Robert Summa explains why your voice shakes when public speaking: the amygdala triggers fight-or-flight, flooding your system with adrenaline and cortisol. A hand-clap shows how fast this happens.
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Hey friends. I wanted to put together this video because it's something that many of my clients bring up when I'm having a one on one discussion in my discovery calls or clients that are emailing me. And it's the quivering voice when we public speak or present, right? When you get up and all of a sudden you can feel their heart pounding. It's almost like it's coming through your voice and your voice starts quivering and shaking and you know, your whole body's probably kind of shaking and quivering. But we really hear in the voice and what's so embarrassing humiliating is that we know people can hear it. People can hear our voice, right? So once that quivering starts and all of a sudden we feel it and we hear ourselves, then it manifests and gets worse and worse. And I want to go over why this is happening. And it all starts off and we don't have to learn too much about the brain, but there's something in our, in our brain called amygdala, right? And that is in charge of our fight or flight response part of our brain, right? We have the logical brain and then we have the amygdala and that is in charge of the fight or flight response. And steer keep us safe from physical dangers and threats. Now, our amygdala is our best friend and it protects us from the physical dangerous threats. But these physical danger threats are things like bears, tigers, intruders, fires, rhino, snakes. Right? Things. The things that go on like that are physical dangers or threats. But public speaking, well, that's not a physical danger threat. So why is it going off? So we have something called a phobia. And a phobia is an irrational fear or something. And what's going on is our brain has mistakenly taken that public speaking phobia and put it into its database, right? So the amygdala has a database of things that it should fear. So let me give you an example. Okay? So I just clap my hands really fast. Now in that split second, your amygdala just went off. It just, it heard that noise and went and started scanning, right? Am I in danger? Was that a threatening sound? Was, was that a gunfire? Was it somebody breaking to my house? Oh no, it's Bob on the screen. I saw him clap his hands and then it went away. So your mega actually activated in that split second, scanned for any physical dangers or threats and then it went off. It turned off and realized, oh no, that was just Bob on TV or this video clapping his hands, Right? So it knew that you were not in A dangerous situation. But when it comes to public speaking, it has a database of things that it does fear. And that phobia is now literally hardwired into our amygdala, the fear response part of brain. So when we go to public speak, because we are hardwired as a phobia to fear, what's going on is our fight or flight response is literally activating for public speaking because it thinks it is a bear or an intruder or something attacking us or fire. So it's literally setting off all that adrenaline and cortisol. It's this big cocktail of all these hormones that go through our body literally in the same split second as clapping my hand. And what's going on is, oh, yeah, public speaking, that's like a bear. And it just sets off all the fight or flight responses. So we get all that adrenaline and we get that quivering voice. The quivering voice is actually a subset of. Of all that power going through our body to be able to outrun that bear or fight off that bear or intruder or a fire. So that's why we get the quivering voice. The quivering voice is basically just a subsymptom of all that cortisol and adrenaline rushing through our body really quickly because the amygdala thinks that it is a real physical danger threat, and it's getting you ready to be able to run it, run away from it, or fight it. You know, avoidance. Think about avoidance. Avoidance, public speaking, that's running away. So I want to put together this video really quickly just to let you know, this is why it's happening. This is why we get the quivering voice and the pounding heart and all those other symptoms. But a lot of people talk about the quivering voice as the most embarrassing because it's something that people can actually hear in the audience, right? They can't really hear your heart pounding. They can't really hear your inner anxious voice, but they can hear your quivering voice. So that's really embarrassing for a lot of people. So I hope this video really helps. Of course, if you have any questions, feel free to leave comments. I always read my comments and I answer them, but I just want to put together this video so that, you know, why is this happening to me each time I go to speak or present in front of an audience?
