Most public speaking advice is about you. Your posture. Your eye contact. Your vocal projection. Whether your hands are doing something weird. It’s a genre of advice that treats the speaker as the subject, as if a good presentation is fundamentally a performance problem, and the solution is to perform better.

It isn’t. And that misunderstanding is why so many smart, capable people leave important rooms having failed to move anyone.

In a recent salon, we sat down with Avital Tzubeli — public speaker, communication strategist, and someone who has spent a decade studying what actually keeps an audience engaged — to dig into a different way of thinking about this. Her framework draws on neuroscience, and the core insight is simple: a great presentation doesn’t just communicate information. It engineers a chemical experience.

The Real Problem Isn’t Nerves

Here’s a reframe worth sitting with: stage fright isn’t fright. It’s resistance.

The nerves most presenters feel — the self-consciousness, the shrinking, the sudden certainty that you shouldn’t be here — aren’t caused by the audience. They’re caused by thinking about yourself when your entire job in that moment is to think about them. Do I look weird? Am I making sense? Should I even be presenting this? Those questions are a sign that the strategic work didn’t happen before you walked in the door.

When you’ve done that work—when you know exactly who’s in the room, what they need, what you’re asking them to do, and why it matters to them—there’s nothing left to be nervous about. You’re not performing. You’re delivering something you built specifically for the people in front of you.

That distinction, from performer to architect, is where everything else begins.

Your Audience’s Brain Is Running on Chemistry

The reason storytelling works isn’t mystical. It’s biological. Human brains are wired for narrative, not because stories are pleasant, but because they were once survival tools. A good story triggers the same alertness response as a predator in the woods: pay attention, something important is about to happen.

Understanding this gives you a map. A presentation that truly moves people isn’t a random sequence of slides and talking points. It’s a deliberate sequence of chemical triggers, and there are four worth knowing.

1. Cortisol is tension. It’s what makes someone lean forward instead of reaching for their phone. A strong opening doesn’t begin with introductions or context-setting; it begins with a problem, a provocation, or a question that the audience needs resolved. The brain, confronted with unresolved tension, cannot look away.
2. Oxytocin is connection. Once you have their attention, you can earn their trust. This is the moment to share why you care about what you’re presenting, what’s personally at stake, why you specifically are the person talking about this. The goal isn’t to establish credentials, it’s to create a moment of genuine human connection, the kind that shifts an audience from passive listeners into people who are actually with you. 
3. Dopamine is the payoff. The insight, the reveal, the moment of genuine reward your audience has been waiting for, but the counterintuitive move is restraint. Release it slowly, and never lead with it. As Tzubeli puts it, “if you go straight to the dopamine, this could be an email.” The most engaging presentations stay perpetually one question behind, opening a thread, then another, answering the first just as they introduce a third, the same mechanism that makes a great series impossible to stop watching.
4. Serotonin is the close. The exhale, the moment of completion when the opening tension finally resolves, and the audience gets to feel the satisfaction of having arrived somewhere. Presentations that skip this — that simply run out of slides and stop — leave the brain in an unresolved loop. The content either rattles around without landing or gets discarded entirely. “It’s like being in the middle of a song when it gets interrupted,” Tzubeli says. “It gets stuck.”

Strategy First, Not Slides

None of this chemistry works without the upstream thinking most people skip.

Before a single slide gets built, the most important questions are strategic: 

• What does this specific audience want? 
• What am I actually asking them to do, not in the abstract, but the one concrete action they could take in the next 48 hours? 
• What am I giving them in exchange for their attention and time?

This is where most presentations quietly fall apart, not in the delivery, but in the intention behind it. Walking into a room without a clear ask, without a specific audience in mind, without one takeaway you’ve genuinely committed to, is one way to ensure that nothing lands, no matter how polished the execution.

The discipline of identifying one clear message — the thing you want someone to repeat to a colleague when they’re asked how the meeting was — forces a kind of radical clarity that makes everything downstream easier to organize, easier to deliver, and easier to remember.

“I don’t believe in confidence or charisma,” Tzubeli told us. “It’s about owning the moment where you are standing here.” That ownership comes from preparation: from knowing where you’re going before you get there, and having decided, long before you walk in the room, what experience you’re creating and exactly who you’re creating it for.

One Place to Start

If this feels like a lot to rewire at once, start at the end.

Before you write your opening, write your close — decide what the final payoff is, the one thing you want your audience to feel or know or do when they walk out, and work backward from there, asking what tension that resolves and what question, planted at the very beginning, would make that answer feel earned. 

The slides, the data, the anecdotes are all scaffolding around that arc, and once the arc is right, the rest has somewhere to go.

The best presentations aren’t the most polished ones. They’re the ones that feel, to the audience, like they were built for them, like someone thought carefully about what they needed, and then engineered exactly that. That’s what it means to get your audience high. Not to dazzle them, but to take them on a journey they didn’t know they needed, and land them somewhere better than where they started.