Dry Mouth and Determination
My first time speaking at the BDIA Dental Showcase.
I am standing on stage at the ExCeL London, doing my best impression of someone who is completely fine. My hands need something to do, and the presentation clicker is bearing the full consequences of that. I've taken multiple sips of water. My mouth is still dry. I'm regretting last night's pizza, and this morning's pizza, and possibly my entire relationship with pizza. Somewhere in the audience are colleagues, ex-students, friends, and a significant number of people I have never met in my life, all of whom have made the reasonable assumption that I know what I'm doing up here. Reader, I am not sure that I do.
Let me explain. A few weeks ago, my colleague Jane Cuthbert (mentor, hero, person I would genuinely do almost anything for) asked if I could cover her presentation at the BDIA Showcase. On medical emergencies, as it happened. My initial response was hesitation. My eventual response was yes, because it's Jane, and you don't say no to Jane.
What followed was several days of preparation, mild dread, and the gradual, uncomfortable realisation that I had agreed to stand on a stage in front of strangers and talk into a microphone, something that dental professionals, as a rule, are not exactly trained for. We are comfortable behind a clinical mask. We are very good behind a clinical mask. The microphone is a different proposition entirely.
To manage this, I mentally recast the whole thing as a superhero identity shift. Dental nurse to public speaker: not a loss of self, just a change of costume. Batman doesn't stop being Batman when he puts on the dinner jacket and becomes Bruce Wayne. Same person, different context, significantly less utility belt. This reframe helped more than it probably should have.
The preparation itself was extensive, occasionally absurd, and ultimately the thing that saved me. My first instinct with the slides was to include everything, every detail, every acknowledgement, every piece of evidence that I had done the reading. This was the wrong instinct. An overloaded set of slides doesn't demonstrate knowledge; it buries it. I stripped things back. Clinical images. Clear diagrams. Simplified templates. The slides became a framework to hang the talk on, not a script to hide behind. If the audience could have just read the deck and gone home, I'd have missed the point entirely.
Practising out loud was what helped me, and not always in a good way. Things that seemed perfectly paced in my head turned out to be anything but when spoken into the air of my living room. I was racing through a thirty-minute presentation in just over twenty minutes. The gap had to be filled somehow, and so I did what any reasonable person would do:slowed it down and allowed myself to ramble a bit. Out came references to K-Pop Demon Hunters and angry pandas. Don't ask. It worked. I landed on twenty-eight minutes, which I am choosing to call, a triumph.
I also made a list of every word or phrase that tripped me up in rehearsal; the tongue-twisters, the clinical terminology that turned treacherous under pressure, and used each one as a cue to slow down. "Back slaps" was on that list. I’ll be honest, none of this repetitive rehearsal made the nerves disappear entirely. If anything, they built steadily in the days before and peaked somewhere around the moment I walked onto the stage and thought, very clearly: why did I agree to this?
The physiological response was very disproportionate. Elevated heart rate. Shallow breathing. A heightened alertness more suited to an actual emergency than to a presentation about what to do in one. My opening slide, although rehearsed dozens of times, felt suddenly unfamiliar, like something I'd borrowed from someone more qualified.
What got me through that moment was a reframe I've found genuinely useful since: anxiety isn't the opposite of readiness, it's a version of it. The racing heart, the sharpened focus, that's the body preparing to perform. The goal isn't to eliminate it. The goal is to work with it. A few slow, deliberate breaths. A chat with a friendly face beforehand. The reminder that I was in a room full of colleagues who wanted the talk to go well, not an audience assembled to catch me out.
This, I think, is something dental nurses understand more than we realise. We step into high-pressure moments all the time. Whether it’s managing an anxious patient, supporting a complex procedure, making a quick decision when there's no time to second-guess. We're often more capable than we give ourselves credit for. That gap between actual competence and perceived competence has a name - imposter syndrome. It is remarkably common among people who are, by any objective measure, very good at what they do.
Once I started speaking, something shifted. Not immediately, the first few minutes I was self-conscious, slightly too aware of my own voice. But the structure I'd built in rehearsal created momentum, and momentum, it turns out, is most of the battle. One section led naturally to the next. The effort became something closer to instinct. I was a bit slow changing the slide at one point. I adjusted. The world did not end. Hurrah.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I looked up and noticed people nodding. Taking notes. Making eye contact in the way that means yes, this is useful, keep going. That was the moment it stopped feeling like a performance and started feeling like a conversation. The audience wasn't cataloguing my mistakes, they were listening for something they could take back to their practice. Once I understood that, the pressure dropped considerably.
What followed was, unexpectedly, the best part. The conversations with familiar and new faces afterwards. Informal, enthusiastic, genuinely engaged were more valuable than anything that had happened on the stage. People talked about how the content connected to situations they'd actually been in. Questions came up that I hadn't anticipated, and I’ll admit I didn’t know all the answers, but I easily referred them to people far wiser than myself. That's what dissemination is actually for; not the delivery, but the ripple of ideas afterwards like the aftershock of an earthquake. Knowledge shared in a room doesn't stay in the room. It travels back into clinics, into practice, into the next time someone needs to make a quick decision and finds they already know the answer.
The experience was not a cure for stage fright; the nerves haven't disappeared, and I don't expect they will. But they feel less like a warning and more like a signal, a Bat signal perhaps, but something that says “this matters, pay attention” which is a much more useful thing for them to be. Knowing what I know now, would I do it again? In a heartbeat.
For anyone sitting with a similar invitation in their inbox, wondering whether they're ready: a few things I'd offer.
Reduce your slide content. I know, it’s your safety blanket. One clear message, well-delivered, is better than the audience has stopping reading by slide four. Learn to treat each subject as a conversation rather than a script, it takes the pressure off and feels more natural.
Practise out loud, not in your head. The gap between the two is where timing disasters live. I was surprised how different the presentation was in length when I compared reading in my head to saying it out loud.
Get used to the nerves. They mean you care. Use that. These tips will help get rid of some of the nerves but I can guarantee there will be some there. Treat yourself to a calming Chai latte beforehand, wear a nice soft outfit, get comfortable as much as possible so when the nerves come, you’re ready.
Talk to someone beforehand. A familiar face, a quick conversation, it puts you back in the room rather than inside your own head. Plus everyone needs a hype person!
Stay for the conversations afterwards. That's where the real value is. Plus, you need to hear all about how much of an amazing job you did.
