Public speaking is still often taught at the level of surface adjustment.
Speak louder.
Slow down.
Vary your tone.
Use eye contact.
Gesture more.
Try to look confident.
There is nothing especially wrong with any of that. It can help. But it is not where the deepest work lies.
In my own courses and curricula, I have become far less interested in whether someone looks confident. I care much more about whether they are making conscious choices, whether they are present, whether they understand the room, and whether they have a genuine relationship to what they are saying.
That, to me, is the difference between delivery and interpretation.
By interpretation, I mean the ability to understand nuance: the audience in front of you, the culture around the interaction, the context of the moment, and the gap between what you intend and what is actually being received. It also means recognising that small communicative choices are rarely small. Tone, pace, eye contact, over-explaining, reading from a phone, sounding too rehearsed, sounding too certain, sounding oddly unsure. These do not just affect style. They alter meaning. Micro-communication becomes macro-meaning.
This is one reason confidence is overrated. Projecting confidence can steady a room, but people often mistake confidence for authority, and fluency for thought. They are not the same thing. I have listened to highly polished speakers who gave me very little to hold onto, and I have listened to people who were less obviously trained but far more compelling because they meant what they said and stayed alert to the audience in front of them.
One of the most common problems I see is overscripting. People write too much because they are trying to protect themselves from uncertainty. The script becomes a kind of shield. I understand why. Speaking live means risking interruption, silence, ambiguity and misjudgment. A script promises control. But the cost is often high. Speech becomes mechanical. It loses elasticity. It loses contact with the room. At that point, the speaker is no longer really speaking; they are reciting.
I would much rather hear someone speak from a clear grasp of their key message than cling too tightly to perfect wording. If they know what they are trying to say, why it matters to them, and what they believe about it, there is a much better chance of real contact with an audience. If they are only trying to remember the next sentence, the life tends to drain out of the communication.
This is also why self-knowledge matters more than many speaking courses admit. A lot of communication training stays safely external. It deals in volume, pace, gesture and structure. Those things matter, but they are only part of it. The harder questions are often avoided: What do you actually believe? What are you saying because you mean it, and what are you saying because it sounds like the kind of thing one ought to say? What are you hiding behind? What kind of authority are you trying to perform?
Audiences are often more perceptive than speakers assume. They can hear borrowed language. They can feel when certainty is a pose. They can sense when someone is trying very hard to sound impressive. They may not describe it in those terms, but they register the distance.
They also notice more than many speakers realise. They notice when eye contact disappears. They notice when someone keeps looking at their phone. They notice when a speaker over-explains, or when the rhythm has gone dead. In theatre terms, the work becomes airless. Peter Brook’s phrase “deadly theatre” has always stayed with me, and I think something similar happens in speaking when the form is technically competent but no longer alive.
The speakers I remember best are rarely the ones most intent on displaying confidence. They are usually the ones who seem most awake. There is thought in the language, care in the phrasing, and responsiveness in the moment. They are not speaking *at* people. They are making meaning with them.
This feels even more important now. AI can generate polished language very quickly. That does not make human speaking less valuable. If anything, it increases the value of speech that feels inhabited rather than merely fluent. As generated language becomes more common, audiences may become even more sensitive to what feels generic, detached or unmeant.
It is also one reason I think language learning, cultural competence and communication training matter so much. Not as add-ons, and not as corporate slogans, but as ways of becoming more precise about meaning, more alert to context, and less naive about how communication is actually received. In a world shaped by global exchange, mixed audiences and increasingly mediated forms of speech, these are no longer specialist skills. They are part of being understood, and of understanding others, with greater accuracy and care.
For me, then, public speaking is not primarily a confidence exercise. It is an interpretive one. Before we speak, we make choices about audience, context, tone, structure and emphasis. While we are speaking, we go on interpreting: the room, the mood, the signals coming back, the cultural codes in play, and the difference between what we hoped to communicate and what is actually landing.
That is why the strongest speakers are not always the most commanding. They are often the most aware. They understand that communication is not the transfer of information from one person to another. It is a live act of meaning-making, shaped by nuance, context, relationship and response.
Confidence has its place. But I would take interpretive intelligence over the display of certainty every time.
Because public speaking is not just delivery. It is the live, relational work of shaping meaning in the presence of other people.
