You've been saying no to things that would have helped.
The panel, the conference talk, the toast. You told yourself it wasn't important. It was, and you knew.
“Um, hi, yeah — so, can everyone hear me? Great. So I'm going to talk today a little bit about, um, some of the work we've been doing —”
“Two years ago we deleted the feature that made us most of our money. I want to tell you why that was right.”
The first forty words are throat-clearing that trains the room to wait. The second sentence gives them a reason to stay.
It shows up as speed. You talk faster than you mean to, lose your place, and hear your own voice go flat — and the flatter it gets the faster you go.
You watched yourself back once, and never again. That single decision is why nothing has improved since.
The advice is always "get more reps" — which requires an audience, which is exactly the thing you're avoiding. That's the trap, and it's the one thing that can actually be removed.
Say it out loud. Get scored 0–100. Hear exactly what to fix — down to the word.
Scroll through. Count how many you recognise.
The number of people is the only variable that changed, which tells you the problem isn't your material and isn't your knowledge. It's the specific physical experience of being looked at while thinking.
One session a day. Not a warm-up — the deep end.
You need reps, and reps need a room.
So here's a room where nobody's watching.
Practise the opening — free