accepting that nerves and anxiety are a part of life.

how to be powerful in your speaking.

Watch how Susan Cain does this in her TED Talk. First she talks about how it was for her when she turned up at summer camp as a shy child with a suitcase of books. She moves swiftly into discussing statistics and research about how we treat shy people in society. Good speakers move easily and quickly between the personal and the universal.

The other great lesson to take from Virginia Woolf is her attitude to failure, which was extremely open. She recognized that it was necessary to go through a lot of self-doubt and self-examination before you could say anything that really mattered.

You don’t have to be perfect, we learn. You just have to be a plausible, comfortable version of yourself, even if that isn’t perfectly poised.

—Your pace is a big part of how you engage an audience. It’s as much about how fast or slow you choose to go as it is about how much you are listening to them, watching them and registering if they are following you.

You just need to say what you came to say, without getting caught up in doubt and fear.

But she too ‘allows’ herself to make mistakes, to say ‘um’, to let some of her anecdotes look spontaneous and under-rehearsed.

She also includes a number of ‘markers’ in her speech to direct our attention and link her thoughts. ‘Which brings me to this …’; ‘What I know for sure …’ These moments give us time to take in what she’s talking about and give her time to breathe.