How to overcome the fear of public speaking
Imagine you just got a call at the office. You have been asked to give a presentation at work. What do you think? More importantly, how do you feel? Do you feel the familiar anxiety resulting from the fear of public speaking?
Perhaps there is no more obvious and widespread statement on the subject of public speaking than this - most people fear public speaking. A common anecdote is that, on a scale of intensity, people consistently rate the fear of public speaking higher than the fear of death. This led to the famous joke by comedian Jerry Seinfeld who supposedly quipped that, at a funeral, most people would rather be in the coffin than on stage delivering the eulogy.
So let's talk about it.
As a presentation skills coach, I can attest to the crippling effect that the fear of public speaking can exert on even the most otherwise talented and capable people. Technically, this is called public speaking apprehension or PSA for short.
And it is very difficult (if not impossible) to be an effective persuasive speaker on stage if you suffer from PSA.Therefore, in this article, I would like to help you overcome this fear as it is a necessary first step to claiming your birthright as an effective presenter. I aim to do this with one simple tool – education.
The bogeyman I no longer fear
When I was a child, like most children, I imagined all kinds of monsters and bogeys residing under my bed. These monsters appeared only at bed-time and made sleeping alone a rather horrid affair. I loved my days of playing with friends, watching cartoons and generally being a happy and active little boy. But I hated going to bed at night because I knew, that just like last night and the night before, the bogeyman would be waiting menacingly under my bed to fill my sleep with nightmares and dread. I praise my parents and older siblings for their patience and tact in dealing with me during this phase of my childhood.
Did you have any such fears as a child?Today, I am happy to announce I no longer fear sleeping alone. What changed? Did I receive a restraining order against the bogeyman for my 10th birthday? No. I got a BMX and it was fantastic! Useless against the bogeyman, but fantastic! Did I hire Ghostbusters? They never returned my calls.
So what changed? Well, I changed. I am older and, more importantly, wiser. I know that there is no such thing as a bogeyman. I am better educated.
“People fear what they don’t understand; hate what they can’t conquer.”
-Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones
Fear finds its strength in the unknown. Once you peel away the mystery, the facts lay naked and harmless before you.
Talking is acquired, public speaking is learned
Think back to when you were a child, right around the age of two, and recall your very first talking class in school. The teacher got up to the front of the room and began enunciating different vowel and consonant sounds. "Ayyyy" She sang. "Baaahhhh" she bleated. Then "Foooooo". Gradually, you caught on and within a few months, you could pull off tough words like "Think" and "Purr". Having trouble remembering this? Of course you are. That class never happened! Nobody had to teach you how to talk. You did this instinctively. You unconsciously listened to the people around you and, within a relatively brief period of time, you were also using verbal language – without even trying!Yet when faced with a presentation today, this natural ability to speak seems to betray you. If talking came so naturally, then why is public speaking such a bane?
Public speaking is NOT natural
And now we touch on the key point – public speaking is NOT normal. The first step to overcoming the fear of public speaking is to accept this. And then to accept that it is normal to feel trepidation at public speaking. You are not somehow damaged for having this fear and while public speaking is not natural, remember that neither are other abilities like driving or downhill skiing. Like these abilities, there are often fears associated (at least initially) with performing them. However, also like these activities, it is possible to attain great skill through training and practice.
Layer upon layer
Speaking in public adds a few layers of complexity to the otherwise basic and instinctive act of talking. Simply by shifting the context of talking, the brain produces a different set of responses. Talking to an individual or small group of friends in a relaxed and informal setting is very different from addressing a larger audience in a formal arrangement. At least as far your brain is concerned. And because of this, it triggers an entirely different set of responses. In this sense, when it comes to public speaking (and many other things actually) your brain is your best-friend and often your worst enemy.
The busy-body in your skull
Next time your palms get sweaty or your voice cracks in front of an audience, feel free to blame your brain – it’s really all in your head. You feel fear because your brain is ever alert searching for potential threats to your well-being.Most of us do not realize it but there is a lot more going on in our craniums than we are aware of. The brain is a veritable busy-body tasked with the job of keeping us alive and safe and it does this often without our conscious consent. In other words, it does not ask for permission. This is where PSA comes in.From a purely primal perspective, most public speaking scenarios furnish all the trimmings of a threatening situation.Whenever a person with PSA is in a public speaking situation, or even just imagines themselves to be, (more on imagination later), this is the unconscious program that runs in their brain: It is I Vs. them. With them being the audience. And since this audience is usually larger than one, well, I am outnumbered and therefore threatened. And if I feel threatened, then naturally, I feel afraid. It is just your brain trying to “protect” you.
The public speaking stand-off – Do you feel lucky?
