First and foremost, recognize that public-speaking anxiety if the number one anxiety shown by years of popular and more social-scientific testing. So no one need feel like the odd man or woman out if you suffer from even a soupçon of public-speaking anxiety. There are numerous self-help books and more scholarly texts on how to solve this problem. I am going to list some exercises and processes that you can try which are not part of the canon of the more scholarly works. They are simply methods I have developed over the years with clients who suffer from severe anxiety and have significant aspirations in public or corporate life.
The first thing is to recognize that all public speaking is no different than an acting role. “I can’t act,” you say. “Nonsense,” I say. You act all the time. You are acting when you assume the persona who goes to work and deals with a difficult colleague with respect and patience. You are acting when you behave as if you like someone who you find heinous. You are acting when you compliment someone on a purple/mauve/pink/moss-green flower-patterned tie that looks like a neck fungus. You can and do act.
The problem with public speaking is that you think it is a personal experience. It isn’t. It is a role like any other. You are “playing” the role of the professional who knows X about Y. This is a distinctly different person from the one who sits around having a Sam Adams with buddies. It does not negate that you know the material in the Sam Adams moment just as you do in the professional moment. It is that you assume the persona of knowing and that is where the acting comes in. We all get hung up with how the professional with a certain areas of expertise should walk, talk, behave and speak—which includes articulation, phrasing, manner, style, etc. In our deepest heart of hearts, we fear that we won’t play the role right and then, even if we do know the material, the audience will see us as frauds. Then comes the anxiety—and remember, anxiety by definition is not rational—the horrid anxiety of what the audience will do to us.
Talk behind our backs.
Laugh at us.
Get bored and dismiss us.
Tell our superiors we are incompetent.
Or worse, be our superiors viewing our incompetence laid bare.
Throw things at us.
Hoot and shriek with laughter and derision (oh, yes, some people fear this and you would be amazed how highly accomplished and placed they are).
In truth, I frequently give public presentations—maybe 50-60 each year for audiences ranging from 100 to 300. I find that there are times I too let anxiety run the show but I have learned how to cover. Please notice that I say that I let or allow anxiety to run the show. This is true. More about this later.
Our bodies are curious mechanisms. You all remember reading about fight or flight in biology classes. We often hear that this is a vestigial response left over from our caveman days. Siberian tiger! Red alert! Run or kill! It is biologically embarrassing that we are victims of that same response and the concomitant release of adrenaline when we get up to speak in public. After all, we are civilized people in the year 2000. Face it, folks, that audience might as well be one pissed-off Wooly Mammoth. Your epinephrine and norepinephrine are released and you experience all the same feelings as that caveman. Here’s what happens:
The actions of epinephrine and norepinephrine are generally similar, although they differ from each other in certain of their effects. Norepinephrine constricts almost all blood vessels, while epinephrine causes constriction in many networks of minute blood vessels but dilates the blood vessels in the skeletal muscles and the liver. Both hormones increase the rate and force of contraction of the heart, thus increasing the output of blood from the heart and increasing the blood pressure. The hormones also have important metabolic actions. Epinephrine stimulates the breakdown of glycogen to glucose in the liver, which results in the raising of the level of blood sugar. Both hormones increase the level of circulating free fatty acids. The extra amounts of glucose and fatty acids can be used by the body as fuel in times of stress or danger where increased alertness or exertion is required. Epinephrine is sometimes called the emergency hormone because it is released during stress and its stimulatory effects fortify and prepare an animal for either "fight or flight."
Here’s the problem. You are now a professional trapped in a biological response. Your autonomic nervous system doesn’t care that your boss is watching. You may suffer from a dry mouth, a racing heart, shortness of breath and eventually shaking hands and other extremities (post the adrenaline rush, you may have lactic acid in the muscles which can cause this but I’ll spare you the glucose talk). This is not fun. The shortness of breath can cause you to take short, shallow breathes which leads to hyperventilation, dizziness, cold sweats, clamminess (not unlike shock) a sense of physical displacement and the desire to be anywhere but here. It’s a vicious cycle and unlike the caveman, you can’t choose the flight part of the equation. So what to do? There are the obvious and realistic answers that may help but not cure the problem.
Prepare your material well. Use flash cards with one side having a key word or image and the other side containing the major points of each section of your speech to check yourself on content. Make sure you have outlined the content so that it has a logical flow that you can follow and are comfortable with intellectually.
Be sure that any visual aids, e.g., PowerPoint, are designed to provide you with the cue words on the flashcards.
