Conquer Your Fear of Public Speaking

Calming down before a job interview

2006-07-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

Public speaking fear can be conquered instantly using Emotional Freedom Techniques™

In my counselling practice, my approach to overcoming fear in any situation is to look at each individual who is afraid. I believe that the solution to your fear, especially your fear of public speaking, lies with you, not with a 'one size fits all' approach.

That's not just because you're the person generating and perpetuating the fear: see my article about that on my Anxiety and Panic Attacks – at last the ultimate solutions blog. When I say that you generate your fear, I mean of course that it's your memories of times you felt that fear that keep your particular experience of fear going.

With each situation and each person, the path out of fear is different. I know that you can take on a new attitude and thereby change your actions and reactions. In this blog we'll explore all that. It's also the case that I have witnessed so many people being released from years of distress caused by fears and phobias, within ten minutes.

A low and manageable level of pre-performance butterflies in the tummy is natural and even useful. Fear of public speaking that makes you feel sick for weeks before the speaking event: that's a waste of your precious life. So click here to learn more about a technique that will give you instant peace. Gary Craig, the creator of Emotional Freedom Techniques™ allows me to give away free up to 100 of his in-depth training DVD. So if you want to have a copy after you've read the free manual and tried Emotional Freedom Techniques™, just send me an e-mail to Jeannette@conquerpublicspeakingfears.com with "I want emotional freedom" in the subject line. You'll certainly gain freedom from your fear of public speaking.

Fear of public speaking: more ways to conquer it

2006-07-13T19:42:00.000-07:00

Visualise success
Another strategy to assuage your nervousness and fear of public speaking is to make sure that you're totally familiar with the venue at which you'll speak. Going back to my earlier strategy, when you're practising or rehearsing your presentation in front of the mirror, when you're smiling and basking in the positive feelings from the audience imagine that you're there in that auditorium or theatre and on that stage. See the colour of the curtains. Or even their color! Visualise the placement of the chairs for your audience. Put as much detail as you can into your visualisation.

Feel it.

Feel that marvellous feeling of actually being there, and feeling calm and confident.

I've discovered that there's something extremely powerful that we can add to that visualisation process. It's so powerful that I devote a whole Section in Public Speaking Success e-Program to it. It's Gary Craig's Emotional Freedom Techniques™. I came across this marvellous approach almost by accident when I was researching another book.

The approach delivers on its promise of emotional freedom. I won't take your time here to discuss how or why. I strongly recommend that you go to the Emotional Freedom Techniques™ website and you can download Mr Craig's FR=EE manual which explains it all. I've used it with clients when we had both (almost) given up. All my usual strategies and approaches worked but only to a certain level. Once they spent the ten minutes needed to go through the Emotional Freedom Techniques™ process, that was it. They were amazed. One client, a cat breeder, said she felt a bit like a mother cat looking around for missing kittens...where is my fear? It had gone.

For now, the process of visualising your calm, confident and successful delivery is a great way to making your next presentation calm, confident and successful.

Preparation is your greatest anti-fear tool

2006-07-05T21:25:00.000-07:00

Fear of public speaking is something that can affect even the most polished and confident public speaker.

I was reminded of the relationship between fear and preparation the other day.

I looked in my work diary to find time for some other task, I saw the date August 10th and immediately I felt a quick stab of fear and anxiety. Truly. I give seminars about public speaking and I've helped many, many people overcome their fear of public speaking. But I felt more than a little butterfly or two. Why? Because on August 10th I have to give a talk to a group of influential and highly successful people. The talk was booked nearly a year ago as often happens. With everything else in my life and work, I had of course put that talk very much on the back burner.

In other words, I haven't prepared it!!

What did I do?

I spent about two hours mapping out the content of the talk. I spent another hour searching for images I'll use. That's what I call 'breaking the back' of the initial preparation. I've given a similar talk on a related subject a couple of years ago and as soon as I looked at that talk, those notes, those visuals, I relaaaaaxed.