Picture this - the speaker (you) are standing at the front of the room or on the stage with the audience (them) sitting in a group facing you. They almost resemble a unified army or a predatory pack looking directly at you ready to descend on you at the drop of the hat. To complicate matters further, even the set-up of the room can work against you.The physical set-up of most public speaking scenarios does not help much either. They are commonly arranged like confrontations and not interactions. We swap out the friendly and relaxed living room side-by-side layout for a head-on face-to-face where you are isolated on stage or at the front of the room.No wonder you feel anxious. Your poor brain is shooting out signals to protect you. It screams to your hands (and butt-cheek) muscles- "Clench! We might have to fight our way out of this one". It yells to your heart "Pump man, pump! We need all the blood we can get in our muscles. It's about to go down!" Your benevolent brain even sacrifices its own comfort, directing more blood and energy to your muscles and reducing how much comes to it. What good is a well-irrigated brain after you have been mauled by the 12 suits and blouses from the accounting and finance department?Funny thing though. You actually need the brain much more at this time than you need your larger muscles. You need it for processes like thinking, remembering your points, choosing (or recalling) your words etc. You know, the nice-to-haves when you are giving a speech or presentation.Yet the entire physiological response to PSA which drives activity away from your thinking brain is such that it makes you, well, dumber.Remember though, this entire response is based on a wrong and faulty construct your unconscious mind has of the public speaking situation. In other words, it is all in your head.
The fear of public speaking - All in your head
You know rationally and intellectually that these are cordial colleagues and clients, not rival clansmen or coyotes. Yet the churning you feel in the pit of your stomach and the clamminess you feel in the pits of your arms say differently. The fear is imagined – it is all in your head. And that Is exactly where it needs to be addressed and redressed.So what are the steps you can take to move from knowledge to wisdom? In other words, how can you apply this knowledge?
Methods for overcoming the fear of public speaking.
Knowing that this fear of public speaking originates from the actions of a well-meaning but over-protective brain, these methods work by going straight to the source – your mind. These are the approaches:
Visualization Techniques
Controlled, coached and repeated exposure
1. Visualization
This method is very powerful because it literally trains your brain to associate a whole new set of emotions – positive emotions – to the public speaking experience. Here’s how it is done:Take a few minutes daily in the days leading up to your presentation to mentally visualize how you want the presentation to go.
The Details
Find a quiet room, sit down comfortably and just relax. Really. Just relax. Let your weight sink into the chair or mat and consciously relax every muscle in your body. To do this, direct your awareness from the crown of your head to your toes with one thought only in mind – relax. Breathe deeply as you do this. Consciously fill your lungs with air and enjoy the rise and fall of your chest and belly.It may take a while but you will finally begin to feel at peace. Now for the fun part.
Make your own movie
Imagine the presentation – notice how it affects you. You are standing on stage or at the front of the room. The audience is looking at you. Do your previously relaxed muscles tense up? Does your heartbeat accelerate? This is your body reacting to the anxiety and it only means you are doing the exercise correctly. That is, you are successfully “fooling” your mind into believing the presentation is really taking place.Now simply notice how you are feeling for a few seconds and then repeat quietly to yourself “It’s all right. Everything is fine” or anything along those lines that reassures you (and your brain) that there is no threat. Keep it in the positive. That is, avoid phrases like “I will NOT fail” or “I will NOT pee my pants”. Phrases like these can do more harm than good by the power of suggestion. Keep it positive. Imagine what you want to happen not what you dread. Restore the calm by consciously relaxing again.Now, staying relaxed, visualize your presentation going exactly as you want it to go. Visualize the reactions you want from the audience. Are they laughing, nodding, smiling or having an epiphany? See them giving you all the signals of this happening.Now feel the feelings this would give you – do you feel happy, valuable, powerful, validated, fulfilled, grateful? Feel these things in this moment as you visualize.Now again, notice your body and, if you are tense, re-relax. Breathe deeply and let your muscles loosen up.
Repeat to retrain
Repeat the above steps for a few minutes each day. Depending on how intense the PSA you experience, you might benefit from performing the exercise twice a day – once in the morning and once again at night. As you keep this practice going, within a few days, you will see a marked difference in how your body and mind respond to the public speaking situation.In this visualization, you detach negative feelings from public speaking and replace them with positive ones. It's like a child learning to ride a bicycle. The first few times on the bike, the child is afraid of falling off. At this phase, when the child thinks of riding, she feels fear. But after riding for a while and enjoying it, when she thinks of her bike, she thinks of fun, not fear.Similarly, this exercise lets you experience fun in public speaking through a mental simulation so that you find yourself looking forward to speaking and sharing your ideas instead of worrying about not doing well.
Why this works – Pilots and soldiers
Flying an aeroplane is a high-stakes activity. Plane crashes are often devastating and lead to loss of life and property. It is no wonder then that an important part of pilot training involves flight simulations. In these simulations, pilots are exposed to different scenarios and then their responses are recorded, assessed and corrected as needed.Flight instructors will tell you that these simulations are as much, if not more, about training the pilot mentally as they are about training the pilot intellectually. Through this training, the pilot-in-training builds skill, confidence and mental toughness for when they are actually flying an aeroplane with peoples lives on the line.This is the power of simulated performance. Let me illustrate with a true story. Have you ever been to a shooting range?
