What my first public speech taught me about pacing and breathing

The lights came up faster than I expected. I was twenty-three, clutching a sheaf of notes that suddenly felt like a foreign object in my hands, and I opened my mouth to a room of around eighty people in a community hall in Melbourne. I had rehearsed the opening sentence forty times on the train. By the time I reached the third paragraph, I was speaking so quickly that the woman in the front row tilted her head as if she were translating from a fast-talking auctioneer. That night taught me that pacing and breathing are not technical footnotes in public speaking. They are the entire performance.

Years later, after thousands of hours live on camera and in auditoriums from Brisbane to Perth, I still measure every keynote by what I learned in that first terrified hour. The lesson was simple to understand and brutally hard to embody: your audience can only take in what your breath allows. Speed is seductive because it disguises fear. A measured pace feels slow to the speaker, but to the listener it feels like trust. Everything I have built as a broadcaster, an author, and a host has grown from that single, humbling realisation.

The nervous energy before walking on stage

Before a speech, almost every speaker I have coached describes the same thing: a fizzing in the chest, a dry mouth, hands that want to grip something. I felt all of it that evening in Melbourne, compounded by the fact that several people in the audience were local media veterans with little patience for waffle. Australian audiences, particularly in professional settings, are famously direct. They will give you two minutes of goodwill, and then you had better have something worth saying.

What I did not know then, and what I now teach, is that this fizzing is not the enemy. It is fuel with nowhere to go. Telling yourself to "calm down" before a speech is about as useful as telling someone in a rip current to relax. The body is already alert. The work is to give that alertness a rhythm it can ride. That is where breath comes in. Slow exhales activate the parasympathetic nervous system. They are not a trick. They are a switch. On that first night I had no such switch, so the energy simply poured out of me as speed.

Losing the rhythm in the first minute

You can hear pacing problems before you can see them. Within the first forty seconds of my first speech, I had compressed what should have been a ninety-second introduction into roughly half that. I was not speaking faster because the material demanded it. I was speaking faster because my body was trying to get the discomfort over with as quickly as possible. The audience knew it. I could see the polite smiles freeze.

The patterns I have observed since, in myself and in speakers I mentor, fall into a few clear categories. This is one of the most useful framings I share with new presenters, and a version of it lives on my articles page for anyone who wants to revisit it.

The middle rows took me years to inhabit. The first row is where almost every nervous speaker lives on debut.

Breathing as the hidden anchor of presence

Breath is the thing you cannot fake. A confident voice with shallow breath will crack under pressure. A quiet voice with deep breath will fill a hall. On that first night, my breath was living in my throat, which is why my voice sounded thin and why I kept swallowing between sentences. I did not understand that breath is the chassis of the voice. Remove it and the structure rattles.

I learned to anchor breath low, into the diaphragm, by lying with a book on my stomach and watching it rise. It is unglamorous and it works. From that base, the voice gains resonance, which buys you the privilege of silence. You can pause. You can let a line breathe, or let a room in a Sydney auditorium hold an idea for a moment instead of chasing them with your next sentence.

The most overlooked habit is the exhale. Inhales get the attention, but the long, slow exhale is what signals safety to the body. I time speakers on a four-count in, seven-count out pattern. The numbers are not magic. The length of the exhale is. Once a speaker can extend it, the pace of the speech takes care of itself.

Pacing for an audience that absorbs at its own speed

A common mistake is to speak at the speed you think. Audiences absorb at the speed they feel. The gap between those two speeds is where meaning goes to die. In a corporate setting in Adelaide once, I watched a brilliant strategist lose his room entirely in five minutes because he was speaking at the speed of his own excitement, which was roughly twice the speed at which his board could metabolise the information. They were still on his second point when he reached his seventh.

Australian boardrooms are pragmatic places. They reward clarity and punish waffle. That cultural reality, more than any technical advice, is what taught me to slow down. If you cannot land a point in this country at a measured pace, you are finished. If you can land it, you will be asked back. Pacing is, in that sense, a form of respect. It says: I have considered what you need, and I am going to give you time to receive it.

