Want to Lower the Public Speaking Terror Alert?

These secrets will help you make the shift from stage fright to stage delight and boost your career in the process

The ability to stand up and speak comfortably and effectively before audiences is a widely recognized leadership and success skill.  And yet, opinion polls tell us that many people rank public speaking as their No. 1 fear.  No. 2 is death.

Why is that?  Why is the fear of public speaking so widespread and so intense?

The fear is clearly self-induced.  It's part of a strange mind game we play on ourselves.  It all comes down to our mindset, to how we think about public speaking.

Here's the first and most important secret to lowering the public speaking terror alert.  And I would ask you to read this next sentence allowed over and over again until you've memorized it.  "There's no such thing as public speaking."

What do I mean by that?  Simple.  Speaking in front of an audience requires the same ability as speaking to your best friend, your co-worker or your spouse.  Let's not call it public speaking.  Let's call it something else.  How about just plain old speaking.  Most people can handle that.

After all, speaking is something we all do quite comfortably and effortlessly every day.  We talk with our friends and loved ones all the time without experiencing shortness of breath or a racing heartbeat.

Speaking is a natural act for most human beings.  Putting the label public on a certain kind of speaking is the heart of the problem.  As soon as you call it public speaking, you're fighting an uphill battle. That infamous P-word raises unrealistic expectations, increases stress, and generally elevates the terror alert to dangerously high levels. 

So let's play the mind game to our advantage.  Let's take the very concept of public speaking out of the equation.  Doing so immediately subdues the stress and throttles down the threat.  We should approach speaking to audiences with the same effortless ease as we approach having a conversation with our closest friends. 

The logical, terror-reducing corollary to the first secret is this:  You can only speak to one person at a time.  Making solid, sustained, one-on-one eye contact with individual members of the audience will help to keep you in conversation mode. 

This leads to the third secret to being a more comfortable and effective speaker:  Make sure the real, authentic you shows up.  Too often, audiences are subjected to speakers who are nervous, detached, stressed out, self-conscious, nearly unrecognizable versions of the real person.

The fourth secret is this:  The audience wants you to succeed.  Except in very rare instances, audiences support the speaker.  The audience wants you to be comfortable, informative, entertaining and authentic. And even when you suspect the audience might be hostile in some way, it's much better for you to behave as if the audience supports you. You'll perform much better when you replace self-consciousness with support consciousness. 

The best speakers don't dread the experience.  They actually enjoy the opportunity to share their ideas and insights with a live audience.  And audiences appreciate it when the speaker actually enjoys the experience. Your sense of ease and enjoyment as a speaker is contagious.

How can you make the shift from stage fright to stage delight?  I recommend a simple, three-step process called  the Three Rs:  Recognize, Reject and Replace.  It's a process I describe in more detail in my book, HabitForce!  You begin by recognizing the fear, simply acknowledge that it exists.  Just admit it to yourself.  Then you can reject it - make a conscious choice - by repeating to yourself as an affirmation that there's no such thing as public speaking.  And remind yourself to speak to one person at a time. 

The third step completes the transformation process.  You're able to replace fright with delight by shifting your focus from being self-conscious to being support and connection-conscious.   Knowing the audience supports you allows you let the real you to show up.  The two go hand-in-hand.  Self-consciousness stifles joy and delight.  It's the underlying cause that generates fear and anxiety.     

So do your career, your self-confidence and your audiences a big favor. Enhance your presentation skills by taking advantage of these four secrets to more effective speaking.  The first secret gets the ball rolling.  Once you realize there's no such thing as public speaking, you'll move toward greater comfort, enjoyment, connection, authenticity and natural enthusiasm.  And you'll take a giant step from fright to delight, replacing the fear of speaking with the joy of speaking.