The public speaking skills every founder needs

Most speaker training starts with what to say. Mine starts with your identity.

After seven years as a solution-focused psychotherapist and hypnotherapist, I know the part of your brain wired to scan for threat can be retrained to scan for success and money instead. That is where confidence actually lives. Not in a power pose you adopt for ninety seconds backstage (although this does help too.) Start with how you speak to yourself in your mind first before you speak there will be a shift.

And please, put down the slides

Death by PowerPoint makes me want to weep. You know the scene. Forty-two bullet points on a slide, a founder reading them out word for word with their back to the room, an audience quietly checking their phones under the table. The deck is not the talk. The deck was never the talk. You are the talk. When you hide behind slides you hand over the one thing that actually moves people, which is you, present and certain in the room. Your slides should whisper. You should be the one they remember.

Confidence is an inside job

Great speakers radiate confidence internally and externally, and the two are inseparable. This is mindset, somatics and body language working as one. Feeling nervous is natural, it means you care. The trick is what you do with it. Breathwork, shaking out the body, and shifting how you see yourself on the inside will have you walking on stage certain, grounded and fully yourself. Your nervous system can be trained like any other part of your craft, and once it is, the fear stops running the show.

Introduce yourself like someone worth remembering

Your positioning begins before you say a word about your business. Most founders open with what they do, which sounds like everyone else in the room and is forgotten by the time you sit back down. My SPEAKER methodology teaches you to open with your why. That is what people remember, and it is what makes them lean in.

Build a signature talk that does the work for you

A signature talk positions you as the leader in your field. It has to be specific, and it has to lead naturally to the next step, whether that is working with you or planting a seed that moves your listener to act.

Here is what a talk that converts actually does. It opens with a question or a statistic that stops the room. It tells a genuine story that speaks to the exact problem you solve. It showcases your expertise and credentials unapologetically, because false modesty serves no one. It offers social proof, handles objections before they are raised, and closes with a question that lingers long after you have left the stage.

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And here is what quietly costs you the room. Closed body language. Opening with who you are, or worse, how nervous you feel. Staring at the ceiling, or fixing on one poor soul in the third row. Winging it. None of these are personality flaws, they are habits, and habits are changeable.

Own it

Public speaking is one of the fastest ways to build authority and credibility as a founder. It puts you in front of the right rooms and does more for your visibility than months of posting ever could.

So have fun with it. Own the space. Be unmistakably yourself. Then practise, practise, practise, because certainty on stage is built in the reps, not born in the moment. This is how you not only become a great speaker but are known and paid as one too.