Archive for November, 2010
Beating Your Fear Of Public Speaking Explained
Supposedly it’s the number one fear most people have - speaking in public. More than heights, spiders, or failure, we fear getting up in front of our fellow human being and giving a talk on some subject or other. Why does that terrify us so?
In this article we will show how beating your fear of public speaking is easily achievable.
For whatever reason, getting up in front of a group of other people, dealing with a difficult audience and presenting a talk on some subject or other stirs up great feelings of panic and anxiety in a great number of people. This article will examine that fear, why it appears and the way of beating your fear of public speaking.
What are people so afraid of? Common answers to that question include the following:
* freezing or “choking” – not being able to speak; * forgetting what you are supposed to be saying/what comes next; * being heckled or insulted and while dealing with a difficult audience; * people talking over you, not paying attention to you; * the presence of people in the audience who know more about the subject you’re speaking about than you do; * being asked a question you don’t know the answer to; * giving wrong information; * boring people, putting people to sleep, causing people to get up and walk out; * being laughed at, appearing foolish, being humiliated, embarrassed, ashamed; * people noticing how nervous you are; * looking fat (or too skinny or bald or pale or ugly – take your pick); * sweating, fainting, shaking, twitching uncontrollably; * ruining your relationship with the host of your speech by doing such a horrible job and giving such an awful performance; * being compared with other speakers better, more entertaining and engaging, and more knowledgeable than you; * not being liked by the audience.
Almost all the fears people have of public speaking amount to the same essential fear – being judged. It all boils down to that. We don’t like to be judged and certainly don’t like our harsh judgments of ourselves. Public speaking seems to provide abundant opportunities for judgment, and so we tend to avoid it like the plague instead of focusing on constructive ways of beating your fear of public speaking.
Fear at its core is a survival mechanism. We need fear to keep us alive. In olden times, when our ancestors lived in the forests like savages, we needed fear in order to stay alive. In urgent and life-threatening situations, the body produced hormones like adrenaline to spur us into some sort of immediate and decisive, life-saving action.
But a speech is not a life or death situation. Far from it. The unconscious reaction of the survival mechanism kicking into gear is uncalled for, it’s inappropriate and unnecessarily extreme for the given situation. So all we need to do is simply find ways in those situations to convince our body that we’re okay – this is the key step to beating your fear of public speaking. Easier said than done maybe. But completely doable nonetheless.