Take your best shot
I recently visited Houston and went with two of my friends to a shooting range. This was my first time in a range. The first thing I noticed as we passed through the sound-proofed doors into the shooting range itself was the discombobulating explosions from the different caliber guns going off all around me. Now one of my friends used to be in the US military and had been on active duty only a few years prior. While I struggled to maintain composure, he was cool and relaxed as he loaded his weapon and calmly exacerbate my misery by discharging a full magazine at rapid-fire setting down the range.For me, the sound of gunshots going off around me was scary and crippling. For him, it was nothing. He had been conditioned to function in that kind of environment. But here is the key – he did not become conditioned on the battlefield – he became conditioned in the training camps. He became conditioned through the training exercises and simulations that exposed him and his squad to the kinds of conditions they would be facing in battle so that they would be able to function in situations where the untrained person (insert me) would completely break down. He became conditioned ahead of time.
Experience it before you do
The mind is unable to differentiate between an actual experience and a vividly imagined one. This exercise works on this principle by causing the mind to experience public speaking in the light of positive feelings and outcomes. And although you may never find yourself in a war zone with machine-gun fire and bombs going off around you and shrapnel raining like confetti, your brain needs to be exposed multiple times to the scenario that is frightening you so that it loses its power over you.Interestingly, as time went by, the explosions began to jar me less and less to the point that, by the end of the afternoon, we were exchanging jokes in-between reloads as our fellow range-users fired everything from small handguns to automatic rifles all around us. I was having fun pretending to be a character in my favourite video game. Now, I understand that a shooting range might not be your cup of tea, but the experience did teach me a valuable lesson. A lesson that segues us into the next technique for overcoming PSA.
2. Real repeated exposure with expert feedback
Visualization is a great way to overcome the fear of public speaking when done correctly. However, without training and real-world skill in public speaking, you can only go so far. It is difficult not to be apprehensive of performing a task you are bad at. This is why joining a group like Toastmasters or working with a coach can be a great way to help you overcome PSA. In both cases, you are delivering your presentation and receiving instant feedback for improvement. Let us look briefly at each strategy.
Join a Toastmasters club
Toastmasters is the largest non-profit organization focused on teaching public speaking skills. Their approach involves following a learning program delivered via workshop-style club meetings with peer evaluation and feedback. There are thousands of clubs all over the world and it is likely there is one that meets near you. With Toastmasters, it is the luck of the draw on the quality of feedback you get (learn more about Toastmasters here) but if you take your growth in public speaking seriously and engage the program, there is little doubt you will not get noticeably better and more confident speaking in public. If Toastmasters is not for you, there is another way.
Hire a coach
As a Toastmaster who has received the highest educational credential the organization offers – Distinguished Toastmaster – I can attest to the quality of the program. However, for people who want highly specialized and personalized coaching, hiring a coach can be a better choice.In his excellent book, Peak: How to master almost anything, Anders Ericsson provides the formula to top performance – repeated intentional practice with instant expert coaching.Some reasons you might want a coach – do any of these sentences describe you?
I have a very important presentation to deliver and do not have a lot of time.
I want strict confidentiality around my personal development in this area.
The stakes are too high for my presentation for me to leave it to non-professional feedback.
I am already adequate as a speaker and now I need to elevate my performance or learn more specific skills.
I want timely, tailored and personalized training.
Then you might be better off hiring a coach.
Is it worth it?
The investment is often larger but coaching is more targeted and individualized. As result, growth is faster. Also, with a good coach, it is often possible to work on finer details of content and presentation than could ever be covered in a group setting. Some of my clients have been Toastmasters who want to take their speaking skills to a higher level or move into the realm of professional speaking. And for many corporate or technical professionals or public servants who deliver specific presentations with many moving parts, a coach is a worthwhile investment and a valuable and trusted resource.The high-quality training and expert feedback will kick PSA to the curb because you will know what you know and be confident in your abilities.The third and last approach to overcoming PSA is easily the most effective.
A Bonus - The Killer Combo
And here is a bonus tip - The best way to overcome PSA is a combination of the two strategies already mentioned in this article. Educate yourself either through an organization like Toastmasters or working with a coach (or both). And use the visualization strategy as part of your preparation for your presentations and watch your skill level go up and anxiety plummet. People will marvel at your newfound confidence and poise and you will enjoy the peace of mind and power that comes with commanding the stage skilfully.
People fear what they don’t understand
I have exposed you to information about PSA as a tool to help you overcome it. There is really nothing to fear. Just like the monsters that terrorized me as a child, your PSA can be a thing of the past – something you even look back at and laugh.Take the right steps and you will soon be moving audiences to laughter, thought or tears with skill. The challenge now is for you to use this information to better your speaking skills. I will be rooting for you and if you are interested in presentation skills coaching, contact me.
