Cure Your Fear of Public Speaking EXCELLENT advice! Dont let this common fear hold your career back and keep you from achieving the success you deserve. Its almost impossible to be successful in business presenting your ideas in public to a group of people. Unfortunately, public speaking makes three out of four people feel nervous and anxious, making them less effective. Not to worry. Here are six ways to cure that fear and truly shine when youre at the podium. 1. Dont procrastinate. If you let the anxiety keep you from thinking and preparing, youre creating a self-fulfilling prophesy of failure. The moment you know youll be presenting before an audience, start outlining and thinking your presentation through. The more time (elapsed and actual) that you spend preparing, the less time youll spend dreading the experience. Getting right onto the project also give you more time to organize your ideas and rehearse. 2. Organize your argument. The purpose of every speech and presentation is to cause the audience to make a decision. Start with that decision, write it down, and then move backwards from Heres where I want them to be to Heres where they are today. Arrange your argument in a logical sequence, providing each point with both a visual representation (bullet, graphic or photo) and one or more facts that support that each part of your argument. Theres a real sense of security that comes from knowing that your speech makes sense and that youve got facts to buttress and prove each point. Having a bulletproof argument is like wearing armor. Youre safe, protected by the facts. 3. Start with an arresting fact. The root of the fear of public speaking is the worry that the audience is judging you. Not to freak you out or anything, but they are indeed judging you. However, in most cases, audiences decide in the first 15 seconds whether or not youre worth listening to. Because of that, craft the first 15 seconds of your speech so that it captures attention and proves that your topic is important to the audience. To do this, you begin with a fact or statistic thats relevant and surprising. A strong start creates momentum. Furthermore, seeing the audience (often literally) sit up and take notice reduces anxiety, because now youve got them in the palm of your hand. I discuss this in 15 Seconds to a Better Presentation. 4. Rehearse and visualize. Fact: the emotional part of your mind cant clearly differentiate between real and imagined experiences. Because of this, you can make yourself less nervous about an event by visualizing it as a positive experience. The best way to do this is to rehearse your talk, while simultaneously imagining your audience having a positive reaction to it. As youre rehearsing, imagine how great youll feel when you know the audience gets what youre saying. 5. Test everything beforehand. Whether youre aware of it or not, part of your fear of public speaking is the nagging worry that something outside your control might go wrong, like a broken slide projector or a microphone glitch. Indeed, maybe youve seen (or worse experienced) such problems. For example, at one keynote I gave a while back, the high wattage projector in the auditorium melted my plastic slides, leaving me to proceed impromptu. It was nightmarish. To reduce and eliminate this element of your fear, check the meeting room setup and any equipment youll need twice: once long before the meeting and then again just before the meeting takes place. 6. Speak to individuals not the audience. Finally, when youre actually presenting never speak to the entire audience. Instead, pick out an individual in the audience and speak directly to him or her. Pretend everyone else is simply overhearing a conversation. Every time you move to another point or slide, pick out a different person in the room and speak directly to that person. Its harder to fear public speaking when youre speaking a person, rather than to the public! As an added benefit, this technique (almost magically) makes everyone in the audience feel as if you were addressing them personally... even if you never picked out that person to talk to! As a result, your talk will be better received and more memorable as well. BY GEOFFREY JAMES
Posted on: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 18:50:35 +0000
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