From my own personal experience, from working with thousands of people face to face, and from asking my blog readers what they find hardest about presenting, I know that the fear of public speaking is a biggie.
And not everyone who suffers from the fear of public speaking has suffered a humiliating public speaking experience.
So why do do many people have a fear of public speaking?

Devoting time to preparing a presentation is worth it. Here are four reasons:
1. The audience’s time
Balance the time that you will spend planning the presentation against the time of the people in your audience. Say you’re presenting to 10 people for 40 minutes. That’s 400 minutes of people’s time - 6.6 hours. Isn’t it worth spending a few hours to ensure that 6.6. hours of people’s time is not going to be wasted?

Today, I presented a session remotely at the Presentation Camp at Stanford University, California. My session was on “How to engage your audience with Twitter” and I tried to do exactly that during my presentation.
Here’s what I learnt from my experience:
1. Design your presentation for Twitter

I used two strategies that took into account that my audience would be tweeting. These are the strategies:

Just as we have a verbal channel for words and a visual channel for images, we have a social channel for non-verbal signals.
That’s the big idea of Alex Pentland’s book “Honest Signals”.