re: Public speaking, anyone comfortable doing it?

The best advice that I can give you is to be prepared, and to try to commit the experience to memory.

When one is nervous, their brain sorta overloads and shuts off and resorts to muscle memory. If you allow it to, you’ll almost black out, having little memory of what you just did. Any musician will tell you that when the red light comes on in the studio or when there’s an audience in front of you on stage, you lose about 70-80% of your abilities. The reason is because your nerves overwhelm your conscious mind and you revert back to muscle memory.

So, by practice what you’re going to do over and over until it’s muscle memory that you can perform in your sleep, when your nerves overwhelm your ability to think consciously about what you’re doing in the moment, you will still perform at a high level. All of that practice got your muscle memory baseline up to a high level.

The other way to help keep your brain from shutting off as a response to nerves is to actively try to remember what you’re doing. Focus on individual faces or objects in the room. Try to remember them. This will keep your active brain engaged so you can still have access to it and think on your feet.

By raising your muscle memory to the point of a solid performance and keeping your mind from shutting off to the point that it relies on muscle memory exclusively, you can appear to overcome any stage fright.