I was being interviewed a few years ago about speaking and communication.
At one point I was demonstrating something.
Do this with your hands.
Use your voice like this.
Bring your body into it.
Put the pieces together.
And then I stopped.
Because a question suddenly occurred to me.
Who actually teaches you this stuff?
Seriously.
Where are you supposed to learn how to stand in front of a group of people and communicate an idea well?
School?
Not really.
You might have been made to give a speech. That doesn’t mean anybody taught you how to give one.
University?
Again, probably not.
You can spend years becoming an accountant, engineer, lawyer, consultant, doctor or executive and become extraordinarily good at what you do.
You can spend tens of thousands of dollars on an MBA.
And somewhere along the way somebody will turn around and say:
“Great. We’d like you to present this to the board.”
Off you go.
Apparently you’re supposed to know how.
So where do we learn?
Usually, we look around.
We watch our boss.
We watch the CEO.
We watch somebody at a conference.
We sit through presentations inside our industry.
And gradually we develop an idea of what a presentation is supposed to look like.
That makes perfect sense.
If nobody teaches you, what else are you going to do?
The problem is that nobody stops to ask whether the people you’re copying are actually any good at it.
Someone stands at the front.
There are some slides.
There are some bullet points.
They talk through them.
Nobody dies.
Presentation complete.
And because we see that format over and over again, eventually it becomes normal.
But normal and effective are not necessarily the same thing.
Being senior doesn’t automatically make you a great speaker
I’ve worked with some incredibly capable senior leaders.
People who know their industries inside out.
People responsible for enormous teams, significant decisions and serious amounts of money.
And yet somewhere in their career progression, communication quietly became part of the job without anyone necessarily teaching them how to do it.
The higher they went, the more they were expected to speak.
Team meetings.
Board presentations.
Conferences.
Sales pitches.
Leadership updates.
Change communication.
But becoming more senior doesn’t magically download presentation skills into your brain.
You can be brilliant at your job and still never have been taught how to hold a room.
And I think that matters because people often diagnose the problem incorrectly.
They say:
“I’m not confident.”
“I hate public speaking.”
“I’m just not very good at presentations.”
Maybe.
But maybe nobody ever taught you.
Confidence is sometimes a skills problem wearing a different hat
If I handed you a guitar, put you in front of 500 people and told you to play something, you’d probably feel pretty uncomfortable.
I wouldn’t immediately conclude that you had a confidence problem.
I’d probably conclude that you needed to learn how to play the guitar.
Speaking isn’t quite that simple, obviously, but the principle matters.
There are learnable skills involved.
How do you structure an idea?
How do you open?
How do you tell a story without making the story entirely about you?
What do you do with your hands?
What does your voice do?
When should you move?
When should you stop moving?
How do you use silence?
How do you make eye contact without doing that slightly terrifying thing where somebody stares intensely at one person for 12 seconds?
How do you know your material well enough that half your brain isn’t screaming:
What comes next?
These are skills.
And when you start developing them, something interesting happens.
You become more comfortable.
And when you become more comfortable, you start looking more confident.
Not because somebody told you to stand in a “confident pose.”
Because you actually know what you’re doing.
Preparation creates presence
One of the biggest differences I notice between somebody who is genuinely present with an audience and somebody who isn’t is what’s happening inside their head.
You can physically be standing in front of a room while mentally being somewhere completely different.
What’s my next point?
Did I miss something?
Where am I in my notes?
What slide comes next?
You’re talking to the audience, but you’re not really with them.
And audiences feel that.
This is why preparation matters so much.
Not because I want somebody to memorise a presentation word for word and deliver it like a robot.
Almost the opposite.
You prepare until you know the content well enough that you can stop thinking about yourself.
Now you can actually pay attention to the people in front of you.
You can see whether they’re with you.
You can pause.
You can respond.
You can change pace.
You can let a moment breathe.
That is presence.
And presence gives you power.
Raise the standard you’re learning from
There’s another consequence of learning purely by observation.
Your idea of “good” is heavily influenced by what you’ve been exposed to.
If every presentation you’ve ever seen looks broadly the same, that becomes the bar.
This is one of the reasons I encourage people to watch great speakers outside their organisation and outside their industry.
Sometimes outside their country.
Not so you can copy them.
Definitely not so every Kiwi executive suddenly walks onto stage yelling, “WHAT’S UP, DETROIT?”
Please don’t.
But because exposure expands your idea of what is possible.
Listen to the voice.
Watch the movement.
Notice the pauses.
Watch how stories are used.
Notice how much of what looks effortless has clearly been practised.
Then take the things that work and find your version of them.
Because there’s a big difference between:
“I’m about as good as everyone else around here.”
and:
“I’m becoming as good as I’m capable of being.”
Maybe you’re not a bad speaker
Maybe you’re simply doing something that nobody ever properly taught you how to do.
That’s a much more useful starting point.
Because “I’m just a bad public speaker” sounds like an identity.
And identities can feel pretty permanent.
But:
“There are some skills here I haven’t learnt yet.”
That gives us somewhere to go.
You can learn structure.
You can learn storytelling.
You can learn how to use your body and your voice.
You can learn how to prepare properly.
You can learn how to become comfortable enough that confidence stops being something you’re trying to manufacture.
And perhaps the strangest thing about all of this is that we expect people to know it already.
We promote them.
We put them in front of teams.
We ask them to lead change.
We ask them to pitch ideas.
We ask them to inspire people.
Then we hand them a PowerPoint deck and send them on their way.
So I keep coming back to that question I asked in the interview all those years ago:
Who teaches you this?
Because if the answer is “nobody,” maybe struggling with it shouldn’t come as such a surprise.
