Why most public speaking advice is wrong—and how to finally overcome anxiety

Instead of focusing on the symptoms of speaking, I started to try and figure out what are the root causes that create these symptoms, and can I address those?

When you tap into a certain energy, that creates emotion. If you tap into that emotion, the words come as a natural consequence. Energy leads, emotions follow, and words fill in the gap.

If you don't enjoy speaking, you're doing it wrong. I see enjoyment as a barometer - if I'm doing things right, I'm probably enjoying myself.

The day I understood that speaking was a subconscious flow-oriented process and not a conscious process, completely changed the way I approached it.

Stop focusing as much on what you want to say and focus more on what you want your audience to remember.

You can only remember one thing out of a talk. That one thing is your arrow - literally a single sentence that is the only sentence people would remember if they left your talk.

Your talk is now internalized, not memorized. You have these pillars, you know where you're going and you're ready to perform it.

The "accordion" refers to de Montebello's method of practicing talks by progressively shortening time limits (3 min → 30 sec) then expanding back up.

Instead of preparing our talk by writing, we're going to prepare our talk by speaking, using time constraints going down the accordion to create extreme clarity.

You can't get better at speaking without speaking. Most people tend to do the opposite because it's scary and there aren't many options to practice.

Speaking is not a specialized skill, it's a meta skill. The better you get at speaking, the better your life gets.

People cannot see what you feel, even though it feels that way when you feel really, really strongly. You're just looking like a normal speaker, competent and confident.

"Stay in character" is a public speaking technique meaning don't acknowledge mistakes or show insecurities while presenting, similar to how actors maintain their roles.

Stay in character from beginning all the way through past the ending. The worse it gets, the more I'll say, just stay in it.