Twelve weeks, one hour a week, in a group of no more than three. You'll speak out loud in every session, and you'll leave with a recording of yourself in week one and week twelve to compare.
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You can. There are good ones, and you'll enjoy it.
Then you'll go back to work, the notes will sit in a drawer, and within a month you'll be roughly where you started. Not because the day was bad, but because you cannot change how somebody speaks under pressure in seven hours and then never see them again. Speaking is a physical habit, and habits change through repetition, spaced out, on real material, with someone correcting you each time.
A one-day course
Twelve weeks with me
Around £495 plus VAT for the day. £1,000 for the twelve weeks. Four times the attention, for a little over half as much again.
I'd make the same argument without the studies, but they happen to agree.
0 RCTs
Coaching for speaking fear works, and it keeps working after it stops.
A meta-analysis of 30 randomised controlled trials and 1,355 people found a clear improvement immediately after training, and a larger one at follow-up. The gains didn't fade once the training ended. They grew.
Nordgreen et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2019
0 studies
Small groups work, and they stop working when they get bigger.
A review of 62 studies found small group teaching delivers around four months of additional progress, and that effectiveness drops off noticeably once groups grow beyond six or seven. Three is comfortably inside the range where it works. Most one-day courses run at six.
Education Endowment Foundation, Teaching and Learning Toolkit
0 assessments
Spacing beats cramming, especially if you want it to last.
The definitive review of 839 assessments across 317 experiments found spaced learning reliably outperforms massed learning, and that the longer you need something to stick, the wider the gaps between sessions should be. A day is the definition of massed practice.
Cepeda et al., Psychological Bulletin, 2006
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And you are not the exception.
In a random sample of 526 adults, 55% named speaking to an audience as a fear. It was the most commonly feared situation tested.
Stein, Walker & Forde, American Journal of Psychiatry, 1994
Not "feel more confident". These are the specific things you'll walk away able to do.
Deliver a full presentation to a live audience without notes.
You'll have done it twice in front of the group, and been filmed both times.
Open any talk in a way that works.
Built, rehearsed and tested on real people, not lifted from a template.
Structure material so people remember it.
A repeatable method that works for a board update, a pitch or a wedding speech.
Steady yourself in the ninety seconds before you stand up.
A specific physical routine, practised until it's automatic.
Handle a hostile question without losing the room.
Rehearsed deliberately, including the question you most dread.
Hear the difference in your own voice.
You get your week-one recording and your week-twelve recording. Most people find the comparison startling.
You keep all of it. The structure, the routine, the recordings.
Your voice, as it actually is
We record everyone speaking before any teaching at all. Uncomfortable, and the most useful hour of the course. It's your baseline.
Breath, and the body under pressure
What adrenaline is doing to you, and how to work with it rather than against it.
Sound
Projection and resonance. Most people are using a fraction of the voice they have.
Pace, pitch and the pause
The three things that make people sound certain, and the reason others talk over you.
Building something worth listening to
Structure. How to make a case that builds instead of wandering.
Openings
The first thirty seconds decide whether the room listens to the rest.
Standing and delivering
Your first full presentation to the group, on your own material, filmed.
Endings
How to land instead of trailing off, and how to be remembered.
The room fights back
Hostile questions, derailment, the one you can't answer.
On camera
Video calls have their own rules. Eye line, framing, and getting in without talking over three people.
When it goes wrong
Technology failing, the mind blanking, losing your thread. Rehearsed, so it's familiar rather than fatal.
Doing it properly
Your final presentation, filmed. Then we watch week one and week twelve side by side.
Sometimes, and if you've a keynote in a fortnight, yes. One-to-one coaching.
But for changing how you come across generally, a group of three does things I can't replicate one-to-one.
You get a real audience. Speaking to me isn't the same as speaking to a room. Here you practise on actual people who are actually watching, every single week.
You discover you're not unusual. Two other capable professionals describing the same dread does more for most people than anything I can say. The shame goes, and it's the shame that keeps people stuck.
You learn from watching. A good deal of what people take away comes from seeing someone else make one small change and hearing the difference instantly.
It costs a fraction of the equivalent hours one-to-one.
Three is the cap, and it isn't a marketing number. Twelve hours between three people is four hours each. At six, it's one.
It's for you if you're a professional, founder or senior leader who's good at your job and tired of that not being obvious the moment you open your mouth. If you've been told you need more "presence" and nobody ever explained what that meant. If you avoid things you'd be good at.
It isn't for you if you want a certificate, a one-day fix, or to watch rather than take part. You will speak out loud in every session from the first week. If that's a dealbreaker, this isn't the right room, and I'd rather say so now than take your money.
Three places per cohort, and I run a small number of cohorts a year. When a cohort is full, it's full.
Life happens — the odd week is no problem. Let me know in advance and I'll send you what we covered plus something to practise in your own time, so you can pick up right where we left off. And if something bigger comes up and you'd miss a real chunk, don't worry: I'll simply move you into a later cohort so you still get the full twelve weeks you paid for. You won't lose your place or your money.
You'll speak in front of two other people who are exactly as nervous as you are, from week one. That's the point, and by week three it stops being frightening.
No. Bring whatever is actually coming up at work. If there's nothing, I'll give you something.
Yes. The meta-analysis above found technology-assisted delivery just as effective, and if your speaking happens on video calls, you're rehearsing in the right medium.
You won't be, and everybody thinks they will be. It's the first thing the group disproves.
Yes, three monthly payments, the first before week one.
If you're not sure whether the group or one-to-one suits you better, book a free twenty-minute call and I'll tell you straight. If the group is right, I'll hold a place while you decide.
Twenty minutes, free. Or email me at sophielwinby@gmail.com with any question at all.