To imagine a big audience as just 1 person sounds cool, but when I imagine the talks I need to give to a bigger audience, I find it very daunting. I can only hope that I overcome it soon.

I am late 50s and I still find talks overwhelming.

What has worked though is

1. Recordings. Go into zoom, and give a talk with recording on. Listen to yourself, just once per recording but more if you can tolerate your voice :) It shows you your common failure points in black and white so that you can work on them.

2. Presenter notes. During my final talk, I have succeeded when speaking without notes, but to get there I need notes. I write my script as presenter notes (in Mac Keynote). Because of ADHD or whatever, as I am speaking, new ideas pop up. Every single time. In early rehearsals, I pause immediately, update the notes first and then go back and rehearse. After a dozen iterations, sometimes 30 iterations, the edits disappear, you learn to live with what you finalized already. Also once you narrate it 30 times, you have all kinds of memory maps sorted out in your brain, so even if you derail, you mind does have the information. I have seen some people have presenter notes in bullet forms, does not work for me. In the beginning I need my speech written out.

3. Rehearsals. The 30 rehearsals I mentioned. Figure out what you need. 5 or 50? You will know when you are ready. Once you have your magic number, stick to it. Maybe 25 becomes 20, but do not short change yourself by saying ... no I can wing it.

4. The morning of. I have tried 2 approaches. One is just open the deck and speak through the notes in your head. No recording. No zoom. No notes. Your mind should have it. OR not even deck. Just close your eyes, I am usually on a recliner (do not nod off) and run the narration in your head. Mistakes ... happen

5. Seating. Most of our presentations are in conference room settings but with remote viewers. Sometimes they are purely on video. Figure out the setup and rehearse 1-2 rounds in live mode. If you will be in a conference room, find one similar and rehearse once in that setting. If you will be seated and speaking to local + remote audience, try to visualize that as you present. It never feels the same with live audience, but it does give you some muscle memory.

6. Timing and Clickability. Transitions sometimes take more (or less clicks) than you envisioned. Practice them. If you are given 3 minutes, or 30, time yourself so that you know how far are you. Sometimes you need to be pitch perfect, but sometimes you can tolerate 10%. If I am at 10% variance, I stop fine tuning. As people ask questions, small variations can be tackled.

If someone else is sharing the screen and you are just speaking, rehearse that with them, because "next slide" handoff gets tiring very soon. To help them, add a line [ Click ] in the notes so that they know the click is coming when you get to a specific speech.

7. Screen setup. Over time, I am learning to speak from my mind (or heart). But the notes are there. I work on Mac Keynote, so there is a presentation mode where I can see what is on screen now, and what will be on screen next as soon as I click. The notes are there but they are only a last resort. If you are familiar with what is on screen, and what is coming next, you do not need to look at the conference room screen, OR any other window. These are usually enough to tell what you need. I make them the maximum size possible - do note that I have 2 screens side by side (current and next) so their sizes are still small on a laptop window, but having the biggest size I can get allows me to interpret fine variations - sometimes the next click makes only a small change, so having them visible helps.

8. Notifications off. Do not look at notifications. Ignore them. It is hard, but do it. 2 presentations back, one notification disrupted me so bad, I choked. I read the notification, it was at the beginning of session and someone just saying "sorry for joining late" and by the time I read it, my mind had disconnected. I started reading from the notes and never recovered from there. Maybe part of it was that I was not prepared - I did not have the 30 rehearsals. We did the work in 3 days, and 3 days was not enough for me to iterate on the slides, rehearse, have notes ... so when the chokepoint happened, my brain could not take it. But notifications is what triggered the disruption (of a bad kind).

Hopefully it helps