Somewhere along the way, we decided that communication is a personality trait. You’re either a “good communicator” or you’re not. Extroverts have it. Introverts don’t. Some people are “naturals” at public speaking and the rest of us just white-knuckle through it.
This is, to put it academically, nonsense.
Communication is a skill. It has fundamentals. It has technique. It responds to practice the same way a golf swing or a deadlift does — poorly at first, then with increasing precision and eventually with something that looks like ease to anyone who doesn’t know what they’re watching.
I studied communication at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. What struck me most wasn’t the theory — though the theory matters — it was the revelation that every element of human communication is a choice. Word selection, pacing, emphasis, structure, silence. Persuasion isn’t magic. It’s architecture. You can study it, deconstruct it, and rebuild it with intention.
That realization changed how I think about my career, my relationships, and how I show up in a room.
The Lifelong Practice
I’m a Solution Engineer at Microsoft. My job is to stand in front of executives, IT leaders, and operational teams and demonstrate how technology solves their specific problems. I’ve been doing this for years, and I want to be clear about something: I am not done getting better at it.
Every demo is a communication event. Every discovery call is rhetoric in action. Every follow-up email is persuasive writing with real money on the line. The idea that you “learn to present” once in college and then you’re set is like saying you went to the gym in 2014 so you’re fit for life.
This is why I practice every week through Toastmasters. Not because I can’t give a presentation — I can. But because the gap between competent and compelling is where careers are made, and that gap only closes with deliberate, repeated practice in front of people who will tell you the truth.
Toastmasters gives you something rare in professional life: a low-stakes environment to take high-stakes risks. Try a new opening. Experiment with pausing longer than feels comfortable. Attempt a story you’re not sure will land. Fail. Adjust. Try again next week.
You can’t get that in a client meeting. The stakes are too high. So you practice where the stakes are low, and you perform where they’re high. Athletes understand this intuitively. Professionals somehow forgot it.
Five Things Worth Practicing
If I had to distill years of studying, practicing, and professionally communicating down to five things worth training, it would be these:
1. Speak from an outline, not a script.
Over-rehearsal kills authenticity. When you memorize a talk word-for-word, you’re not communicating — you’re performing a recitation. The audience can feel the difference. Instead, know your key points cold and let the language be live. An outline gives you structure without rigidity. It lets you respond to the room, adjust on the fly, and sound like a human being having a conversation rather than a teleprompter wearing a blazer. The best communicators look unrehearsed. They’re not — they’ve just practiced at a higher level than memorization.
2. Internalize value statements — articulate the why, not the what.
Nobody cares what your product does until they understand why it matters to them. “Our platform automates approval workflows” is a feature. “Your team gets two days back every month and you stop losing deals to bottlenecks” is value. The shift from what to why is the single biggest unlock in professional communication. But it doesn’t happen naturally — you have to practice translating features into outcomes until it becomes your default mode of speaking. When a client asks “what does this do?” and your instinct is to answer with impact instead of functionality, you’ve internalized it.
3. Get comfortable with silence.
Most people rush to fill pauses. They “um” and “so” and “basically” their way through transitions because silence feels like failure. It’s not. A deliberate pause after a key point is the most powerful punctuation in spoken communication. It tells the room: that thing I just said matters. Sit with it. Silence gives your audience time to process. It gives you time to think. And it projects a confidence that rapid-fire delivery never will. Practice pausing for two full seconds after important statements. It will feel like an eternity at first. It looks like authority from the audience’s chair.
4. Read the room and adjust in real time.
A talk is not a broadcast — it’s a feedback loop. Watch faces. Notice body language. If someone checks their phone, you’ve lost them and need to change something. If someone leans forward, you’ve hit a nerve — go deeper. The ability to read a room and adjust your delivery, your pacing, or your content on the fly separates good communicators from great ones. This is a skill you can only develop by speaking in front of live humans, repeatedly. No amount of practicing in front of a mirror will teach you to read an audience. Toastmasters, team meetings, community events — any live audience works.
5. Tell stories, not summaries.
Human brains are wired for narrative. When you say “a manufacturing client reduced defects by 40%,” that’s data. When you say “their quality manager used to spend every Friday afternoon hand-checking inspection logs because she didn’t trust the automated reports — until we showed her a dashboard she could actually believe,” that’s a story. Stories create emotional engagement. They make abstract concepts concrete. And they’re dramatically more memorable than statistics or feature lists. Practice turning your case studies and examples into two-minute stories with a character, a tension, and a resolution. Your audience will remember them months later.
The Compound Returns
Here’s what most people miss about communication training: the returns compound. Getting 5% better at presenting doesn’t produce 5% better outcomes. It produces disproportionately better outcomes because communication is a multiplier on everything else you do.
Your technical knowledge is worth more when you can articulate it clearly. Your strategic thinking is worth more when you can persuade others to act on it. Your leadership is worth more when people actually feel led, not just informed.
The professionals who invest in communication training — who show up to Toastmasters on a Tuesday night, who study rhetoric, who ask for honest feedback on their presentations — aren’t doing it because they’re bad at talking. They’re doing it because they understand that in a world where everyone has access to the same information, the person who communicates it best wins.
Communication is not a talent. It’s a discipline. And like every discipline, the people who train it consistently will outperform the people who assume they’re good enough.
Get on stage. Get feedback. Get better. Repeat forever.
Drew Breyer is a Solution Engineer at Microsoft and a communication studies graduate of St. John’s University. He practices public speaking weekly through Toastmasters because he believes the best presenters are the ones who never stop training.