How to improve public speaking skills (with 5 tips from experts)

TL;DR

To improve public speaking skills, treat it as a skill you train rather than a talent you are born with: practice in conditions close to the real thing, record yourself and watch it back, ask a few people for honest feedback, and repeat that loop often enough that the nerves stop running the show. Get those reps wherever you can and move up as each setting gets comfortable, starting alone at home, then with a friend or a small group, then in everyday moments like meetings and toasts, then at a club or class, and on your own with a public speaking app. Then work on five specific techniques inside that practice: open with a hook, control your pace and use pauses, speak from something you care about, lead with warmth before competence, and vary your pitch and volume.

You have probably read a list of speaking tips before, maybe several. And the next time you stood up to talk, most of what you read was gone.

That gap between knowing and doing is the real problem. Most advice hands you a list of things good speakers do and stops there, which leaves you with information you never turn into a habit. Reading about how to ride a bike has never taught anyone to ride one, and speaking works the same way. So before getting to the specific techniques, it helps to be clear on how the skill actually develops, and where you can go to practice it.

How to improve public speaking skills

The honest answer is that you improve at public speaking the way you improve at anything physical and repeatable: through structured practice with feedback, repeated over time. Matt Abrahams, who lectures on communication at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, describes the process in three parts:

"We must take the time to dedicate to this improvement through repetition, reflection and feedback."

Those three parts give you a loop you can run again and again. The sections below break it into moves you can start this week.

Treat it as a skill, not a fixed talent

Some people do seem to be born comfortable in front of a room, but comfort is not the same as competence, and competence is trainable. Psychologist Anders Ericsson's research on deliberate practice showed that expert performance across fields grows from focused, repeated effort aimed at specific weaknesses, not from raw talent or time served. For speaking, that means choosing one thing to work on at a time rather than trying to fix everything at once.

Practice in conditions close to the real thing

Rehearsing a talk silently in your head is the most common form of practice and one of the least useful. The skill you want is speaking out loud, on your feet, with something at stake, so your practice should look like that too. The effect is strong enough that even simulated audiences help: in a 2023 study, people who rehearsed in virtual reality improved their real-life performance, because the practice was close enough to the real situation to carry over. If you do not have access to a real audience, stand up, speak the whole thing aloud, and imagine the room.

Record yourself and watch it back

Reflection is hard to do from memory, because how a talk felt rarely matches how it landed. Recording solves that. Film a few minutes on your phone and watch it once for content, then a second time with the sound off to see your body language, then a third time listening only to your voice. This is roughly the method Abrahams has his own students use, and it surfaces habits you would never catch in the moment.

Watching yourself back works, but it is slow and easy to misjudge. RiseGuide's Speech Analyzer reviews a recording of you speaking and points out where your pacing, filler words, and clarity slip, so your practice time goes toward fixing the right things.

Ask for honest feedback

Your own review only goes so far, since you cannot hear yourself the way an audience does. Ask one or two people you trust to watch you and tell you the single thing that would most improve the talk. A specific question gets you a useful answer, where "how was it?" tends to get you a polite one.

Repeat the loop in real situations

Each pass through practice, review, and feedback makes the next talk a little easier. The point is to keep the loop turning in settings that count, starting small and working up. A question raised in a meeting, a toast, a short update to your team, each one is a chance to run the cycle again.

Keeping that loop going on your own is the part most people drop, usually because there is no structure holding it together. RiseGuide's Communication Mastery journey turns this kind of practice into 15-minute daily lessons with exercises and feedback built in, so the habit has something to hang on.

Where to practice public speaking

The loop only works if you actually get reps, and that is where most people stall: real chances to speak to a room feel rare, so the practice never starts. It helps to know that you can get most of your reps on your own, in ordinary settings, well before you are on a stage. What makes them pay off is aiming each one at a specific weakness and raising the pressure gradually as each setting gets comfortable. Tim Ferriss uses the same logic when he prepares for a big talk:

"Mimic game-day conditions as much as possible… I don't want my first rehearsal in front of a large group of strangers to be when I stand up in front of 3,000 people."

The settings below run roughly from lowest pressure to highest. Start wherever feels manageable and move up.

At home, on your own

The lowest-pressure place to practice public speaking is at home, alone. Say the whole thing out loud, standing up, the way you would in the room, rather than reading it over in your head. Talk it through to the wall, record a voice memo and play it back, or prop your phone up as a camera. Home is where reps are effectively free and unlimited, and reps are what eventually make a talk feel easy. Carmine Gallo, who studied hundreds of the most-watched TED talks, points to how far the best speakers take that:

"[B]rain researcher, Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor, told me she rehearsed her TED Talk not once or twice, or even ten times. She practiced it 200 times."

You will not need 200 run-throughs, but the direction is right: practice more often than feels necessary, spread across days rather than saved for the night before.

