Three Steps to Reduce Your Fear of Public Speaking
A site member posted this:
How to overcome fear of public speaking?? Even the thought of it gets me anxious :(I've always had this problem, and I haven't been able to overcome this fear. Any advice?
The fear of speaking in public is widespread. For those of us who do not suffer from this fear, and who never have suffered from it, it serves as a tremendous barrier to entry for our competitors. It reduces the number of people who are competing against us.
Of course, this means that you have to find a way to make a living, or to extend your calling in life, by means of public speaking. There are very few professions in which the ability to speak in public cannot be converted into a career asset. Even in technical jobs, there is always the need by an employer to get information transferred, either within the organization or outside the organization. This means the company must rely on professional writers and speakers.
I think the best way to be able to speak in public is to be able to write a speech that can go for 90 minutes, and then cut it to 45 minutes or less. If a person stands before a group in full confidence that he could talk for 90 minutes, he probably is not going to be afraid of becoming so disoriented during the speech, that he cannot at least talk for another 20 minutes.
A technique that works very well for some people is to stand in front of a podium, give a speech, and record the speech on video. This has only been possible over the past 30 years or so. For most people, it did not become possible until the rise of inexpensive camcorders. Today, anybody with a cell phone and a tripod can do this. Of course, it is always important to have good sound, so you need an inexpensive external microphone and a cable that converts a cell phone's headphone jack into a microphone jack. Combined, this will cost about $50, plus about $25 for the tripod. Buy a sheet music stand. Use it to hold the note cards outlining the speech.
There is something that you should be aware of. If you use a metal sheet music stand, the metal will reflect the sound of your voice back into the microphone. Thus, if you use the stand, put a cloth or some other sound-absorbing material underneath your note cards. This will reduce the echo effect.
When you can watch yourself deliver the speech, you can identify the most annoying characteristics of your presentation. If you know that you have eliminated 20% of the annoying characteristics that will create 80% of the annoyance, you are in pretty good shape. It does not take much to identify three or four things that really are annoying in your delivery.
Keep giving the speech in front of the camcorder or smart phone. Keep reviewing it. It may take you two or three hours to write it. It may take you 90 minutes to deliver it. You would be wise then to cut it down to whatever length you can get away with. Then deliver it at least three times on video. Watch the video. There should be improvement with each video.
One of the reasons why this works so well is this: people can see their improvement. If they can see that their speech is getting better, they know that they are becoming less vulnerable. This should reduce risk.
The #1 problem is this: the consequences of looking bad up in front of a camcorder are not the same as looking bad in front of an audience. There will be substantial emotional disruption building up for 30 minutes before you stand in front of the audience. It is like practice for a sport. Your performance in practice is going to be a lot better than your performance in the game. The pressure of the game disrupts the ease of performance. But professional football was changed dramatically by coach Tony Dungy's practice of forcing the team to go over the same procedures again and again in practice. The real master of this was coach John Wooden at UCLA. He had note cards, and he made all of the players go through a standard routine of drills, over and over and over. Then, under pressure, they would respond instinctively. This created the famous two-minute explosion, in which the team would score 16 points in a row, completely demoralizing the opposition. It was all the product of constant drill. Imitate this.
In your mind, you have to be on top of the material. I think this is the key. It would be good if you are interested in your material. If you bring enthusiasm into the podium, this will have positive effects on the audience. But even if you're talking about something that does not interest you, if you are talking about it from a position of comprehensive knowledge, and you have boiled down a much longer speech into a short speech, then you are unlikely to make a major mistake. The fact that you will not make a mistake is the key to losing the sense of anxiety that bothers most people who are assigned the task of giving a public address.
If you come into the podium with this goal, namely, to improve the lives of 80% of those in the audience as a result of your speech, you will begin to lose your fear. If you see yourself as a person of service whose lecture will help most of the people in the audience, your focus will be on the audience.
The next step is to mentally conceive of just one person in that audience who your speech is going to help. Concentrate on him, his prior knowledge, his enthusiasm, and his ability to sift familiar information from new information. If you see yourself as a servant, your fear of making a mistake will be reduced. If you're just a helpful guy who makes a mistake, you know that the person you are trying to help will overlook the mistake, and if he doesn't really know much about the topic, he will not even know that you have made a mistake. If the speech is all about you, you, you, then you're going to be afraid. Your mistake will reflect badly on you. But if the speech is all about them, them, them, they will overlook all but major mistakes.
Most people's fear of public speaking has to do with the fear of making a major mistake in public. The way to reduce the risk of this is by mastery of the topic, practice in front of a camcorder, and intensely focus on the representative figure in the audience whose life you are attempting to make better.