Don’t Say Umm – Public Speaking Exercises
Lessons from preparing for and delivering a conference talk.
I’m not a great public speaker, yet. This year, I’m committed to improving. Speaking is on my list of timeless skills, ones that are beneficial in the long term.
To get a fresh perspective on what I can improve, I read a book, “Don’t Say Umm”, which is packed with exercises. My take after finishing it and putting it into practice:
Self-Awareness
At first, I didn’t like watching recordings of my meetings. Which makes sense, for the majority of our existence on this planet, as a species, we weren’t able to do so. It’s unnatural. We’ve never experienced ourselves from the outside. It’s also unfamiliar to hear our own voice, as we hear it differently when we speak.
When I got promoted to a manager, I started speaking more, and many meetings were recorded. My English wasn’t at the level that I wanted, so I watched selected ones (without any sensitive data) with my English teacher. It was a game to hunt as many mistakes as I could. Spotting my own mistakes and then learning new phrases to prevent them improved my language.
Exercise:
Record yourself while speaking, then watch it with no sound. Then listen to it one more time, but with audio only. Then both with video and sound. How do you perceive yourself? Splitting dimensions can help with focusing on selected elements.
Analysing recordings helped me to pause more but also notice my monotonous tone (that’s a work in progress). Transcripts helped me see how exaggerated my use of “So..” is.
Pausing
Michał, it’s quite ironic.
In your talk, you preach the value of pausing (as it’s a decision-making superpower).
And the most important feedback I have for you is that:
you need to pause more, you speak too fast.
That’s what I heard from a speaking coach after my first dry-run, a month before the conference.
Speaking fast is efficient. I can say much more in a short time, right? But spoken words per minute is not a good metric. The real metric is how much of what you said was actually understood.
Think about your audience. You might introduce new concepts to a tired crowd. Speaking fast makes the material more difficult to process.
Exercise:
Take LEGO bricks. One brick represents one thought. When you finish it, connect one to another, don’t say anything, while physically connecting the pieces. The act of connecting them is a sweet-spot pause moment, not too long, not too short. It gives your audience a moment to digest what you have just said. I used Post-it Notes for that, by connecting them, or a Rubik’s Cube, where I would do one random twist after each thought.
This trick improved my delivery. I didn’t have any props with me on stage, so instead, I was doing a certain hand gesture to remind myself about these tiny pauses after each thought.
Simulating Mistakes
Mistakes will happen when you are giving a speech. These are a source of additional stress. “Oh, I messed this up,” “The slide is wrong,” “I forgot to add something,” etc. These are inevitable.
You can’t predict exactly when mistakes will happen, but you can prepare for those moments.
Exercise:
Set a random timer which rings after 60 to 200 seconds. Adjust the span to the talk length. I googled an online random timer, surprised that it’s a thing.
Then I prepared a list of fallback phrases, like:
Let me rephrase it.
Oh, it’s important to also add this...
Remember the reversibility mental model? Let me load the previous slide
When the timer buzzed, I pretended that I had made a mistake and used one of these fallback phrases.
During my recent talk at the ELC conference, I missed one important thing which I wanted to add to the slide, as otherwise the story wouldn’t be complete. My brain picked one of the prepared phrases automatically.
I wrote about rewiring my relationship with mistakes in a separate article:
Final Thoughts
It’s not just about speaking on stage. We talk to people every day. What if your communication could be a bit more engaging, precise, or easier to understand thanks to these drills?
What stops you from speaking in public? Sounds scary? You can start by writing a newsletter. It’s easier to talk about something you have written down and repeated many times.
Thanks for reading,
— Michał
P.S. I spoke at ELC in Prague, and I know that some of you were there listening live. Thanks for that!
P.P.S. I’m looking for more opportunities to practise: May at Infoshare, and in June at Devoxx. Current stats: applied to 8 conferences in 2026, accepted by 3, rejected by 3. If you know any related events in Europe, let me know!
P.P.P.S Thanks Gilad Naor for the “Don’t Say Umm” book recommendation.
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