I'll spend about another two to three hours or so, finalising my talk. I've set aside whole slabs of work time to do just that. Preparation is as much about organisation as anything else. And yes, before I made a lot of my living giving public presentations, I used to try to wing it. To give a presentation with the minimum preparation. Sometimes that worked, other times the audience could tell and so could I. If you truly respect your audience, you'll do them the courtesy of preparing well. Fear or no fear.

I'll post another short article when I have a minute about the opposite of this phenomenon. The fear and anxiety that is produced by over-preparing.

I'm now so looking forward to my half-hour talk that I wish the presentation was next week! Well not quite, because my prep time is set for a fortnight from now. It really brought home to me that if I didn't do that structured, sometimes labourious and boring preparation, I would be very scared indeed. Think about it. Have there ever been times when you've spoken in public without giving adequate time to preparing? Were you more worried about the presentation? Yes? And you know what? In that circumstance, it would be totally appropriate to have a fear of public speaking.

Easy ways to calm your butterflies

2006-06-27T01:02:00.000-07:00

If you don’t feel calm, fake it.

That’s right. If you cannot be genuinely cool, calm and confident yet, pretend you are. Act as if you are.

Try this little exercise.
Think about your next public presentation. Butterflies immediately hitting that tummy? Or maybe your level of anxiety feels more like a few F1-11 bombers flying around. OK. You’re at home so relax. Deliberately open your mouth just a little bit, and consciously let your tongue go very limp. Look at yourself in the mirror. It’s physically impossible for you to be tense and anxious while you’re opening your mouth just a little bit and your tongue is limp and relaxed.

Now that I’ve got you relaxed, a little…talk to yourself in the mirror. It’s alright. There’s only you and me here and I won’t tell anyone.

Go and get your speaking notes, and stand in front of the mirror again. Keep your mouth nice and relaxed. Let’s forget about getting the rest of your body calm, for the moment. With that very relaxed mouth, start giving your talk. Smile at the little joke you’ll tell your audience next week. Look suitably worried or serious when you give that statistic about the spread of illiteracy or poverty or whatever serious news you’ll convey.

That’s it. Pretend you’re feeling calm and confident about that next presentation. Act as if you truly are, and you will be.

Some people respond better to physical ways to feel more relaxed.
This is a tactic used by actors before going onstage. Stand at arm’s length away from a wall. Place both your palms flat on the wall at about shoulder height in front of you. Push against the wall with your palms – as if you were trying to push the wall down.

Notice that your abdominal area is totally engaged in that effort. It's those muscles in your solar plexus that are vital to keeping you centred and calm. While engaged in that effort your body cannot also produce the noradrenaline which is the precursor to those panicky feelings of fear.

We’re marvellously adaptable creatures, we humans. Sometimes it helps us to relax by loosening up. Other people relax and de-stress their systems by tensing particular muscles.

Once again, there’s more detail about that in my e-program.

Another strategy to assuage your own nervousness is to imagine that there’s a very nervous and anxious person in the audience. Use your tone of voice and your innate charm to put her or him at ease. Think that one through and you’ll find it quite helpful.

I devote an entire Section of my e-program Public Speaking Success e-Program to eliminating your fear of public speaking, so those little tips were… just the tip of the iceberg.

Stay tuned for more practical ways to conquer your fear of public speaking.

Simple steps to overcoming your fear of public speaking

2006-06-20T17:50:00.000-07:00

Fear of public speaking has to be faced before you can start to overcome it.

I know that sounds too obvious to even bother stating it. I only state it because in my twenty years helping people improve their public speaking skills and to conquer their fear of public speaking, I've met far too many people who don't do that. They don't face, full-on, that they have that fear.

They're the people who make all sorts of excuses not to speak in public. Or they embarrass everyone listening to them by starting their short, or twenty-minute long, talk by saying "you'll have to forgive me, I'm a bit nervous about this."