Do not make the presentation an opportunity to tell all you know. Most people appreciate brevity. It is not only the Generation Y folks who have no attention span. Busy people want you to get to the major point ASAP and help them to stay involved. If they want to know more, give them a Q&A section which helps you in two ways: 1) you can see the light at the end of your anxiety tunnel if your presentation is brief; and 2) during Q&A you have the opportunity to engage in conversation which is a structure that relaxes people and gives you time to breath — literally.
Never be afraid to say that you are nervous. You can couch it in statements such as: “I am really honored to have the chance to present my ideas to all of you. I’m sure my dry throat and shaking hands are just part of the charm of the moment.” EVERYONE HAS EXPERIENCED PRESENTATION ANXIETY AT SOME LEVEL. They will find your honesty disarming. They may even laugh. Good. Now they are comrades-in-anxiety, not the enemy. In addition, their moment of laughter has bought you time to breathe.
If you have very high anxiety, build pauses or breathers into the presentation. Handouts are not a good idea as a rule because they distract from you but they can be invaluable if that slight break in scrutiny allows you to refocus and breathe. Lack of oxygen and thorough expelling of carbon dioxide is a big problem in anxiety. Deep cleansing breaths are key. A handout buys the time to do this. Also, walk around the room and hand it out. This moves your muscles, helps with that lactic acid and makes breathing more regular. There are many ploys for moving around a room and refocusing attention. Think of ones that will work for your presentation. The moment the eyes leave you, you have a private moment to regroup.
There are a number of things you can do to help you wean yourself from the intense anxiety that builds up before the presentation. Don’t wait to do this until the presentation is imminent.
Make a list of all of your fears of what could go wrong:
I’ll throw up. I’ll get hysterical; I’ll lose my voice; I’ll sweat through my clothes; they’ll throw rotten fruit at me.
Then make a parallel list in which you evaluate the likelihood of this/these fear(s) becoming reality. Have you ever done such a thing? Are these people likely to react this way? It is not stupid and don’t feel silly. We have children act out their fears to alleviate anxiety. This works for adults too. Imagine the worst-case scenario and then let your rational self determine how likely it is.
Beyond working with flashcards and being well prepared with the structure of the presentation, you must rehearse. Ask a spouse, significant other, tolerant friend or sibling to listen to your presentation. Realize that they are often the toughest audience because their esteem is critical to you. They’ll tell you all sorts of things such as, “don’t fidget,” “smile more,” etc. These comments are not what you need them for— don’t tell them that. You need them there so that you will experience the nervousness and survive. Every time you survive a one-on-one rehearsal of your presentation, you are less likely to get anxious in public.
Anxiety can be self-induced. I had to do a lengthy introductory set of remarks a couple of months ago to a group of about 150. I was not at all anxious. The room was dry and hot. I had taken some cold medicine which made my mouth very dry. I was having trouble forming words effectively because of the dryness. This made me conscious of what I was doing and in turn made me all the more aware of how difficult this talking in front of people was. (Could they sense my breathlessness? Were they thinking that I was nervous?) It caused me to breathe less deeply which induced the sense of anxiety through the physiological effects telling my body I was anxious. I had to break the cycle. I took a detour and introduced someone who deserved thanks for the event and encouraged everyone to applaud. In that interval, I did all the tricks to regularize my breathing and was then fine.
What are the tricks?
First, stand up straight. If your posture is bad, your diaphragm cannot work efficiently and cannot serve as the muscular bellows to push air from your lungs across your vocal cords and out through the mouth. Nor can you get in a good deep breath. Make a point of lifting and dropping your shoulders. This is where we all tighten the body when anxious. Keep your head centered on your neck, not jutting the chin forward. All this relaxes the throat and back, and makes breathing easier.
This is something to focus on in your everyday life. If you make yourself aware of the tightening of these areas, you will begin to correct it in a casual conversation. Eventually, you will self correct without much thought. You will make the action of self-relaxation reflexive. Also, loosen up the face and mouth by doing exercises that help you to lose tension and improve articulation. Sounds silly but say:
Red leather, yellow leather
Rubber baby buggy bumpers
She sells seashells by the seashore
Repeat these over and over while driving, in the shower or on a park bench if you are so bold. OVER-articulate. Really exaggerate the words and move your mouth and lips and tongue back and forth, up and down. A stuff mouth makes a stiff face, makes a stiff upper body and throat, makes speaking harder and creates a sense of anxiety in the biological rhythms.
Start with these suggestions. We’ll work on more as we work on future presentations. Let me know when you want to rehearse a presentation for critiques and assistance personally and/or as a group.