12 Things I Wish I Had Known as an Emerging Speaker

After a coaching session with Ken, the CFO of a multinational company, he asks, "If you could go back and give advice to Peter, the emerging speaker, what would it be?" I give him two or three ideas, and we move on. Yet the question sticks with me. Here, in order, is what I would have told my younger self.

1. It Is Not About You

When you speak to an audience, you are there to be of service to that audience, not to show how much you know. Every decision that follows — what to include, what to cut, how to open, how to close — becomes clearer the moment you accept that your job is to help your audience members, not to impress them.

2. Understand Your Audience Before You Build Anything

Know who is in your audience, what they need to hear, how you want them to feel, and what you want them to do differently after your talk. The more precisely you can answer those four questions, the more obvious it becomes which stories, statistics, and examples belong in your presentation — and which ones quietly need to be cut.

3. Set a Transformation Goal, Not Just an Informational One

Do not ask "what will I cover?" Ask "How will my audience be changed by the time I finish?" Information is what a handout does. Transformation is what a speaker does — and it is the reason your audience came to hear you instead of reading the document.

4. Know Your Single Core Point

Build everything around it. Your message must be specific to this audience, at this moment, for this goal. If you cannot state that point in one sentence before you start writing, the presentation is not ready to be built yet.

5. Use Stories

Use stories. They are engaging, memorable, and irreplaceable. Do not merely tell them. Relive them. Use present tense, dialogue, and vocal variety to bring them to life. Data gives your audience information; stories give them something to feel — and people act on feelings far more often than on facts.

6. Ask Questions

Both actual and rhetorical questions are among the most powerful engagement tools available, yet almost no one uses them enough. A well-placed question pulls your audience from passive listening into active thinking, and the mind that is thinking with you is far harder to lose.

7. Embrace the Pause

Embrace the pause. Silence is not empty; it is powerful. It gives your audience time to absorb what you have said and creates anticipation for what comes next. The pause you find most uncomfortable is almost always the one your audience needs most.

8. Practice Until It Feels Natural; Then Practice More

Record yourself. Review it honestly. Revise. Repeat. The goal is not to memorize; it is to become so familiar with your material that you can stop thinking about what comes next and start paying attention to the people in front of you.

9. Use Slides Effectively or Avoid Them Altogether

Slides are not a teleprompter. They exist to support your point, not replace your preparation. You are the presentation. The slides are optional. When in doubt, cut. A presentation with too few slides has never failed, and a presentation with too many has failed thousands of times.

10. Invest Disproportionate Time in Your Opening and Closing

Know exactly how you will capture attention at the start and leave your audience with something lasting at the end. Audiences remember how you began and how you ended far more vividly than anything in between.

11. Embrace Your Nerves

That adrenaline rush is your body preparing you for something significant. Work with it, not against it. The speakers who appear calmest on stage are rarely the ones who feel calm. They are the ones who have learned to channel the energy rather than suppress it.

12. Hire a Speaking Coach Early

Hire a speaking coach early. You will accelerate your development by years, not months. The blind spots that take most speakers a decade to discover on their own are the ones a coach can name in the first session. You cannot fix what you cannot see.

A year after that coaching session, Ken delivers a keynote to three thousand people at his industry’s annual summit. He picked three items from this list — know your audience, use stories, invest in your opening and closing — and worked them until they became instinct.

These twelve items are not a checklist. They are a trail. Pick one, and work on it until it becomes instinct. Then pick the next.