Wedding speech nerves, and the ten minutes before

Your hands shake. Your mouth dries out, your voice comes out higher than it does in the kitchen, and about thirty seconds in you become certain that the speech you wrote is terrible. All of that is normal, and none of it is information about the speech. Your body has correctly noticed that ninety people are looking at you, and has poured adrenaline into you for a fight that is not going to happen.

The fixes are physical too. Hold the paper, so your hands have a job. One drink, then water. Pick four faces and talk to those. Breathe out for longer than you breathe in, stand, wait two seconds, and start slower than you want to. Each is below, plus a countdown for the last ten minutes, which is the part almost nobody plans. None of it is role-specific: the best man with four minutes of jokes and a mother of the bride with two paragraphs are up against the same chemistry.

What nerves actually do to a speech

Freezing is rare. What adrenaline really does is speed you up.

The pauses go first, and that matters most for the jokes, because a joke needs a gap after it. Adrenaline eats the gap, the room never gets its beat, you hear silence, you decide the line died, and you go faster still. By the middle you are just reading.

Your volume also drops away at the end of every sentence, so the last three or four words of each line never reach the back of the room. And you stop looking up at all.

The drink

Somebody will tell you to have a couple to settle your nerves. That advice is half right.

One drink takes the shake off your hands and does very little else. Two takes off the things you need: your timing, your read of the room, your willingness to stay on the page, and your sense of how long you have been talking. You feel steadier and you are worse. You will run longer than you practised, and there is a fair chance you say the line that got cut, which got cut for a reason.

If you are the groom, watch the arithmetic. A glass at the drinks reception, another during the photographs and wine with the meal is not one drink by the time you stand up.

Eat something. One drink if you want it, then water. Put a full glass in front of you at the meal and keep it there.

Your hands

Hands with no job invent one. Pockets, cuffs, the stem of a glass, the edge of the tablecloth. Movement is the first thing an audience notices, and a fidget reads as fear even when your voice is fine.

Give them the paper. Holding your speech is better than holding nothing, even if you know every word of it. Both hands get a job, the fidget stops, and any tremble goes into the page where it is harder to see.

The paper itself matters. Use card, or at least thick paper: a single sheet of thin A4 shakes visibly and a small stack does not. Hold it low, around chest height, rather than up near your chin where it covers your mouth.

Not your phone. The screen dims, the notifications arrive, and from the back of the room it looks like you are reading a text message.

Where to look

The old advice is to look at the back wall, above everyone's heads. It works, in that you will get through it, and it makes you look like you are addressing a car park.

Pick four faces instead, spread around the room, people already on your side: your partner, your mum, the friend who laughs at everything, whoever you were most pleased to see arrive. Give one whole sentence to one face before moving to the next, rather than sweeping your eyes across the room.

Two faces to avoid. The one who can make you laugh with an eyebrow, and the one person you are anxious about: you will keep checking them, they will keep having a neutral face, and you will read that as a verdict.

For the sincere paragraph, look at the couple. It is much easier to say something loving into a face than into a room.

The breathing that works

"Take a deep breath" is not quite it. Big breaths in, with no long breath out to match, leave you light-headed, and light-headed feels exactly like panic.

Longer out than in is the one that works. In through the nose for a count of four, out through the mouth for a count of eight. Four rounds. You can do it sitting down and nobody at the table will notice.

Then one more once you are standing and the room is settling. Starting a speech on an empty tank is why first lines come out high and fast.

The ten minutes before

This is the part that goes wrong. People rehearse the speech for a fortnight and give no thought to the ten minutes before they stand up.

First, know when you are on. Ask whoever is running the room (the best man, the toastmaster, the venue coordinator) to warn you two speakers out. If you are not sure where you fall, the usual running order for wedding speeches will tell you.

Ten minutes out

Go to the loo. Last chance, and needing it is a distraction you cannot reason with. Run your wrists under the cold tap while you are there.

Eight minutes

Half a glass of water. Then read two sentences: your opening line and your toast. Not the whole speech. Read the whole thing now and you will find something to change, and a line changed at eight minutes is a line you say out loud for the first time in front of everyone. First sentence and last sentence. The middle is on the paper.

Five minutes

Get the pages out and put them in front of you, the right way up. Not in an inside pocket you will have to pat yourself down for. Check the order.

Three minutes

Breathing. Four rounds, out longer than in. Drop your shoulders, unclench your jaw, let your hands hang loose for a moment.

One minute

Move your chair back a few inches so that standing up is not a scrape and a stumble. Decide which of your four faces gets the first sentence.

Standing up

Stand, then wait. Two full seconds of saying nothing while the room turns round and the chatter drops away. Do not start talking on the way up, which is what almost everyone does. Then the first line, deliberately slower than you want to say it. Adrenaline has already reset your sense of pace, so whatever speed feels right, go under it.

If you lose your place

You might. It is survivable, and two things turn it into a non-event.

The first is the page itself. Format it for a person whose hands are shaking. 14 point or bigger, double spaced, one beat per block, a blank line between blocks, printed on one side only. Never let a sentence break across a page. Short sentences, so that when your eye comes back down it lands somewhere obvious:

I met Tom in 2009. He was wearing a coat he had found. He is still wearing it.

The second is what you do in the moment. Stop, look down, find it, and say nothing while you look. A silence you are standing inside feels a minute long. From a chair it is three seconds and reads as a pause. If you want words, one flat line does it:

Right. Where was I.

Say it once and carry on. Do not apologise for it: the apology is what makes a room notice something it had otherwise let pass, and a second one turns it into a running theme.

Reading it is fine

Nobody at a wedding minds that you are reading. The idea that you have to know it by heart is borrowed from a different kind of speaking, and memorising is what creates the blank moment people are frightened of: a memorised speech has no page to fall back on.

Learn your first sentence. Learn your toast. Read everything in between and look up at the end of each sentence, and the reading stops being the thing anyone notices. Settle this early if you are giving the father of the bride speech. A fortnight spent learning lines is a fortnight not spent practising the delivery.

Practise out loud, standing up

Reading it in your head is not practice. It tells you nothing about where you will run out of breath or which word you cannot get your mouth around.

Read it aloud, standing, at least three times, at the speed you will actually go. Anything you stumble on twice, change the word. If a sentence needs a second breath in the middle, cut it in half.

Time it while you do. The number you get at home is not the number on the day: nerves push the words out faster, but the room hands that time straight back in laughter, in the wait for a table to settle, in the moment somebody's glass goes over. Five minutes in your kitchen is nearer six in the room. Build the gap in now rather than finding it live. How long a best man speech should be has the target lengths and the word counts.

If part of the dread is that you do not think you are funny, that is a separate problem with its own answer: a maid of honour speech when you are not the funny one. Comedy pressure and nerves feed each other, and deciding early that the maid of honour speech will be warm rather than hilarious takes a lot of weight off you.

None of this fixes a speech that is not written yet. If that is where you are, start with the questions first.

Afterwards

You will not remember much of it, and nobody warns you, so you sit down with a blur and a firm conviction that you rushed it and the second joke fell flat.

Ask someone to film it on a phone, from the side of the room and low down, and to keep going through the toast. Watch it a week later, not that night. The pauses you were sure you missed are usually in the recording, and the bit you thought raced past is usually normal speed.