Just Say No Some More

I have talked in the past about the need for speakers to avoid drinking alcohol or even coffee and tea before speaking. Any drug that can alter your normal state, even by 1%, can hurt your abilities to communicate effectively with your audience.

To many people, this advice is so obvious as to seem less than insightful. But here’s something that might surprise you, you should also avoid cold medicines, antihistamines and many other over the counter medications as well. You don’t want to put anything in your mouth that will change the natural moisture levels in your mouth or your nose.

When you take simple over-the-counter drugs to solve cold and allergy problems, they may do a good job of masking one set of problems, but they create new problems. Namely, your mouth will be too dry to function properly. If you have a normal day at the office, that’s no problem. You can just talk less and drink more water. But if you are giving a major presentation, you don’t want your mouth to be dry. Your natural state of nerves will make your mouth drier than normal before and during a speech, even if you aren’t taking any medications. But when you add natural dryness with chemically induced dryness, the result can be you on stage sputtering with nothing but dust coming out of your mouth.

So take care of your cold and allergies the best you can, but lay off of the drugs the day you are giving a speech or presentation.