Speaking Up without Freaking Out: Techniques for confident presenting

audiences respond best to confident speakers yet for many of us being confident is hard because speaking in front of people either live or virtually is nerve-wracking we get anxious this anxiety is called glossophobia and many people suffer from it up to 85% of people report that they fail nervous when presenting in front of others and I think the other 15% are lying because I think we can create a situation that would make them nervous too our goal in becoming effective compelling communicators is to build up our confidence by learning to manage our anxiety rather than

have it manage us so what I'd like to do is share with you 10 tried and tested anxiety management techniques that can help you feel more comfortable and confident when you present the very first technique is to greet your anxiety for most people when they begin to feel nervous their anxiety actually makes them feel more nervous when you begin to feel those Jitters or you begin to perspire you start feeling like oh no everybody's going to tell that I'm nervous and we begin to actually make ourselves more and more nervous the single best thing you

can do in that situation is simply to greet your anxiety say to yourself This Is Me feeling anxious it makes sense that I'm nervous I'm about to do something of consequence and by acknowledging your anxiety you short circuit that building or spiral of anxiety that makes it far worse so a great technique is to Simply greet your anxiety another very useful technique is to work on breathing nervous speakers breathe very shallow and very quickly by taking deep belly breaths you allow yourself the opportunity to catch your breath and to quell the autonomic nervous response that

leads to many of those anxious symptoms by simply taking some deep belly breaths prior to speaking you slow down your blood pressure and your heart rate it can help you tremendously take deep breaths another thing to try is to warm up your voice nervous speakers go inside themselves they think about what's coming what they're going to say how they're going to respond and they don't warm up all other athletes before they do their events warm up they stretch singers practice their vocal range before they go out on stage speakers need to do the same thing

practice your beginning lines say a tongue twister do something to warm up your voice the first time you hear your voice during a presentation shouldn't be in front of the audience speaking of the audience it's critical that you be in service of them too often nervous speakers feel like all the lights are shining on them and everybody's attention is focused on analyzing and evaluating them really your job is to be in service of your audience and to put that Spotlight on them if your attention is on your audience and giving them what they need that

gives you less bandwidth to worry about yourself so a very effective anxiety management technique is to think about the audience and get them what they need another useful technique is to write down your fears many of our fears about speaking are irrational they're emotional and when we write them on paper we do two things we make them explicit and make them more rational by being able to distance ourselves from them and evaluate them additionally by writing them down we get them out of our head and by actually seeing them it gives us more of a

sense of agency and control over them writing down your fears is something that can be very empowering many of us when we speak worry about how bad things can go what happens if this happens or that happens and instead we should expect success what could it be like if it goes well so go into a presentation expecting it to go well if you do this you can live up to that self-fulfilling prophecy now you don't have to define success at some super high unattainable level success can simply be getting through all of your material getting

your audience to engage with you at a certain point but if you expect success that gives you more of a sense of control and a goal that you will be pleased to try to achieve rather than if you're thinking of all the negative thoughts a goal that you want to avoid reframing the speaking situation is one of the most powerful tools for managing anxiety if you see your speaking situation as a performance whether it's a right way and a wrong way that can make you very nervous and put a tremendous amount of pressure on you

instead of seeing speaking as a performance view it as a conversation most of us don't get nervous when we converse with our friends our family our co-workers so how do you do that how do you reframe speaking as a conversation let me suggest three tips first practice conversationally sit around a conference room table a dining room table a coffee shop table and Converse your presentation with somebody talk it through as if you're having a conversation by practicing this way you get in the habit of speaking more conversationally Second Use conversational language nervous presenters physically distance

themselves and they linguistically distance themselves nervous speakers say things like one must consider the ramifications we don't talk that way they should say things like you should consider this is important to you more conversational inclusive language is conversational third use questions these can be questions where people actually respond they can be polling questions they can even be rhetorical questions but questions are dialogic they're two-way they're conversation so by practicing conversationally by using conversational inclusive language and by using questions you can increase the fact that what you're doing is a conversation rather than see it as

a performance another thing that we have to rid ourselves of is procrastination when you're nervous about something and you know it's going to be something that's hard for you it's very easy to put it off to try to ignore it to procrastinate but all procrastination does is compress that anxiety and when you compress it it gets more intense right before so we need to manage our procrastination and research tells us a great way to do that is to publicly commit to your goals so as you identify time-based goals I'll have my introduction done two days

before I begin practicing which is 2 days before I give the presentation by publicly committing to those goals it will help you one not procrastinate and two actually get your presentation prepared and ready so we have to learn to manage that procrastination and we do so by publicly committing to goals another thing that gets people very nervous is thinking about all the things that could go wrong that catastrophizing actually can be paralyzing now thinking about things that can go wrong is actually very beneficial to effective speakers but you have to go the next step you

have to plan for those contingencies just like I hope many of you have a fire safety plan for where you live if there's a fire you know what to do you should have similar contingency plans for your presentation so if you're afraid that your slide deck isn't going to be able to project have handouts or have a file that you can email to people in its place by having contingencies thought about and planned for it gives you a sense of control and it gets you out of paralysis that comes from all of these concerns the

last bit of advice I give you for managing anxiety is to break away from PowerPoint and slides start with an outline start with a structure have a story to tell if you have that story you can then fold slides into it if they help the audience and only if they help the audience but by having a structure that you've thought about that's an outline form form that gives you something to hang your hat on it gives you something to come back to if all you have are slides then you are floating in space you don't

have something to root them down so having clear structure in an outline format will help anxiety about speaking affects most everyone I want you to leave knowing that there are tools that you can use to help you manage that anxiety so that you can deliver confident presentations