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The emotional stages every speaker goes through don't disappear with experience. In fact, one of the most reassuring patterns I’ve seen after coaching thousands of speakers is that the emotional stages tend to remain remarkably consistent. The faces and contexts change, but the internal weather is often the same. The goal, then, isn’t to avoid these feelings or to treat them as proof you shouldn’t be on a stage. The goal is to recognize them, understand what they’re doing, an

Rhetoric is the history and practice of non-fiction storytelling. Storytelling is about creating a narrative where you take the audience from point a to point z. And rhetoric is how you get them there. Most people think that Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric is “persuasion.” But that’s only partly true. Rhetoric is “the ability to find the available means of persuasion in any given situation.” Rhetoric isn’t focused on the result … because you can’t control what the result w