I woke up this morning anxious as hell.
Not “a bit nervous.” Not “slightly stressed.” Full-on anxious. Barely functional, sweaty, with a racing heartbeat.
The reason? A presentation. Not even a complex one, just a few minutes walking through the last feature I’d been working on. The same feature already approved and appreciated in reviews. But this time, I had to present it in front of the whole company.
And that was the problem.
I’ve always been terrible at public speaking. I turn red, mumble, speak too fast just to get it over with, and my voice drops lower and lower. If standups with a small team made me nervous, imagine doing it in front of dozens of faces on Teams.
The only solution I know? Preparation. Nothing calms my anxiety more than being over-prepared. I wrote down the key talking points, got them checked by my manager, ran them through an LLM to turn them into a conversational flow, then tweaked them back into my own words. For days, I rehearsed. On walks, at the desk, even scrolling through notes on my phone in random moments. Piece by piece, my confidence grew.
But that lingering discomfort never left. And maybe that’s natural.
Speaking in front of people isn’t impossible, it’s just something I never do. And like anything unfamiliar, it triggers fear. But that fear isn’t useless. It’s a mechanism that forces me to prepare harder, to focus on the details, to push myself into growth. Without it, maybe I’d have skipped rehearsals. Maybe I’d have been sloppy. That edge, annoying as it is, keeps me sharp.
And growth only happens in these uncomfortable places. You can’t shortcut it. You have to go through it.
So how did it go?
The morning was fine. I dropped my daughter at school, took a quick walk in nature, light breakfast. Rehearsed again and felt ready. Then, 15 minutes before the meeting, a small bug popped up. Something that had worked flawlessly in tests broke because of a last-minute commit in another project. Classic.
Somehow, we spotted it, reverted the commit, redeployed the fix, and I joined the call only two minutes late. But my confidence took a hit. My heart pounded through the whole meeting.
When my turn came, I saw all those faces waiting for me to speak, and for a split second, every memory of failed presentations and red-faced mumbling hit me. But then muscle memory kicked in. I spotted familiar faces (my team) and I remembered I wasn’t alone.
I started talking. And you know what? It went great. People loved it. I actually enjoyed it.
I’m not sure there’s a neat moral here. Preparation matters, that’s clear. Fear is uncomfortable but useful. And these moments do shape us, even if they suck in the moment.
But maybe the lesson is this: when you’re in that spot, with your heart pounding and your voice shaking, look for the familiar faces. I’ll be one of them. I’ll clap first. I’ll be in your corner.
Because we all need someone to break the ice.