“Can I Really Improve My Presentation Skills?”

After launching my 15‑minute Expert Skills Bite course Presentation Skills for Managers, I joined Jonathan Hancock on the Mindtools Pain Points podcast. He opened with the question I hear more than any other:

“Can I really get better at presenting?”

It’s the question people ask when they’re nervous, frustrated, or convinced they’re “just not a natural.” And it’s usually asked with the same tone people use when they’re hoping I’ll say yes, but fully expecting me to say no.

So let’s start with the truth.

The short answer: Yes. Absolutely. Unequivocally. If improvement weren’t possible, I wouldn’t have spent years being invited back by organisations across tech, science, engineering, finance and beyond (and not the same ones on rotation.)

But the real reason people improve isn’t because they suddenly lose all fear but because they realise what presenting really is.

The problem is that we’re not aware of what to improve or we’re pinned down by false beliefs of what presenting is, number two below being a case in point. Here are six reasons you can become a more engaging presenter.

In fact, scroll to the end and you’ll read the tale of the scientist who did everything she could to avoid presenting only to become hooked. (That’s not a one-off, in my experience. I see it all the time with clients.)

1. Presenting isn’t a stage thing: it’s an everyday thing

Most people imagine presenting as a big, spotlight moment. But your most influential presentations happen in the smallest interactions:

• the corridor chat
• the “quick update?”
• the one‑to‑one where your brain suddenly goes blank

These are Invisible Presentations. These shape your reputation far more than the big events.

Once you realise that presenting is simply communicating with clarity and intention, the whole thing becomes less theatrical and more human.

2. You don’t need to watch yourself back for an hour

People avoid watching themselves because they think they’ll have to endure the whole painful recording.

Not that they do unless I were to make them, which I don’t. It’s pointless.

60 seconds is enough to spot a constructive win – a gesture that works, a moment of clarity, a habit you can tweak. Your brain is brilliant at pattern recognition. It doesn’t need a feature‑length documentary of your mistakes.

This is what I call The 60‑Second Fix, and it’s one of the fastest ways to improve without overwhelming yourself.

3. Introverts often make the best presenters

There’s a persistent myth that charisma = loud. It doesn’t.

Some of the most compelling presenters I’ve coached barely raise their voices. They connect quietly, thoughtfully, and with a kind of unforced presence that people lean into.

Introverts often excel at:

• balancing facts with story
• creating calm authority
• listening deeply
• choosing words with intention

If you’re introverted, you don’t need to “perform.”  That may seem strange coming from a performer who trains technical specialists to become communication ninjas. But stranger still is that I too can be quite introverted. You need to present in a way that feels like you.

4. Stop trying not to do things. Your brain hates that

If I say, “Don’t think of a pink bus,” what happens? Exactly.

This is why most presentation advice fails. It’s a list of don’ts:

• don’t wave your hands
• don’t say “um”
• don’t look nervous

Your brain can’t act on a negative instruction. It needs a replacement behaviour.  If I say “Don’t think of a pink bus”, what do you do…I bet you immediately envisaged a pink bus, didn’t you?

This is the Pink Bus Rule: stop focusing on what to avoid, and start focusing on what to do instead.

And there’s some genuinely fascinating science behind this. Harvard researcher Alison Wood Brooks ran a series of studies on people preparing to speak in public, discovering that those who tried to calm themselves down actually performed worse than those who reframed their nerves as excitement. Simply saying “I am excited” out loud was enough to shift performance. This is because reappraising anxious arousal as excitement led people to feel more excited and perform better than those who tried to calm down.

Your brain doesn’t do “don’t be nervous.” It does “be something else instead.” So next time the butterflies arrive, try telling them they’re actually anticipation. They’re surprisingly easy to fool.

(Brooks, A.W., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014)

5. Nerves management is not the whole game

But here’s what nobody tells you: for a lot of people, the nerves aren’t the problem. They’re the symptom.

