Nerves can ruin public speaking. They can stop you from giving presentations, and leave you afraid of speaking in public. We've all experienced nerves at some stage or other and they aren't always a bad thing – for instance, nerves can keep us alert to danger; they can remind us to check for potential errors before we hand in a report, or they can keep us charged up so we meet a deadline or a plane on time.
However, when we experience nervousness in public speaking, our presentations can be ruined. We may experience blushing, sweating, heart pounding, shaking, a dry mouth, stomach butterflies, trips to the toilet, or go blank, lose our place, drop our notes, mumble, become inaudible, sound squeaky or overall fail to give a good impression. If you get these problems prior to giving a speech or during a speech no wonder you have a fear of public speaking.
However, it is possible to overcome public speaking nerves and anxiety. Here are just five of the many steps that may help you. They have been selected from interviews with seven women on the CD set "Confidence for women in public speaking". They can apply to you too.
Adopt an audience focus. Many people who are nervous about public speaking are often, in my experience, self-conscious. They spend a lot of time worrying about themselves. They think the audience is going to be very critical, that the audience is out to destroy them or trip them up, that the audience is going to analyse them and find fault in everything they do. All of this self-focus increases anxiety and panic in public speaking so they freeze. Instead, focus on the audience. After all, the audience is actually most concerned about themselves. They sit there wondering how they’re going to cope with all the new e-mails that will arrive while they’re there, they wonder whether they’ll get back in time to pick up the kids, they’re anxious in case they can’t keep up or they have to do something humiliating or embarrassing. You can, therefore, forget yourself and focus on the audience. Forget the concept of audience attack! Instead make then feel welcomed, ensure they are comfortable, reassure them, have eye contact with them, interact with them, make the speech relevant to them, and so on. When you take the focus off yourself anxiety will lessen. Too much self-focus kills confidence and increases nervousness. When you focus on the audience everyone benefits.
Put yourself in the present moment. Anxiety and nervousness are often related to concerns about the future, about what will happen, about what may go wrong. Thoughts such as, "What happens if the audience asks me a question I can't answer?" or "What happens if the audience falls asleep?", or "What if I go blank?" all increase your anxiety and nerves, and take you away from what is happening right now. Instead of worrying about what may happen later become fully involved in what is happening in the present moment. Chelsea, aged 10, was the youngest person on the CDs and was a big star in her school play. When I asked her how she managed to pull off such a successful performance, she replied, “I didn’t really think of anything else, just what was going on in the moment.”
Let your errors build your skills and experience. We all make errors when public speaking. It is our reaction to such errors that matters not the errors themselves. Melissa, a 29 year old mother of two and small business owner, used to go over and over in her mind the one time she had “fluffed” a presentation. She presumed that she would therefore “fluff” all future presentations. There was no evidence for this. She had some good presentation skills. One flop does not mean permanent failure: it just means that you had one flop! No-one, however skilled and confident, can go on stage, speech after speech, and always have 100% success. Talk to successful presenters and they will all be able to tell you of the time that a speech hasn’t worked, or they lost their place, or someone fell asleep. Such experiences are normal. What matters is what you do with them. I remember giving a speech to a local council once. It was after lunch. I looked around and sure enough there was one of the older guys, not just asleep, but snoring! What I needed to learn was how to wake him up without embarrassing him, and so I invented an exercise where everyone had to turn to the people next to them and talk to them. In other words, the man next to him woke him up for me! If you learn from your errors then your experience will build your public speaking confidence and skills.
Invest your time in practising being confident. It is very easy to increase our panic and nervousness by what we do and what we imagine. It is equally possible, therefore, to increase our confidence and reduce our anxiety by what we do and imagine. For example, Melissa initially said she was terrified of speaking at a national conference, as she was sure the audience was going to pull her to pieces. No wonder she was scared if this is what she imagined would happen. In contrast, when she began visualising the audience sitting together as small groups of friends while she was sending them her love, her anxiety and palpitations eased and were replaced by a relaxed sense of calm; and the conviction, that yes! she could do this – she could speak successfully at the conference. Invest your time practising being confident.
Do your homework. We live in a society where we have been trained to expect instant results, instant confidence, instant happiness, and instant luxury. Yet life is not really like this, this is just a fairy tale dreamt up by advertisers who want you to buy their products and services. If you want to instantly cure your nervousness you may be disappointed and give up too easily. If you are willing to do your homework and practise the strategies to overcome your public speaking panic, then success is yours. I am a confident and successful speaker but I still do my homework and work to get myself in the best mind state for each speech. Do your homework and the rewards will be yours.
Say goodbye to nervousness in public speaking. Your confidence is already there waiting for you.
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