Speaking in Public

Anxiety and public speaking

Its obvious and normal to get nervous about public speaking. It's something you ought to get rid of but can even be used to overcome it. an average person ranks the fear of public speaking more than fear of death. You feel nervous, your palms sweat, your stomach ties itself into knots. You don’t want to do it. You would rather do anything else than talk to someone.

In business, it is essentially important for you to be able to get your point across. It is likely that all of us will one day have to speak in public. Whether we are giving a formal presentation to an audience, or simply asking our boss for a promotion, speaking skills are essential to getting ahead in a professional setting.

There are few specific ways that can be used as an guideline for yourself to be motivated before your next speech.

Let the fear not overtake you:

Let the fear drive you through you way but not take over you. Preparation and rehearsal take time and effort. We need to be motivated to do it – and fear is a great motivator. People without fear tend to skimp on preparation and rehearsal, they wing it. So they waffle and ramble their way through their minutes on stage.

Let your fear motivate you to prepare and rehearse and you’ll be a more effective speaker.

Choose how you can interpret you fear positively:

Consider an example where 2 patients who had their days counting to death were done an experiment. They were told that they were going to be given with portion of medicine and poison. One patient was given medicine and another poison but were told the other way. The scientist found interesting thing as the person who was given poison but told medicine survived few more days but the other one was found dead.

This study showed that with a fear of death, even medicine wasn’t able to work properly whereas even poison couldn’t kill other person as he believed he was going to live.

Hence choose the positive way even if the fear drives you away from it, eventually you will succeed.

Don’t overthink audience reaction:

There is sure to have some people in audience who is busy texting or yawning or bored, none of those has to matter with you. Don’t overthink that your speech is getting boring or it isn’t making any sense to them because sitting in audience is easy but stepping up and speaking to them in mass is difficult.

Use the adrenalin to fuel your passion:

A totally relaxed and laidback speaker is unlikely to show passion. To show passion you need to be full of energy and excitement about sharing your message with the audience. That comes from adrenalin. The same adrenalin that is making you nervous. Use that adrenalin to fuel your passion.

So don’t fight your nerves, make friends with them – and use them to make you a better speaker.