People don’t change, do they? Your personality is basically formed by the age of 18, you’ll have developed all the skills and talents you are going to develop by the age of 25 and, despite what you may pay your coach, guru, therapist, yogi, and/or hypnotist to tell you, after the age of 30 the only personal development you’ll be doing is becoming more and more of a caricature of yourself.

That’s what I used to think, anyway, having gone on countless personal development courses in the name of business journalism and not developed personally in the process of doing so. But the other Friday night, driving back from Bromsgrove, I realised that at the age of 32, I had changed in one respect. You see, I’d just given an hour-long talk to 100 people, without once vomiting or fainting or falling over and a couple of years ago that would have been unimaginable.

Indeed, so profound was my glossophobia that until recently I routinely declined all invitations to speak, once even refusing a boss’s request to address a group of five teenagers. And on occasions I simply couldn’t get out of talking — a wedding speech, a thank you — I managed only by necking pellets of the anti-anxiety medication a US doctor prescribed me when he thought I was having panic attacks but was actually succumbing to a tropical illness.

And while I can’t claim to have suddenly become Wolverhampton’s answer to Barack Obama — after all, a few months ago I failed an audition for the audiobook of my own autobiography — I generally do some public speaking most weeks and it doesn’t stress me out at all. What has changed?

Well, as much as it pains me to admit it, the improvement began with a personal development course. A couple of years ago I was given intensive training in public speaking by two business trainers, who began by making me give a 12-minute speech in front of a video camera and then forced me to watch the recording. At the time it was agonising — it felt like a torture technique worthy of an Iranian prison — but the experience taught me two important things about public speaking: (a) you may be crap but you’re probably not as crap as you think you are; (b) to get better at it, you have to do it.

Public speaking is an incredibly common fear, as widespread as phobias of snakes, spiders, heights, water, mice, bats and Celine Dion’s falsetto, but it’s a skill you have to master if you want to make it in any career, even librarianship, and just as a writer is simply someone who writes, a public speaker is simply someone who speaks in public. Very few people are born brilliant orators, they become so by practising. And there are lots of different ways to practise short of hiring business consultants: you can accept opportunities to speak to schools, join organisations such as Toastmasters International, or just make speeches at home, in front of your cat.

The second thing that made a real difference — and this is an indication of just how much of a phobia speaking had become for me — was hiring a voice coach last year. Looking back at the notes he left me, I don’t think all the training was useful, as a portion of it required sitting in my living room with a stranger performing “tongue exercises” that involved placing my tongue-tip behind my bottom teeth and saying “YUH YUH YUH YUH”, “silenting shaping” the “NG” sound with my lips before blowing out my lips like as a horse, humming the sounds “MMMAAAHHHHH”, “MMMMMEEEEEE”, “MMMMAAAAEEEE”, “MMMM E EEEEEE”, “MMMM UH OOO” and “MMMMAAAAWWWWW” and “silently speaking” the words “KICK COOK CAKE”, all of which, frankly, made me feel like a bit of a CO*K.

But there were several important lessons that this voice coach taught me that I’m happy to share, to save you the expense of hiring one for yourself. First, lots of people confuse the stress of finding something to say with the stress of saying it. If you talk about something you know about, something you’re actually interested in, most of the stress and tension disappears, not least because your enthusiasm for the subject matter distracts you from the mechanics of what you’re doing.

Second lesson: check out the venue. If subject matter accounts for more than half of the stress of speaking, then where you are speaking accounts for another 30 per cent. Suddenly finding yourself in a strange room staring at several hundred people variously picking their noses, or falling asleep, can be horrifying, which is why it is important, if possible, to scout your venue before you speak, and visualise the worst. A friend of mine does something similar when he goes on TV: if he finds himself getting nervous, he imagines a member of his audience — a middle-aged man, cutting his toenails in a hotel room — and suddenly he feels better.

But the main thing this voice coach taught me is the vanity and irrelevance of nerves. Amateur speakers often like to mention that they are “unaccustomed to public speaking”, but this is a terrible idea because first, it highlights their nervousness, and nobody enjoys watching a nervous speaker (watching someone die on stage can be worse than watching someone literally die). Also, no one cares. Most people in most audiences aren’t thinking about you. They’re thinking about themselves, are entirely absorbed in their own anxieties and tribulations, wondering whether they left the heating on at home, worrying that they forgot to pay the congestion charge last week, or fretting about the speech they’ve got to make themselves next week. And if your nerves are the last thing on their mind, why not make it the last thing on your mind, too?

Sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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