Public speaking exercises for stage fright practice
Ten public speaking exercises for stage fright practice, from voice warm-ups and pause drills to recording yourself, with timings and a weekly plan.
6 min readFor anyone who wants to practise speaking before it counts1 drill
Speaking in front of people is a physical skill, a bit like swimming. Reading about it helps, but you only get better by doing it, out loud, again and again. Public speaking exercises give you a way to do that without waiting for the next big talk to come round.
The ten public speaking exercises below each take between two and fifteen minutes. Most need nothing but a phone and a quiet room. At the end there's a simple weekly plan that fits them into a normal week.
Public speaking exercises for your voice and breath
Nerves show up in the body first: a tight throat, shallow breathing, words that come out in a rush. These three warm-ups loosen all of that, and they're worth doing before every other exercise.
1. Humming and lip trills (2 minutes)
Hum a comfortable note with your lips closed until you feel a buzz around your nose and mouth. Then blow air through loosely closed lips so they flutter, like a child imitating a car, and slide the sound up and down your range. Both ease tension in your voice and jaw.
2. The long exhale (2 minutes)
Breathe in through your nose for a count of four and out through your mouth for a count of six to eight. Do it six times. A longer out-breath than in-breath slows your heart rate, and it's the same breath you can use, unnoticed, in the minute before you speak. There's more on the hour before a talk in our guide to calming nerves before a presentation.
3. Over-pronouncing (2 minutes)
Read a paragraph from a book or article aloud, exaggerating every consonant as if you're talking to someone at the back of a large hall. Then read it again normally. The second read will sound crisper than usual, because your mouth has warmed up the way your voice did.
Exercises for speaking on your feet
These are where most of the improvement comes from. They train you to find words while standing up and being heard, which is the part reading in your head never touches.
4. The one-minute topic talk (5 minutes)
Pick a topic you haven't prepared, stand up and talk about it for exactly one minute. Any topic works: your journey to work, a meal you remember, why you like a particular season. The point is getting used to starting without a script and keeping going until the time is up.
Practise this now
Do today's exercise in a minute.
Record a minute, watch it back and get one thing to try next.
Rehearse your first minute5. The pause drill (5 minutes)
Read a short passage aloud and hold a full two-second pause at every full stop. It will feel far too long. Then talk freely for a minute and, whenever you feel an um coming, close your mouth and pause instead. Pauses sound like thinking to a listener, and they're the most reliable fix for filler words. Our guide on how to stop saying um goes further.
6. The slow first sentence (3 minutes)
Write the first sentence of a talk you have coming up. Say it three times: at your normal speed, at half that speed and somewhere in between. Record all three. The slowest one often sounds the most confident, and the in-between version is usually the one to keep. Nerves speed you up most in the opening, so this is where slowing down matters most.
7. The question drill (5 minutes)
Write ten everyday questions on slips of paper, such as "What would you change about your job?" or "What's the best advice you've been given?". Draw one, and answer it out loud in 30 seconds: your point, the reason, an example, then your point again. It's good practice for meetings and interviews, and our guide to impromptu speaking has more simple structures to try.
Exercises for being watched
Stage fright is largely about being looked at. These three get you used to it in small steps.
8. The eye-contact drill (5 minutes)
Stick three notes around the room at eye height, one to your left, one ahead and one to your right. Give a short talk and say each complete thought to one note before moving to the next. On a video call, the note goes beside your camera lens. It trains you to hold someone's gaze for a whole sentence, where nervous eyes usually flick about.
9. Record and watch back three ways (10 minutes)
Record a two-minute talk. Watch it once normally for the overall impression. Watch it again with the sound off to see your posture, your hands and where you look. Then listen with your eyes closed for your pace, your pauses and your filler words. You'll usually find you look calmer than you felt.
Stagefright can do this part with you. It measures your pace in words a minute, counts your pauses and filler words, marks them in your transcript and suggests one thing to try next.
10. The exposure ladder (10 minutes a step)
Write a list of speaking situations from least to most frightening, then work up it one step at a time. A typical ladder looks like this:
- speaking to an empty room
- speaking to your phone camera
- a video call with one friend
- one friend in the room with you
- two or three people
- making one point early in a meeting
- the real talk
Stay on each step until it feels only mildly uncomfortable, then move up. Going gradually like this is how most fears shrink, because each step shows your body that nothing bad happened.
Stage fright practice: a simple weekly plan
You'll get more from fifteen minutes on four or five days than from one long session. Here's a week of stage fright practice that fits around work:
Keep the recordings. Comparing Friday's video with one from a month ago is the clearest proof that it's working.
How long until the exercises help?
You'll often feel steadier after the first week, mostly because the opening of a talk stops feeling new. Bigger changes, like finding words easily on your feet or hearing fewer fillers, usually take a few weeks of regular practice. Our guide to stage fright explains why each talk you get through makes the next one a little easier.
If the fear is stopping you doing things you need to do, or affecting your sleep or health, talk to your GP. In the UK you can also refer yourself to NHS talking therapies, which offer CBT for anxiety.
