When I was 16, I moved to a much better school for sixth form and was asked to speak in front of the class. I remember holding a sheet of paper and watching my hand shake. A boy I didn’t much like noticed and made fun of it, and I decided there and then that I would never speak in front of people again. I managed to avoid it until university.

I have since spoken at hundreds of events, and I am as nervous now as I was that day. My heart races, my breathing goes wrong, and I still never hold paper on stage because it would shake. But nobody in the audience can see any of that. From where they sit, a speaker who feels confident and a speaker who is acting confident look exactly the same.

There are two types of speakers: those that get nervous and those that lie about not getting nervous. The confident ones have simply learned to hide their tells, and something interesting happens when you do. The psychologist William James noticed it in 1899, in an essay called The Gospel of Relaxation. We can’t simply decide how to feel, he wrote, but we can decide how to act, and the feeling tends to follow: “So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.” The boy with the shaking sheet of paper never went away. He just learned to act, and no audience has ever known the difference.