I set a question, I will then get down and walk around while people are doing that, and I'll look at them writing, or I'll listen to them and say, oh, that's a great point. And I'll go to three or four tables. And what I'm basically doing there is I'm finding people who are writing an answer. Number one. I'm prepping them by saying, oh, that's great. Oh, yes. Yeah, I totally agree with that. Because then when I get up on stage, I can say, okay, does anyone have an answer now? I saw Steve. He had something awesome. What did you have down there, Steve? Can you remind me again? And I. So I don't get stuck in that point of I've got nothing to do now what do I do? Yeah, and get terrified. So there's little things like that that you can learn from watching other people whereby you can prep yourself so you don't get caught in a nervous position where you're not getting any answers, you're not getting any feedback, and then it makes you feel stupid, and then you freeze up because you get scared. And the other thing you can do is you can actually put someone in the audience that you know or say to someone in the audience that you know, I'm going to ask someone to ask this question. I know that you know the answer to this question, but, Brad, would you mind asking this question? Because I want it to carry on in more discussion with other members of the audience. So you prime them and you say, look, you know, I'm going to ask, you know, do you have any questions about this? And this is when I want you to ask that question. Even though I know you know the answer. Absolutely. Yeah. Look, priming the audience is an old one. I mean, it's always been used in showbiz. You see it on television. It's always there. The audience is primed. And I mean, magicians and people like that have been using it for so many years, as we well know. There's a reason for it. It's because it works. Yeah. Probably the last point I wanted to talk about before we finish up is that you need to practice being you on stage. And my way of that is to go through my speech multiple times Some people will try and write a speech and then they'll practice it once and then they want to get up on stage in front of people, and I think that's really dangerous. I think the more you practise a speech, the smoother you get, the less nervous you get, because you know what's going to happen next. Otherwise it's almost. And I've seen people do this and I do it myself, occasionally you turn to the next slide and you look to see what the slide is, because you don't know what the next slide is. And that tells me you haven't practiced enough or that your nerves have exceeded your practice level. Yes, definitely. One more thing I'd like to just comment on before we finish on this topic is that I think as part of your preparation for going on stage, priming an audience member or all of those things that we've talked about in stagecraft, et cetera, I think you also need to know how you are going to finish and what you are going to do immediately after you finish on stage so that you know that someone is going to send people to your table at the back or that they're going to say you are available to have a conversation with over lunch, or, you know, where you're going to go, you know how long you're going to stand in the room and, you know, pack your bits and pieces and still be available to have a conversation with someone, or, you know, whether or not you have to leave the room immediately because there's another speaker on in five minutes. I think you have to make that part of your managing the nerves and managing who you are and being authentic to make sure you are ready for what happens immediately you come off stage and also how you are going to expel that extra energy and that adrenaline that is built up. And that's, I think, also part of the routine that we need to sort of think about. Absolutely. You make a great point. And, like, when you come off stage, things can be really weird sometimes, you know, they can drop into an entirely different topic. You know, you're the speaker now as a networking group, we're going to do tables or something. It's like, yeah, that's done, that's finished, it's all gone. And you're sitting there kind of like, oh, what happens next? Was that worth any effort? You know, did I make an impact? And so definitely having something that you set up with the MC beforehand is worthwhile, because then you feel like, okay, I'll get ready for that and I'll get you know, so there's none of that. Just hanging, wondering what the heck happens now. Yeah, absolutely. That's a great way to segue into finishing this. That was a brilliant question. Yeah. Well, thanks again for joining us on the Experts Journeys podcast. If you learned something useful in this episode, take a second and subscribe. Share it with a fellow expert and leave us a quick review. It really helps us reach more people. And don't forget to check out our Latest books on Amazon.com Dixie Start with the Draft how to Easily Plan and write a Nonfiction book and my AI powered how to use AI to automate and accelerate your business in 90 days. Both are packed with tools to help you grow faster and speak with confidence. Catch you in the next episode. See you then. Thanks, Brad.