Watch how Susan Cain does this in her TED Talk. First she talks about how it was for her when she turned up at summer camp as a shy child with a suitcase of books. She moves swiftly into discussing statistics and research about how we treat shy people in society. Good speakers move easily and quickly between the personal and the universal.

The main factors influencing successful public speaking are these: commitment, practice and guts.

As the American coach Brendon Burchard writes in The Motivation Manifesto: ‘Almost all fear we experience today, and its resultant cowardly thinking and behaviour, is just imagined social drama created by unchecked mental processes and conditioning. We are afraid of being rejected, isolated or abandoned – not of being eaten alive.’

—Your speed is highly determined by your breath. You ignore your breath at your peril! It’s a great tool to use to keep yourself relaxed and to find natural pauses in your speech. Just a few moments spent thinking about your breathing before or at the beginning of a speech will relax you. Notice how you punctuate what you’re saying using your

—In a meeting, job interview or important conversation, have something in mind you would like to say in conclusion to a point or that you really want to drop in. Make it short and easy to remember. Practise saying it slowly and deliberately. In every conversation, we all have something we really want to get across; in more formal conversations we

As the novelist Philip Roth said of his work: ‘Over the years what you develop is a tolerance for your own crudeness. And patience with your own crap, really. Belief in your crap, which is just “stay with your crap and it will get better, and come back every day and keep going”.’

Kenyan Nobel Prize-winner Wangari Maathai: ‘The higher you go, the fewer women there are.’

the contrast between how you present externally (what other people see) and how you think of yourself internally (how you feel).

without your own belief that you can own the room – and your desire to own it – the room is already lost.