Reframe the physical sensation of nerves as excitement rather than trying to calm down, since the body cannot easily tell the difference and calming rarely works under adrenaline. Memorise your first line exactly so you are not composing sentences while most nervous. Rehearse standing up and out loud. Common advice about imagining the audience naked does nothing because it does not address why you are actually afraid.
Imagining the audience in their underwear, or "just being yourself", or being told to "relax" are the three pieces of advice almost everyone has heard and almost nobody has found useful. They fail for the same reason: they do not address what you are actually afraid of, which is usually being judged for the content of what you are saying, not the fact of standing up.
Telling a nervous person to relax also asks them to fight the adrenaline already in their system, which is a losing battle in the minutes before speaking. The more workable move is not to fight the physical state but to relabel it, because your body produces almost the same chemical signature for fear and for excitement, and which one you experience depends partly on what you tell yourself it is.
Telling yourself you are calm asks your body to do something it is not currently doing, which is a hard sell mid-adrenaline. Telling yourself you are excited asks it to reinterpret a state it is already in, which is a much smaller and more believable claim, and tends to land.
Nerves peak in the run-up and the opening, then usually fall once you are a minute or two in and have evidence that the room has not turned on you. That means the part of the talk you most need to protect from your own nervous system is the beginning — exactly where composing fresh sentences is hardest.
Memorise your opening line or two word for word, so you are retrieving something already built rather than constructing it live while your hands are shaking. This is not about the whole talk being scripted — most of it should not be — it is about removing the one decision you are least equipped to make well in the first thirty seconds.
Reading notes silently at a desk trains a completely different skill from standing and speaking aloud to a room. Nerves are partly a mismatch between what your body has practised and what it is being asked to do live — if you have only ever rehearsed sitting down and quietly, standing up and speaking out loud is a new and unfamiliar task on the day itself.
Rehearse standing, at the volume and pace you will actually use, ideally in front of at least one other person or a camera. This surfaces the physical habits — pacing, filler words, where you actually stumble — that silent reading hides completely, and it means the day of the talk is not the first time your body has done the thing you are asking it to do.
Not mouthing the words while seated. The physical act of projecting your voice while standing is part of what you are training.
Being watched, even by one friendly person, reintroduces some of the pressure you will feel on the day, which rehearsing alone cannot.
It carries the most nervous weight and is where you have the least spare attention to improvise.
A shaking hand holding a page of notes is far more visible than a shaking hand holding nothing, so put notes on a lectern or table rather than carrying them loose. A voice that wavers usually steadies if you deliberately slow down, because most vocal shake is partly a symptom of speaking faster than your breath supports.
Some people manage genuinely severe performance anxiety with medication such as beta-blockers, prescribed and monitored by a doctor for that specific purpose. That is a medical decision between a patient and a clinician, not a public-speaking tip, and it is worth naming honestly rather than pretending breathing exercises are a substitute for a real anxiety disorder.
It also helps to accept that some visible nervousness is not the disaster it feels like from the inside. Audiences generally read a slightly nervous but genuine speaker as sincere, and a speaker straining to appear falsely confident as much harder to trust once that confidence cracks, which it usually does somewhere.
Experienced speakers commonly report still feeling nervous before talks they have given many times before. What changes with experience is not the absence of the feeling but a working relationship with it — knowing that the feeling passes, that it has passed every previous time, and that it is not a reliable predictor of how the talk will go.
The goal worth aiming for is not eliminating nerves but no longer needing them gone in order to perform. That is a more realistic target than the one most advice implicitly promises, and it is the one that people who speak often actually report reaching.
Many report the feeling never fully disappears, even after years of regular speaking, but they stop being thrown by it. The change is in how much the nerves interfere, not in whether they occur at all.
It helps with a dry mouth, which nerves genuinely cause, and it gives you a natural, unhurried pause if you need one. It does nothing for the underlying anxiety itself, so treat it as a small physical tool rather than a fix.
Mild nervousness is usually invisible or reads as sincerity. It only becomes a problem for the audience when it causes you to speed up so much that words become hard to follow, which is exactly why deliberately slowing down helps both the shaking voice and the audience.
A brief, genuine mention can build warmth, but only once, and only if it is true rather than performed modesty. Repeating it, or apologising for nerves throughout, asks the audience to manage your feelings instead of listening to your idea.