There is also a regional texture to this. Audiences in Perth tend to be unhurried, almost reflective. Audiences in Brisbane, in my experience, are quick to laugh and quick to forgive, but they will not pretend to be impressed. The room will always tell you what it needs. Your job is to give the room time to do that, which means giving yourself time first.

Recovering from a stumble without losing the room

Every speaker falls over their words at some point. The first time it happened to me live, I apologised three times in ten seconds, which compounded the error and made the audience feel awkward for me. I learned later that the recovery is the speech. The stumble is forgotten in seconds. The recovery lives in the memory of the room.

A breath, a pause, a sip of water, a calm "let me say that again" — any of these resets the rhythm. The worst thing a speaker can do is rush past the error to cover it. The audience knows. They saw the stumble. They are watching to see if you can handle it. When you breathe through it, you demonstrate the very presence the speech is about. When you panic, you teach the room to worry about you instead of listening to you.

This is the moment I point speakers to my videos page when they want to see what recovery looks like in practice. The clips are unglamorous, mostly rough rehearsal footage, but the recovery technique is the same across all of them. Breathe, pause, continue. The audience exhales with you.

The physical habits that rewired my delivery

Over time, breath and pace stopped being things I thought about and became things my body did. That shift came from small, repeatable habits rather than dramatic overhauls. I walk to every venue at least twenty minutes before I am due on stage, partly to settle nerves and partly to feel the room's acoustics. I drink room-temperature water, never iced, because cold tightens the throat. I do a set of shoulder rolls and a few silent exhales in the wings, the kind of thing no one in the audience will ever see.

I also learned to use my eyes. A speaker who looks at their notes is a speaker who has lost the room. A speaker who lets their gaze land briefly on a few faces around the room, and rests there, draws the room back in. The act of looking is a form of breath for the audience. It reassures them that the message is for them, not for the speaker's fear. Photographers understand this instinctively; there is a craft to capturing the moment when someone's presence fills a frame, and the principles translate uncannily well to a stage, as any piece on how photographers capture the intensity of a subject will show you.

A few minutes of closed-eye breathing in the wings, visualising the first three lines of the speech, does more for my pacing than any amount of note-reading. The eyes need rest before they can lead, and the breath needs a task before it can settle.

Practices that anchor your breath and pace

When I walk out for a corporate event now, whether it is a leadership summit in Canberra or a women's breakfast in another Australian city, I run the same checklist in my head. Breath low. Pace slow. Pause often. Look at the room. Trust that the words will come if the body is calm enough to let them. I also keep a small folder of calm visual material on my phone for the minutes before I am introduced, a small absurd ritual that helps my eyes and my breathing settle at the same time.

Pacing and breathing are not separate skills. They are the same skill, viewed from two different angles. One is what the audience hears. The other is what the audience feels. When they are aligned, a room of strangers can feel like a single, attentive friend. When they are not, even a brilliant script will land flat. The habits below are what carried me from that first night in Melbourne to the stages I work on now.

A handful of practices have proven themselves across thousands of hours of live work. They are simple, repeatable, and unglamorous, which is precisely why they work.

• Bookend every speech with a slow, visible exhale before the first word and after the last.
• Replace the phrase "I'm nervous" with a body action: shoulder rolls, feet planted, jaw unclenched.
• Time your pauses at a full breath. A real pause is roughly two seconds; speakers almost always undershoot.
• Record yourself once a month, not to chase perfection, but to hear the gap between how fast you think you are speaking and how fast you actually are.
• Practise the first sixty seconds of any speech in silence, breath only, before adding words.
• Walk into the room alone for at least three minutes before the audience arrives so the space belongs to you first.
• Keep a small bottle of room-temperature water within reach and use it as a planned breath, not a panic response.