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 feel 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. They 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. 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 getting 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 where there'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, 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 conversational. 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 two 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 that 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 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.