You walk up. Your legs shake a little. Your hands shake a little. Your voice comes out thinner than it does in your own head. Somebody afterwards tells you that you just need more confidence, and you nod, because what else are you going to say.

I want to argue with the name itself. We call it stage fear, and that name sends everybody looking in the wrong place.

The fear is not the stage. The fear is the act you are performing on the stage.

Take a musician who plays guitar well. Put him on a stage in front of a thousand people and he will play. He has practised it. He knows what to expect, he knows what to do, he knows how to do it. He might even enjoy it.

Now hand the same man a tabla and ask him to play that instead. Same stage. Same thousand people. Same man. He will not be fine.

Nothing about the stage changed. What changed is whether he knew what he was doing. That is the whole thing, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

So when your hands shake, the useful question is not how do I become a more confident person. It is what exactly am I about to do up there, and do I actually know how to do it.

At the Asian Institute of Management, class participation is part of your grade. It is not optional and it is not small. You are expected to argue, in a room full of people who will pull your logic apart if it is weak.

I did not participate. Not once, for a long time. I sat there with things to say and said none of them.

When I finally did have to present, people used to ask whether I was rapping. That is how fast I spoke. Not because I had a lot to cover. Because I wanted to be off that stage, and the fastest way off a stage is to finish.

I did not fix that by reading about confidence. I fixed it by presenting, then presenting again, then presenting again, badly, in front of the same people, until it stopped costing me anything.

The first is preparation, and I mean real preparation, not rehearsal of your opening line. When you genuinely know the subject, most of the fear has nowhere to live. Ask me to go on a stage and talk about a topic I have not thought about, and I will want to get off it. Ask me to talk about something I have actually done, and I will talk.

Watch what happens with a subject you love. Somebody who follows cricket properly will talk about cricket in front of anybody. No trembling, no notes, no breathing exercises. The knowledge is doing the work that confidence was supposed to do.

The second is going up more often, on purpose. This part has no shortcut and nobody wants to hear it. You raise your hand first. You volunteer. You take the presentation nobody wants. Each time it is slightly less expensive than the last, and that is the only mechanism I have ever seen work, in myself or in anyone else.

Pick the next thing you have to speak at. A meeting, a review, a call where you usually stay on mute.

Then do two things. Know the material so well that you could answer a question you were not expecting, because being asked something you did not prepare for is the specific moment everyone is afraid of. And say one thing out loud in that room, early, before the fear has time to build a case.

It will not feel good the first time. It is not supposed to. It is supposed to be slightly less bad than the time before.

This is Module 15 of the First Drop, and it sits late in the course on purpose. By the time we reach stage fear we have already spent fifteen modules on the fears underneath it, because the shaking hands are a symptom and the fear of being judged is the cause.

The course is sixteen recorded conversations, in Tinglish, a mix of Telugu and English. Not a lecture. My own team sits in the room and asks the questions you would be too embarrassed to ask, and you hear what I say when I have not prepared an answer.