Presuming that at least part of your job requires you to stand up (or maybe sit down) in front of people and transfer some kind of information into their noggins, I think this handful of tips will be useful to you. Aside from the clarity of the content that you’re delivering, how you’re delivering it needs to be carefully considered. Make eye contact and keep your eyes in motion, plant your feet when you’re stationary, don’t stand with your arms crossed, adopt an open posture, move toward the audience whenever you can and don’t prance around up there.

When you’re speaking, slow down and pause. Those breaks, with silence – particularly after you’ve made a key point and delivered something that you really want people to remember – send messages. During that pause, make eye contact with five or six different people in various parts of the room before you start again.

Almost no one that I know likes the sound of their own voice, but learning to use your voice well adds volumes to your ability to transfer information into people’s heads in a credible way. How you sound greatly influences your credibility and the validity of your message, and that requires, first, just being heard. When you’re speaking, address the person farthest away from you in the room. If they can’t easily hear you, speak up! Or better yet, use a microphone – and learn how to use one. Your diction, modulation, comfort, breathing and pauses are all components that make you sound more or less interesting and believable. It’s all learnable and has almost nothing to do with whether or not you just happen to like the sound of your own voice.

It’s ok if speaking in front of people still gives you butterflies, even if you’ve done it a thousand times. But to manage those little fluttering rascals, know and keep coming back to the key point that you want to make, and keep pointing your other messages back to that key point. Turn your facts and data into a story. You need to describe what it looks like; put them in the place or situation, help them see and feel it. Don’t deliver a speech that was written for someone to just read. People need to hear your description and see you present it, preferably with pictures to back it up. Practice your description with people who are as much like your audience as you can find, slow down and breathe, and when you do screw up, and you will occasionally, stop, breathe and pick it up. Most of them haven’t even noticed.