A book “confessions of a public speaker” has quite a few very nice and useful anecdotes and tips.

And a random personal anecdote:

I had a really difficult time even at toastmasters dealing with my Uhms and Umms. Having someone count them somewhat works, but I decided to experiment by just watching my daily speech to be the same “quality” as public speech, and try to suppress the garbage words even during no-stress moments.

It took maybe half a year of practice, but as a result I started to speak slower and (probably :) clearer in the day to day life, and this during the public speaking too, with zero effort.

Edit-append: the most useful exercise is taking the projector, presenting in an empty room as if for the crowd, recording this “from a seat” and watching yourself. Extremely weird at first, but you very quickly see the areas to focus on. And since you must rehearse any talk anyway several times (at least that is the case for me), it is a zero-cost and high return activity.

Video has helped me to calm my hand motions down. And editing podcasts makes me ever so aware of the verbal tics that I (and my guests) tend towards.

My High School debate coach loved to sit in the back of the room during practice with his hand in the air counting the number of "Uhmms". Disconcerting at first, but then you start actively trying to keep the count from increasing, which backfires for a while, and then you get past it.

Sounds like great advice - thanks. I did have to give a (kind of) public talk recently and it wasn't great but one of the things you mentioned helped me a lot - namely, slow down. I felt like I was talking much too slowly at first but slowly realized it was okay.

Happy if it will be of use!

There are two things at play with being too fast:

first, you know what you are talking about (thus are giving a talk) - and tend to want to give as much info as possible.

the second, and more important one, is the adrenaline rush that every performance gives.

It probably is this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachypsychia

Consequently rehearsals help (they remove the worry about what to say)

Also one thing that helped me a lot is taking “dominant” poses five minutes before getting on stage. I can’t find the study that claimed it to work - but it did.

Later I have read the research that had claimed it didn’t work - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28946020/ is one of the studies I could find quickly, but for me this technique still works, so maybe it’s the power of the placebo :)

Interesting, thank you and I see there are an unbelievable number of affiliated clubs near where I live.

A lot of companies (though probably not many startups) do offer presentation skills classes. They don't beat practice but worth checking out.

I definitely found the big room effect scary at first even if I should probably have felt less pressure than presenting to my CEO in a small room.

Yeah. My company has a modest education budget per employee and I've been told that improving my communication skills is a perfectly acceptable use of it - time to put it in action!

I find it uncomfortable. I'd probably hate acting classes. But, even as someone who does a lot of presenting, classes are really useful and I've benefited when I've pushed myself to take them. You'll probably find it more useful in the long run that something about the framework du jour which you can probably do equally well on-line.