Dave Worden recommends Toastmasters clubs and volunteering to read at church as free ways to practice public speaking. He describes his own terror reading aloud at church, mispronouncing words, then improving through repetition and slower pacing. Most audiences want you to succeed, and people forget your mistakes fast.
Toastmasters are local clubs and it's a group of people, 5, 10, or 20 people, and you go out to a dinner together and each person has to make a 5-minute toast. And maybe it's 2 minutes and sometimes it's 10 and maybe they feature someone, but everyone speaks every single time and you break some bread together and then you do it again. Very economical, very powerful way to learn in front of an audience. But I'll give you an even cheaper way. At our church, that little Rockaway Valley church down here, I went to the pastor, said, Pastor, do you mind if I do the readings? And he's like, my gosh, we've been looking for someone. He's like, this is divine. I said, oh, great, great. It's divine because I feel called to asked to do it because I'm terrified to do it. I was in my early 20s and I got chills. I was in front of 20 people and I'm up there and I'm reading through it and I'm mispronouncing names. I didn't like rehearse it. I just started reading. I'm like, how do you pronounce these names? So it was horrible. Like I didn't even know how to pronounce Jesus. But on time 10 or time 20, I started getting better. I spoke a little slower. I actually learned to breathe a little bit more. I got more and more comfortable doing it. I realized at the end of the day, the audience for any group does want you to succeed. They're like, I want to learn something or you're doing something that I feel nervous to do. You have a degree of support behind you. They want you to win. The last thing I noticed is at the end of the day, no one remembers really. Generally, you can flub, you can mess up, you can be great. People really won't remember much about it because life goes on. So it ain't that big of a deal.
