DELIVERY
Delivery is the final and most challenging part of a presentation. Not the most difficult or the most important—that award goes to storytelling—but the most challenging, the most frightening. I never heard of slide preparation fright or storytelling fright, but stage fright is common. The reason delivery is so frightening is because it's live and it's final. You cannot undo it; once it's done, it's done.
NERVES VERSUS STAGE FRIGHT
I never had stage fright. This isn't to suggest that I was always good onstage, but I don't remember being scared. In my childhood, I was the lead singer in a children's band and coming onstage was a relatively mundane experience for me. I was nervous but never frightened. Later, I came onstage as a dancer, singer, martial arts practitioner, business trainer, business school lecturer, personal development coach, comedian, and actor. I was still getting nervous (but never to the point of being paralyzed), and I think it is pretty much normal to feel this way. Anxiety never quite goes away, and it's always worse when the role or the place is new to me.
If you have serious stage fright, one that really prevents you from speaking, I suggest you seek professional help. Scientific branches of psychotherapy (like cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT) have made some truly dramatic progress over the past 20 years. But if all you have is general anxiety, just live with it. Trust me, nobody will notice.
There are basically two ways to deal with your fear: the first is to prepare and the second is to learn to improvise. And this is what Part III of the book is about—preparation and improvisation in public speaking. I think there are two versions of public speaking, there was 1.0, and now there is 2.0. The first approach was to be very formal and regulated. Books on public speaking 1.0 overwhelm you with advice on all things proper: proper dress, proper speech, proper timing, proper posture, and so on. Public speaking 2.0 is much more relaxed and much more demanding at the same time. You cannot get away with simply following the rules anymore. You have to put in your soul. You cannot just do the prepared talk and leave. You must have a conversation with your audience and react to their feedback, both verbal and nonverbal.
Public speaking 1.0 was built around the idea of control. Controlling time, controlling emotions, and controlling the audience. Public speaking 2.0 (or should I say presenting?) is built around the idea of losing control. Of course, in order to lose control, you first have to have it. You can't lose something you never had in the first place.
Public speaking is a lot like martial arts in this sense, or, in fact, like any activity that requires complex coordination of the mind and body. When a student first comes to a martial arts school, they know how to fight intuitively. If somebody attacks them, they react, sometimes quite effectively. However, when their teacher starts telling them what to do, they soon become disoriented in the sea of new information. After a while, they master formal exercises that may look cool but aren't really very close to an actual fight. The next stage is when you stop doing attacks, blocks, or holds that you know, and focus on the one thing you can focus on (which is your opponent) and just let your body do the rest of the job. It's the same in public speaking. If you want to do well with your public speaking, you have to let your body do the job.
You cannot plan your speech pretty much like you cannot plan your fight. I once read in Brian Tracy's book on public speaking (1.0) called Speak to Win: How to Present with Power in Any Situation, “The very best talk of all is when the talk you planned, the talk you gave, and the talk you wish you had given all turn out to be the same.” Let me tell you: no, it's not. First of all, it never happens that way. Never, ever. But second, if the talk you planned is exactly the same as the one you gave, it's because you knew beforehand everything your audience knows, which is unlikely to the point of being impossible, or you missed an opportunity to learn something from your audience. If everything goes as planned, if nothing unexpected is happening, you will soon be dying of boredom and so, by the way, will your audience. If the talk you gave is the same as the one you wanted to give—that means you either reached your life's ideal (which, again, is highly unlikely) or you stopped developing. My very best talks of all were the ones where I came prepared and my plan almost worked, which means that while following the plan, I encountered new and entirely unexpected problems, solved them creatively on the spot, and came out victorious. This is public speaking 2.0.
I'm not suggesting that Brian Tracy or any other remarkable speaker of the past stopped at the formal stage. But they taught what they'd been asked to teach, which was the formalities. These formalities aren't enough anymore. This is why the last chapter of Part III is devoted entirely to the most difficult and daring topic: stage improvisation.