With a friend or a small group

Once the words are steady, add a couple of listeners. A small audience is safe enough to relax into and real enough to change how you sound, and it gives you the one thing solo practice cannot: an outside read. That read only helps if it is specific. A 2024 study in Communication Education found that precise feedback improves speakers most when they act on it, which is why a vague "that was good" changes nothing. Ask your listeners for one concrete thing to change, not an overall verdict.

In everyday situations

You speak in public more often than you probably count. Asking a question in a meeting, giving a short status update, proposing a toast, or speaking up in a group are all public speaking on a small scale. These are the moments to use when you want public speaking practice without organizing anything: real enough to lift your pulse a little, frequent enough that the practice compounds. Pick one this week and treat it as a deliberate rep rather than something to get through.

At a club or a class

When you want a dependable audience and a reason to show up, a Toastmasters club, a local meetup, or a speaking class gives you both. The value is less any single session than the schedule: a standing commitment turns practice from something you mean to get to into something that happens every week, in front of people who came for the same reason.

With a public speaking app

When you want to rehearse and get feedback on your own, a public speaking app can stand in for the audience. Some record you and flag your pace and filler words, some coach your voice, and some simulate a conversation, and even that kind of practice helps, with a 2024 trial finding that a single session of virtual-reality practice lowered speaking anxiety. Match the app to what you are working on; we compared the main options in our team's roundup of public speaking apps. RiseGuide is one of them, with short daily lessons on speaking, body language, and voice, plus the Speech Analyzer for feedback on your own recordings.

5 Public speaking tips from the greatest speakers

Once you have a practice loop running and places to run it, you need specific things to work on inside it. These are public speaking tips drawn from people who speak for a living, each with a reason it works and a way to rehearse it.

1. Open with a hook, not a warm-up

Many speakers spend their first thirty seconds clearing their throat: thanking the committee, apologizing for nerves, reading out the agenda. Attention drifts before the real content arrives. Strong speakers use the first sentence to give the audience a reason to listen. When Steve Jobs gave his 2005 Stanford commencement address, he opened without any preamble:

"Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories."

Chris Anderson, who has run TED for years, argues that the opening job of any talk is to make the audience care before you give them information. We pulled apart the rest of that talk in our breakdown of Jobs's Stanford speech. To practice it, write your first line last, once you know what the talk is really about, and try a few openings out loud to hear which one makes someone lean in. It's also why the old advice to open with a joke is risky; speaking coach Ian Hawkins, one of our experts, explains what great communicators do instead: walk on, own the space, and simply say hello.

2. Control your pace and use the pause

Nerves make us speak faster, and a rushed delivery reads as anxiety to a listener. Slowing down and leaving deliberate silences does the opposite, signalling that you are in control and giving the audience time to absorb what you said. Winston Churchill marked pauses into his speaking notes the way a composer marks rests. A 2022 study on how pause duration shapes impressions of a speaker found that well-placed pauses raise how competent and trustworthy an audience judges you to be. Mark two or three spots in your notes where you will stop completely and count to two; it will feel far longer to you than to anyone listening.

3. Speak from something you genuinely care about

Audiences forgive a lot when they can tell you mean what you say. Carmine Gallo, who studied dozens of the most-watched TED talks for his book Talk Like TED, found that real passion and a story to carry it were the traits the best speakers had in common. There is a reason a story outperforms a statistic, and it has a name in psychology: narrative transportation, the way a listener gets pulled into a narrative and processes it almost as lived experience. Brené Brown captured the same idea when she described her work as a researcher:

"Maybe stories are just data with a soul."

Find the one moment or example you would happily tell a friend over coffee, and build your point around that rather than around the bullet list. If lines like Brown's stay with you, we collected more of them in our roundup of communication quotes.

4. Lead with warmth, then competence

First impressions from a stage form fast, and they form in a particular order. Vanessa Van Edwards, who runs the behaviour-research lab Science of People, teaches that audiences read warmth before they read competence: they decide whether they like and trust you, and only then weigh whether you know your subject. A speaker who opens cold and impressive can lose the room before the content has had a chance. A smile, some eye contact, and a sentence that acknowledges the people in front of you settle an audience more than another credential does.

5. Vary your pitch and volume

A flat, single-note delivery makes even strong material hard to follow. Speaking teacher Vinh Giang trains people to use the voice deliberately, working with pitch, pace and volume rather than leaving them on autopilot. Dropping your pitch slightly at the end of a sentence lands it as a statement instead of a question, and lowering your volume can draw an audience in more than raising it. To hear your own patterns, record two minutes of your talk and play it back with your eyes closed, listening for where the sound goes flat.

Where this leaves you

Think back to the talk where everything you knew disappeared the moment you stood up. More tips were never going to fix that on their own; what changes things is running the practice loop, in real settings, until the techniques hold up under pressure. Choose one technique, use it this week somewhere small, and watch what shifts.

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