Speaker 1: For seven years I presented the news on television and every Thursday I was there in front of my camera and I heard the director in my ears saying, attention studio for live, 5, 4, 3 and every Thursday I felt my heart racing. Every week, seven years. Now I tell you this because there is this huge misunderstanding that experienced speakers, they are not nervous. When you see that speaker on stage and you say, well they do it in a natural way, no they don't, they are nervous. But the difference for me between an experienced and an inexperienced speaker is that experienced people know how to handle the nerves. And I want to give you this insight because it really helped me a lot to deal with my nerves. Because it all begins with the brain. That's why my explanation begins. Because you have to look at your brain as having these different antennas and your brain really wants to protect yourself and it takes that job very seriously. So as soon as the antennas perceive a kind of danger, a button is pushed. It's a button somewhere here in your head, in your brain and it's called the amygdala. It has the shape of an almond, the colour of an almond, it is small as an almond but it's a very important button because as soon as the button is pushed, that's what we call the fight or flight reaction. You have all these sensations in your body. Typically the things that you experience when you are nervous like a dry mouth, legs shaking, your heart really beating very fast, your respiration is going faster. And this is something that actually is there to protect yourself because as it is a fight or flight reaction, imagine that there is this car nearly racing into you when you cross a road. The fact that you have this heartbeat that is fast, it actually prepares you to react and to run actually. The thing is when you stand in front of an audience, you cannot run. So the antennas, they don't make a difference between a real danger and a danger in your head. So what happens is when you are in front of your audience, you cannot run, you kind of freeze but still you have these sensations so you want to protect yourself. Now this is on a subconscious level. What happens on a conscious level is that actually when you stand in front of your audience, you want to protect yourself. So actually by doing this, now this is overdoing it. But to some extent that's what speakers actually do in front of an audience. Stand like that, you really want to protect yourself. Looking down or looking very quickly from one person to another. Now what does an experienced speaker do? Exactly the opposite. They on a conscious level, they make themselves big in front of the audience. You could say that they fake it. Making yourself big, what I mean with that is having that posture in front of your audience that gives you a kind of a positive attitude. Now to know what that is, just watch television. You can really learn a lot from it. I advise you to look especially at people for example presenting the news but people standing because that's the most difficult thing to do, how to stand in front of that audience, what to do with your arms, what to do with your legs. Just look at how they stand and imitate that because this is a good neutral position. Same thing for the way you look. A tip that I have there is that you actually look at your audience as though you pour them a glass of wine because this will help you to stay with one person. You look at one individual at a time. The time it takes to pour them a glass of wine. To avoid that you would either look away or look very nervously from one person to another. So the next time you experience these nerves, what I advise you to do is stand and look in a conscious way. Just watch television to know what that can be and watch TED.com because on that website you have all these presentations with PowerPoint, without PowerPoint. Look at it without volume because it helps you to look how they stand. What I absolutely advise you to do is watch Amy Cuddy. She's an expert on body language and this is exactly what she's talking about, about faking it. So just have a look. Imitate, integrate and make it your own.