I'm not a great public speaker, but what always worried me about something like Toastmasters is you're learning public speaking from other people who are also faking it.
Exactly. Toastmasters is good for bright working class people with limited education who find themselves in competition with college graduates for advancement in corporate settings. This is a very common situation in the U.S. where corporate opportunity is more fluid than in other regions.
It is fairly useless if you’ve already had to give presentations at university, or trade shows.
Honestly, other than being comfortable with your material, I'm not sure you can really prepare for getting up on stage in front of 100s or 1000s of people.
Most of us should probably do proper dress rehearsals more. I always mentally walkthrough a presentation a few times but I often don't do an actual run-through--except those times when I miss switching the video on for a recorded presentation :-) And it really does help. I always make some changes if I'm giving a presentation more than once.
Record yourself. We all have both speech and physical tics.
That said, I've done this a lot. And the bar to getting materially better was probably a bunch of professional voice coaching and speaker training years ago.