Given that fear of public speaking is rated as the number fear among humans, we do forgive that sign of nervousness, that sign of being human.

However, it's far better for the person to face the fact that they have a fear of public speaking and then decide to do something about it.

Tell anyone you know who has that fear of public speaking to read this blog, to write to me via this blog with questions and to visit my website Public Speaking Success E-Program

First tip to conquering your fear of public speaking
No, I'm not going to give you that fatuous advice of "just relax". Eventually, you will be more calm and relaxed about public speaking, but while you are in the grip of fear at varying levels, anyone saying "just relax" is so annoying it should be a criminal offence.

What I am going to suggest is this.

Use one part of the main strategy I use in my programs. Rehearse for success. That means that when you prepare your talk, you have to rehearse it in front of another person, preferably more than one.

I'm jumping ahead of myself. Before you even rehearse in front of some supportive family and friends, do this.

Prepare your talk, make the notes you'll use. I go into more detail about both of those steps in my face-to-face seminars in Melbourne and in my e-program. For now, let's assume you've prepared your talk, made your mnemonic notes (memory jolts or cue cards), so you're ready to go. Speak your presentation to yourself. Preferably either looking at yourself in a mirror or better still, recording yourself with a video camera.

Here's the essence of that strategy. When you're at home alone rehearsing in front of the mirror, you are relaxed and confident. No one is watching. No public gathering is listening. What you are actually doing is feeding your brain, your subconscious mind, with images and (more importantly) sounds of you delivering your talk, in a splendidly animated and confident manner.
Doing that is probably counter to what you normally do. First, most people whom I've coached expend hours of energy being nervous and frightened. Some have even cancelled out of engagements rather than face the audience. Yet they haven't spent any time in the calm atmosphere of their own home presenting their talk "as if" they were their usual confident selves.

One of the best ways to overcome your fear of public speaking and to develop your confidence is the Silva UltraMind System. The nine-part program Living Your Alpha Life is fr+ee which is one reason I'm happy to tell you about it. The other reason is that it's a wonderful addition to the tools we all need to succeed.

In subsequent postings, I'll go into that in more detail. For now, be assured that you can conquer your fear of public speaking as easily as you created your fear of public speaking.

Fear of public speaking can be overcome

2006-06-18T23:43:00.000-07:00

Fear of public speaking comes in many shapes and sizes.

I've been running public speaking and public presentation seminars for twenty years. People from all walks of life and ages and backgrounds attend. They come along for many different reasons. Some want to improve their job prospects by improving their public presentations, others have to give lectures as part of their job and they want skills on how best to get their message across.

After a short time of running those seminars, I realised that one thing united most of the participants. They had a fear of public speaking. For some it was just that anticipatory, totally natural, sense of excitement that spurred them on to do better. For others, it was anything from fear that kept them awake at night thinking about the presentation, through to people who were so plain terrified that they'd decided to give up trying.

In fact, many people would rather climb Mt Everest in their undies than have to make a public presentation - even to a group of friends.

Let me tell you now, whether it's the butterflies gently caressing your tummy or it's downright terror, you can conquer your fear of public speaking. Naturally, if the fear is longstanding - if you've had it most of your life - and if it's really severe, you might expect me to say that it'll take much, much longer to overcome than if it's recent and not too intense.

Not so.

In my next post, I'll tell you about a truly exciting way to immediately conquer your fear of public speaking. For now, let me suggest that read some of my FR+EE advice on Conquer Your Fear of Public Speaking

Fear of public speaking and performing

2006-06-18T01:15:00.000-07:00

Fear of public speaking is ranked as the world's number one fear. That's why comedians, including Jerry Seinfeld, have quipped:

"If fear of public speaking is the world's number one fear, that means that we'd rather be in the coffin than having to give the eulogy at a funeral."

In this blog, we'll look at the sorts of skills you need to make great presentations in public - to a few friends at a birthday party, your colleagues at work, or to the United Nations. We'll also look at the very best ways to overcome your fear of public speaking.