Ask HN: How to Speak Confidently?

Luckily I haven't encountered this often. And on at least one or two occasions, when something like this has happened, it's actually been a positive in that the person was adding useful information that complemented what I was already saying. In that case, I don't mind letting them go on for a minute or two.

That said, at some point you have to take back over if you're going to get through your material. It's not in my nature to generally be rude or brusque with people, but sometimes you may have to force the issue a little. You might choose to intentionally wear a wristwatch just so you can do the gambit of "conspicuously look at your watch, and then interrupt and say something like 'OK, in the interest of time we need to get back to the main thread now. Perhaps we can have a follow-up conversation later on XYZ.'"

A common interjection as well is something like "This is good stuff, but we're getting a bit off-topic. If you want to talk about that in more detail, grab me after the talk and we can chat." Something like that.

2. I personally find it helpful not to look at people's faces when I'm in the middle of a verbal paragraph. This gives me fewer distractions as I focus on something that can be complex, and doesn't give anyone an 'in' to interrupt (harder to interrupt when the speaker hasn't noticed your finger in the air). Once you get more confidence, you can start looking at people again.

Now onto some advice. I’ll give you 2 tips and ask a question.

Tip 1: Learn to relax. It sounds like you lose confidence when you’re presenting an idea and things start going badly. It’s natural to get flustered and stressed in those situations. But getting stressed out is the worst possible reaction. Your ability to listen and problem solve drop exponentially. Getting stressed is like taking 50 IQ points off.

Practice some basic mindfulness and relaxation techniques. Practice them in quiet moments throughout the day, then when you’ve got the hang of them, start to use them in mildly stressful situations. It might take a while to get good enough at relaxing to be able to actually do it in a high stress situation, but you will get there. And if you can keep your cool when a presentation isn’t going well, you’ll always be the best version of yourself.

Tip 2: Practice. Presenting a technical argument to an audience is hard. Really hard. It’s going to take a while to get better. And the only way to improve is to practice.

One great low stress way to practice is to record a screencast. Pick a topic, or present a feature you’ve built. Record yourself, listen to it, then try to improve. Even just repeating the same presentation a few times will help you find your rhythm.

Now a question: I think you need to ask yourself why you are getting so much passive and active negative feedback?

It strikes me as a little unusual. I would hope even the most junior member of my team wouldn’t feel like their ideas are responded to with people not listening, losing interest or being overly critical.

It could be that your team has a toxic culture, and you’re being unfairly marginalised. In which case you should not bother trying to impress them and just leave.

Or maybe people aren’t listening to you because you’re too new to the team? Or maybe you’re advocating for points of view that conflict with the leadership/power structure?

I don’t know the answer, but I think it’s a question worth your time considering. Maybe find a friend/mentor at work who could give you a bit of honest feedback if it’s you or them.

But stick with it. Careers are long. And if you’re improving just a little bit every day. You’ll be amazed where you will end up!

Totally agreed with this. I love that particular bit of phraseology. I use it all the time both in verbal and written forms. I can't be sure, but I suspect that it is a very useful phrase.

In my experience, it's a nice way to state something, but "soften" the statement a little so that it's less likely to invite challenge.

I also like the phrase "In my experience" for similar reasons. It's a way to state something, but it seems to evoke a challenge less often, because who can really challenge your lived experience?

For grins and giggles, I decided to search HN and see how often the "I suspect" phrase is used. Turns out it's quite a lot:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...