SPEAK WITHOUT FEAR #22
PREPARE THE THINKING, not the script. I have often watched a speaker walk to the front of a room completely relaxed, exchange a few words with people nearby, even make everyone laugh and then change the moment the presentation begins. The shoulders stiffen. The voice becomes formal. Words that would never appear in an ordinary conversation suddenly arrive: “It is indeed my immense pleasure…” The person who was interesting 30 seconds ago disappears, replaced by someone trying very hard to sound like a speaker.
It happens even with experienced professionals. Somehow, we have learnt to associate public speaking with a different way of speaking. We prepare sentences we would never naturally say, memorise openings because we are afraid of forgetting them, and rehearse until the presentation becomes technically correct but strangely distant.
Yet, when people tell me they want to “sound natural,” they sometimes arrive at the opposite conclusion. Perhaps they should prepare less. I think the problem is not too much preparation. It is preparing the wrong thing.
When Preparation Becomes a Script
I understand the attraction of writing everything down. A script gives us certainty. We know exactly how we will begin, what comes next, and how we will end. For someone nervous about speaking, that certainty can be comforting. But the comfort has a cost.
Once we memorise exact sentences, part of our attention
moves away from the audience. We are no longer simply communicating an idea. We are trying to remember what comes after a particular sentence. If someone interrupts us, the presentation equipment fails, or an unexpected question changes the mood of the room, we struggle to return to the memorised track.
I see this regularly in training rooms. A participant gives a reasonably good prepared presentation. Then I ask a question about the same subject. Suddenly the language becomes simpler, the face more expressive and the answer much more convincing.
I sometimes ask, “Why didn’t you speak like that during the presentation?” The answer is usually some version of “Because now I was just talking.” That distinction interests me. The knowledge has not changed. The speaker has.
When answering the question, they are thinking about meaning. During the presentation, they were thinking about delivery.
Prepare the Thinking, Not the Sentences
Over the years, I have become increasingly comfortable preparing around ideas rather than wording. I want to know what I need the audience to
understand, what sequence will help them understand it, which example will make it real, and where I eventually want to take them.
The same happens in negotiations. We can prepare our position, priorities, alternatives and boundaries. But we cannot script the other person. If we spend the conversation waiting for an opportunity to deliver our prepared argument, we may miss the one sentence that tells us what really matters to them.
AND SOMETIMES, SOUNDING NATURAL BEGINS WHEN WE STOP TRYING SO HARD TO SOUND LIKE A SPEAKER.
I do not need to know every sentence in advance. This has become one of the simplest ideas I share with speakers: prepare the thinking, not the script.
It sounds like a small distinction, but it changes the nature of preparation. Instead of asking, “What exactly will I say?” I ask, “What exactly am I trying to say?”
Q&A sessions expose this even more clearly. Nobody knows the precise question that will come. The speakers who appear most natural are rarely the ones with the quickest clever answers. They usually know the central ideas they want to protect. They can enter a question from different directions and return to those ideas without sounding as though they are repeating a prepared line. This is where preparation begins to create freedom rather than restrict it.
Before a session, I may have five or six ideas in my head, perhaps a story, a question and an example for each. The structure is clear, but the sentences are allowed to form in the room. Some examples get longer because people respond to them. Others disappear because the audience already understands the point. Occasionally, a participant says something that becomes a better bridge to my next idea than anything I had planned.
Natural Does Not Mean Casual
There is another misunderstanding worth addressing. Sounding natural does not mean treating every audience like a group of friends over coffee. A board meeting, policy discussion, classroom, investor pitch and community gathering require different levels of formality.
That freedom is possible because the structure underneath is strong. Natural speaking is therefore not speaking without preparation. It is being prepared enough that you do not have to visibly depend on your preparation.
Being natural is not about being casual. It is about sounding like yourself within the context.
The Audience Changes the Conversation
Mentoring has reinforced this for me. I may enter a mentoring session expecting to discuss marketing, only to discover that the entrepreneur’s real problem is pricing, cash flow or a disagreement between partners. A prepared lecture on marketing would become useless. What matters is knowing the subject well enough to listen, respond and still guide the conversation somewhere meaningful.
The language may become more precise. The sentences may become shorter. The humour may reduce. Certain words may need careful choice. But the audience should still feel that a person is speaking to them, rather than listening to someone recite a document.
I have noticed that this becomes especially important when the stakes rise. We often respond to importance
Leave Some Room for the Room
Perhaps the real test of preparation is not whether we can deliver everything exactly as rehearsed. It is whether we can move away from what we rehearsed and still know where we are going.
That requires a different kind of confidence. Not confidence in remembering every word, but confidence in understanding the idea beneath the words.
There are certainly occasions when exact language matters – a formal statement, legal wording, important data or a quotation. We should be precise when precision is necessary. But everything does not deserve to be memorised simply because we are nervous about forgetting it.
The speakers who sound natural are not necessarily making it up as they go along. Very often, they have prepared more deeply than we realise. They simply prepared themselves to think clearly rather than remember perfectly.
When the thinking is clear, the words have somewhere to come from. And sometimes, sounding natural begins when we stop trying so hard to sound like a speaker.
Shakya is an entrepreneur, certified trainer, and small business consultant. He can be reached for an executive mentoring session at suman@tangentwaves.com