If you don’t know what to do with the room – when to pause, when to bring people in, what to cut – some part of you knows it. And that’s what you’re actually nervous about. No amount of box breathing fixes a talk that’s a shopping list of slides with nowhere for anyone to engage. You can calm your nervous system perfectly and still feel that flicker of dread, because your body’s picked up on something real, that the mind hasn’t yet twigged: the content isn’t going to land.

Here’s where I recommend you download my Spice Rack™- a set of engagement techniques you drop into a talk at specific points to pull people back into the room.

And here’s the bit that surprises people: using the Spice Rack doesn’t just make the talk better. It calms your nerves too because you’re no longer performing at people, you’re in a room with them. You stop being the corporate muppet reciting slide six, and you become someone having a conversation that happens to have slides behind it.

Breathing gets you to the stage in one piece. Structure and engagement are what happen once you’re there.

6. The real reason people improve: they learn to present as themselves

Here’s the part most people never expect: you can have all the techniques in the world but if you’re not presenting in a way that feels like you, your nerves will spike and your confidence will evaporate.

I learned this the hard way.

Some time I hired a presentation coach for a keynote I was preparing. I thought, Why not? I don’t know what I don’t know. I ran the talk through with him, he beamed, and he said, “Wonderful. Such a great communicator.”

Lovely. Except… when I practised it afterwards, something felt wrong.

I was uncomfortable. Tense. Oddly nervous – much more nervous than usual.

And then it hit me. I had subconsciously shifted my style to fit what he thought good looked like. Not what I know works for me.

I’d drifted away from the version of myself that feels natural on stage where I’d be the one who gets the audience involved early, treating presenting like a conversation rather than a broadcast.

The moment I returned to my way of doing it, the nerves dropped. The clarity returned. The talk came alive again.

This is the breakthrough I see in clients all the time: You improve the moment you stop trying to be someone else.

There are universal techniques that genuinely work for everyone: projection, strong language, the way you order your information. These aren’t up for debate; they’re the palette and the landscape, and every good presenter draws from the same set. It’s like two painters with the same palette and the same landscape, who create two entirely different masterpieces.

The way I work with others is based on finding their voices again. I don’t fix so much as remove what never belonged in the first place, then amplify what’s working.

So… can you really improve your presentation skills?

Yes. And not by becoming someone else — but by becoming a clearer, calmer, more intentional version of yourself.

If you want to build those skills in a way that’s practical, fast and grounded in real‑world communication, my 15‑minute Expert Skills Bite course is designed for exactly that.

🎓 Listen to the full conversation on the Mindtools Pain Points podcast Jonathan and I go deeper on all of this: the nerves, the myths, and the small shifts that make a big difference. Here it is on Spotify or on Podcast Addict here.

Real Results: How One Scientist Overcame Presentation Nerves

Annika, a postdoctoral scientist, came to me crippled by nerves. Her presentation was a direct request to a panel for a research grant, funding her discovery of plastic-eating microbes in the sea, work that’s as important as it is remarkable. So this wasn’t an abstract training exercise. It was a clear, real-world test.

We didn’t start with breathing exercises or calming techniques. We started with her slides. Her content. How she was actually engaging the panel — not performing at them. It was holistic: with each session, her shoulders dropped a little further. Even the way she moved changed.

Annika won the grant.

But here’s the part that matters more than the win: she told me months afterwards that her fear of presenting hadn’t just diminished, it had flipped. She now grabs the chance to present whenever and wherever she can – something she’d never have imagined before the training.

So yes. You can really improve.

Your Action Steps:

Think of your next presentation, pitch, or meeting that’s giving you that flicker of dread.

1. Before you reach for a breathing technique, ask: is it really nerves – or is it the content?
2. Look at your structure. Where’s the moment for the audience to actually engage, not just receive?
3. Pick one Spice Rack technique and drop it in at that point.

Fix the content, and you’ll often find the nerves were never really the problem.

Need Some Help With Your Presentation Skills?

Sometimes you don’t know what the problem is: only that you’ve got a presentation coming up that’s keeping you up at night. I work with managers and technical specialists on exactly this – making those talks that feel high-stakes making them high impact. Be less vanilla, more THRILLER. Let’s chat.