As a Scouser living in Yorkshire I have had a long and laborious relationship with public speaking. Within the first year of teaching in the grassy hills of Huddersfield I learnt that I was going to get nowhere unless I slowed my accent down a touch – yet two years later I still felt the urge to ram a 20 minute presentation in to 5 minutes when speaking to a group of colleagues, covering every strategy and piece of data in exquisite detail but leaving my audience shell shocked in my wake.

However, give me a class of 30 bright-eyed and bushy-tailed students or a hall filled to the rafters with 100+ sets of adolescent eyes and I spoke fluently and without hesitation. But the moment those children turned into adults, the situation changed – all of a sudden I started to reconsider every syllable I pronounced, every point I was about to make and my worthiness to stand in front of them as an educator. My palms became slippy, my skin began to break out into blotches and my accent became thicker and faster with every breath I took, so I limited my place in the spotlight.

Then I started to get the itch to share my practice and discuss my knowledge on topics I had researched to death. But how could I possibly do this when every time I stood in front of a group of adults in a formal manner I lost my cool completely? The whole bumbling, red mess look didn’t quite correlate with what I pictured as a poised expert of their craft.

It was the education community on Twitter that ignited the spark of change for me. I started to share my work with groups of professionals behind the safety of a keyboard and I started to receive compliments for the quality of resources I was producing – because I didn’t have to speak I found confidence in sharing, knowing I could draft and redraft my tweets until they were perfect.

Twitter was where I found WomenEd who taught me the valued message of being ‘10% braver’. It was because of this phrase that I started stepping up to the mark and sharing my expertise in 15 Minute Forums, where up to 30 teachers would come to listen to others present their views, ideas and strategies. When I look back at my first 15 Minute Forum I can’t help but feel proud of myself and yet simultaneously mortified, thinking about how the red blotches crept up towards my face. I must have looked like something out of a 1950s science-fiction horror film.

When I was younger I, naively, had this notion that public speaking was a natural talent that people were born with and I always believed I had it until it came to working in education. I was that student that was always happy to raise my hand and share my opinions in university seminars; which in my eyes was exactly the same as publicly speaking in front of a body of experts. What could people find so difficult about it? Working in education well and truly called my bluff on that one.

Public speaking is not a natural-born talent, it is a skill that is honed and polished through experience and practice. It is this insight that makes me continuously reflect on my delivery and keep putting my hand up to volunteer to present in front of staff and governors.

Although I am not yet the perfect speaker I want to be, I am definitely on the right track. I now deliver a variety of regular CPD from 15 Minute Forums to whole school briefings. Being just a little bit braver each time has certainly given me the confidence to believe in my craft and deliver in a way that is less like a Ludacris rap and more like a calm, knowledgeable professional.

My next step is to work on my facial expressions so I can finally get a decent picture when presenting…