All high school and college students have to prepare for public speaking at some points in their lives. Lack of commitment to public speaking can result in anxiety for a lot of people. Speakers experience numbness from the terror of communicating in front of a large audience. It’s quite common to feel your pulse rising lot of students end up speaking so fast that the other person fails to comprehend the gist of the speech. That leaves a lot of room for awkwardness and silence.

So how can one learn to manage public speaking skills to get rid of anxiety? Some people suggest simple hacks such as a confident body language, speak in a deeper tone and slowly and the most foolish is picturing the audience in their underwear. It should be the last thing that anyone should do during a talk. These hacks may work for people with minor speaking issues but those who experience serious public speaking anxiety before events need more than just hacks.

In case you have experienced the following, there is a change that you go through performance anxiety prior to a talk:

• Trembling
• Shortness of breath
• Dizziness
• Muscle tension
• Rapid heart rate
• Sweating
• Blushing
• Upset stomach
• Clammy hands
• Confusion or losing all thoughts
• Shaky voice

Most of the people experience public speaking anxiety. Here are some ways that can help you fight through numb hands and manage performance anxiety in the best possible manner.

Know the Stuff

Knowing all the points and details is perhaps the most important part of managing anxiety at a graduate and professional level. Puffing and lowering your voice won’t get you anywhere, especially when you don’t know the basic material.

Make sure that you get enough time to go over the material before the talk. The best tip that we can give you is connect one slide to another. Form a structure that connects the last point on the slide to the next topic on the slide. Practice these transitions and you will not get lost during the talk.

Notes are Important

Even if you know the entire project from inside out, it is a healthy practice to carry some notes in your hand. It can either be a general outline, important points or citations of the experiment. You can either to do it the traditional way on a piece of paper or on the presenter section of PowerPoint.

Managing the response of Anxiety

Sometimes no preparation about the project can lead to an innate response during public speaking. If you are able to stop your innate responses, then you can manage them easily. The audience never has a clue that your hands are numb and regardless of how bad you deliver the talk, they won’t kill you with pitchforks. When you experience such a response, tell yourself that these feelings don’t mean anything and can’t stop you from giving a great talk. It will take you some time to master this trick but eventually you will get better at it.

Hope these important tips will work for you. Public speaking anxiety is a common problem but it can go away if tackled the right way. Thus, you need to get rid of it as soon as you can. Just believe that it is something that you can conquer like you used to when you were a little kid. You are stronger than anymore and thus, we believe that you can rid of public speaking anxiety. Try the above mentioned to get tricks and tips to actually fall asleep without staying up too late.

All graduate students have unpleasant things to say about literature review. The process is not very exciting. When you are done with the literature review and move on to collecting the data and research, there is never enough time update literature review. If you stop searching for frequent articles and journals doesn’t mean the research world stopped publishing. In the time it takes for you to complete the research, articles will be published and you will eventually have to go back to the daunting task of updating the research. Here are some efficient strategies for keeping up with the never-ending literature review when it’s not your number one priority. These efficient tips will also help you in the real world after graduation. So, here we go:

Related Articles to your Thesis

It’s important to track search terms in the process of literature review process. When you are busy with other parts of the thesis, it’s good to set up automatic searches. It allows you to enter keywords and you receive an email regarding all the latest papers with your standard keywords. If your search engine doesn’t support the feature of weekly emails, then try out Scopus and PubMed. The biggest advantage of tracking search terms is that you will get the most of the up to date research.

Articles not directly related to your study

The above strategy that we discussed is limited to searching related articles and general methods with different techniques. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds for journals related to your field of study. If you are not connected to the university server, then you can read all the abstracts in the Table of Contents. They don’t change very often however; you need to figure out a way to check the ones from the press. They are updated frequently. You can use Google Reader or the Pulse app on iPad for browsing. Another technique is to find a listserv related to your main topic.

Media Coverage

We generally give priority to scholarly work, it’s good to track all the major headlines related to your work. They can be valuable in guiding you how the general public perceive your field. Skygrid for iPad is a great way to start. It lets you enter keywords and you can receive article headlines. This isn’t the most perfect app because search results are often too broad; you will get the basic idea. Articles from different news outlets will come your way and you will get to know what’s trending. Keeping up with Twitter feeds also helps in covering media grounds for research.

No matter what tricks or tricks you use to keep your literature review updated, remember two things: don’t check it too often because you have other tasks too and try to automate the searches as much as possible. Following these simple guidelines you can the literature review process less painful as you reach the finish line!

Books are the most trustworthy and amazing partners in the world. We all should learn from our mistakes, but great are the people who learn from others mistakes. Books help us extract messages and lessons that we could learn without making any mistakes.

They say you become what you read and if you wish to build a successful company where you get to call all the shots, you might want to start following some specific books.

Here are some of our top recommendations for this season:

1. “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand

Some of the well-known entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban, a self-made billionaire and Charlie O’Donnell, partner of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures recommend this book to every entrepreneur.

It sums up entrepreneurial passion better than any other book. The real question is not who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.

2. “The Effective Executive” by Peter Drucker

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon made his senior managers in the company read this book for the all-day book club. It is among the three books that he recommended his managers to read.

In this book, Druker helped to visualize ideas about today’s management in the workplace. For example, it was pointed out that the employers and managers should work together towards common goals.

The Effective Management is the best book that explores decision making habits and time management that helps business executives to be productive and helps the organization to move forward.

3. “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen

Another book that Jeff Bezzos had his senior managers read was The Innovator’s Dilemma. It is one of the most influential books of all time related to business.  It is also of the top pick of many VCs and founders all over the world.

In this book, Christensen discloses why large companies act like a dinosaurs. He also proposed solutions in this book. Thus, entrepreneurs must give it a read as one of those how to books to beat large companies as competitors in their own markets and industries.

The book does not revolve around one single idea. However, it does focus largely on a misused phrase “disruptive technology”.

4. “Business Adventures” by John Brooks

This book is a collection of stories based in New York by John Brooks. It is Bill Gates all-time favorite business book since 1991.

Bill Gates says that the book is all about strengths and weaknesses in the challenging business world. However, all the circumstances are still relevant regardless of the time and age.

5. “Benjamin Franklin” by Walter Isaacson

Benjamin Franklin is an all-time favorite book of the Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk. He shares that Franklin, the main character in the book started from nothing and became an entrepreneur. He was just a runaway kid and turned his life around.