While this is a site, which tends to give a lot of people, some cause for concern, it's not true that fear of public speaking is greater than fear of dying. That's an urban myth. I tracked it down some years ago. And it was never true. But I do think a lot of people have a deep fear of standing in front of a thing like this. With all those people out there, it's probably a fear of looking foolish.

Losing one's way, making a mistake, appearing ineffective. It's all to do with ego, of course. And if you remember that it's not about you, which we've covered, then that does tend to take away a lot of this because you're there to give a gift to those people. Nevertheless, I do understand that this can make people nervous, and I hope that this chapter is going to gives you all the tools you need to be able to practice, prepare, and deliver, which are the three stages. Wonderful talks. Now I've given talks to anything from 10 people to 15,000 16,000 people, and I don't get nervous anymore.

So a lot of this is about repetition about practice about becoming comfortable with doing a thing. It's like riding a bike, the more you do it, the more confident you become. Nevertheless, even if you don't do it that often, these three things will allow you to do it well. And if you can do something, well, it's far less nerve wracking. If you have to, you know, if somebody said you're on stage in the Royal Albert Hall next week, playing the piano in front of 10,000 people to me I would be extremely nervous because I am not a very good piano player. And I don't have enough time to get good.

They say it takes 10,000 hours or something to become a master Well, what I'm going to give you in this chapter won't require 10,000 hours, a lot of it is simple tips, tricks, things I've learned over the years five TED Talks, hundreds of talks on stages. I'm going to distill all of that into this chapter and give you everything I can that will give you enough to be able to deliver a great talk without necessarily spending $10,000. Of course, if you spend 10,000 hours doing this, you will become an absolute master at it. For now, let's focus on becoming good at it. And if you're already doing it becoming better at it, I hope even for practice to speakers, this chapter is going to be extremely useful. So PPD practice, prepare, deliver