Confident Public Speaking

Welcome to Shrink for the Shy Guy. This is the show for you. If you are sick and tired of being held back by fear, self doubt, social anxiety, shyness, anything that's stopping you from you being you. I'm going to share the most powerful tools and resources that I've been discovering over the last 15 years on my journey to eradicate social anxiety and instill confidence, first in myself and, and then in every single person that I meet on my journey. You're going to learn these tools and how to apply them in your life now so that you can become the most free, powerful, bold, authentic version of you. Welcome to today's episode of Shrink for the Shy Guy. I'm your host, Dr. Aziz, and today we're going to be talking about you confidently speaking in front of more people. And that could be confidently speaking in the giving a formal presentation sense, which I want to answer a question that I had from someone recently about giving a TED Talk. Although this doesn't have to apply to it, formal speaking. In fact, a lot of people, because they're afraid or uncomfortable with public speaking, know that they're not going to do that. And then they think, well, I don't need to worry about public speaking because I've already solved that problem. I'm just not going to public speak. And that might work for, say, pre planned presentations. You know, you're not going to give the toast at the wedding or whatever. But actually, if you change or expand your definition of public speaking, I mean, this comes up everywhere. What about a work meeting when there's like six people and they all turn to you and say, well, what do you think? That's kind of public speaking. In fact, even more terrifying, that might be impromptu or spontaneous public speaking where you don't even have a presentation planned. Right. You got a riff off what you already know or, or what you think or what you're making up on the spot. So that could be a work setting and a small, informal meeting. Maybe you do have to give a presentation at work. Sure. It's not, you know, addressing the whole company and being the CEO or something, although you might have that as well. I've worked with people who are in high positions in companies who have tremendous anxiety speaking up and they just do it cause it's part of their job, but they're stressed out all the time. They have, you know, stomach issues, they have anxiety issues, they have sleep issues. Um, some of them I've talked to and work with are on beta blockers, which is a medicine that removes the physiological experience of the anxiety. So it doesn't alter your experience of fear. It's not like an anxiolytic that can numb your fear, like Valium that can just basically turn your fear off temporarily, although then it rebounds back way more. So don't use that as a solution for most anxiety, including public speaking. That's usually a bad, bad approach. That's what most psychiatrists would not provide that for public speaking or any other sort of anxiety at this day, day and age. But beta blockers can remove your heartbeat from going off the charts and you're just, you're more calm physiologically, which does allow you to perform better at the same time. I remember this guy I worked with who give these presentations regularly to his company and he had to take a beta blocker every time and if for some reason he had to give an impromptu situation or he didn't have his, you know, pre planned beta blocker in the morning, he couldn't do it. So the problem is not really solved in this regard. And the good news is there is a way to solve this problem. So whether you're giving a larger formal presentation to a company, a small group presentation, or even people don't think about public speaking in terms of social or friend groups, but it can be right. You know, there's a group of six people and I don't know why I'm always picking the number six. It's only six if there's five or seven, and this doesn't apply. No, but a small group of people and you know, you're sharing a story and all of a sudden just four people are looking at you as you share the story. That's like a form of public speaking. So how do we get more confident? How do we get more comfortable? How do we get more bold and authentic speaking with groups of people, that's what I want to get into in this episode. The first thing to look at here is why are you afraid? Why are you afraid? And it might seem like, well, everybody's afraid. And I've been afraid so long. And of course public speaking is scary. So what a weird question, why would you even ask it? But let's take a moment here. I'm not saying why are you afraid of a cougar out in the wild in the woods? Or why are you afraid if a car is bearing down on you really fast and you're on the road? Those are physiological dangers, threats. I understand why you'd be afraid of those. But public speaking, speaking in front of a group of people is not Inherently dangerous in the same way. Now, it might feel like that, and it might have felt like that for so long that the fear and the danger become blurred. So because I'm scared, I perceive a sense of danger, therefore it must be dangerous. Therefore it's a threat. Right. In cognitive therapy, they would call that emotional reasoning. Because I'm scared, it must be dangerous. So the first thing we gotta do is we gotta kind of dig in there a little bit, because if we're not aware, we're just gonna keep perpetuating it. And no matter how much public speaking you do, you might still just be afraid of it because you haven't really examined what's underneath. So I'm gonna start again here. What are you afraid of? Well, generally there's some sort of judgment that we're afraid of. I gave a pause there so that you might reflect or think about it or maybe just daydream during that pause. I don't know. But whatever it is my perception in my own self and working with lots of people around this, it's a fear of being judged. And the judgment might be about your performance. Right? Like, I'm not going to do it well, I'm going to stutter, I'm going to forget things, and then people are going to judge me because I didn't do it very well. Sometimes the judgment is about how people perceive your emotional state. So forget about the content. That guy or that person, that woman looked nervous. Oh, my gosh, how shameful and terrible, embarrassing that was. If you're nervous when you give the talk again, the content aside, maybe it's brilliant information you're delivering to your company about whatever the topic is. But if you're nervous as you did it, then often clients of mine are afraid that people are gonna see them as nervous and then think that they're weak, that they can't hack it, that they shouldn't be in the position that they're an imposter. All this stuff is loaded into being nervous. And the judgment could be of something else. I mean, you could imagine someone's gonna judge that your nose is big or your voice is too nasal or that your shoes don't look good. I mean, it doesn't really matter. But it's a fear of judgment. They are not gonna like it. They are gonna judge me. And so, in a way, this is not too different than any other sort of social anxiety. It's just more pronounced because instead of one or two sets of eyeballs looking at you, like when you're talking to a Stranger or a friend or a colleague. Now you got 20 or 30 sets of eyeballs looking at you, or 50 or 100 or more. Especially in these days online, right? You can be giving a presentation on Zoom. There's 50, 70 people there looking at you. Now, of course, you might not even see all of them. You might even just be seeing yourself as you give the presentation on the screen. But there they are, you know they're there and it creates this increased sense of fear. So to truly become confident in public speaking, two sides are needed. Yes, we need to practice in repetition. I'll talk about that in a minute. But we also need to work on the underlying core fear, which is the fear that goes through all social anxiety and niceness, which is what are they going to think of me? And what it can be is a magnifier of your own insecurities. I'm going to say that again in a different way because it's so important to get this, because this is what's going to set you free. You are already afraid of judgment, of other people. Forget about public speaking. We all are, right? And the more work you do on this, the more aware you can become, the more options you can have, the more boldness you can develop to act in the face of that fear. And yet it's an inherent human quality to be concerned about what other people are going to think of them. So when people, when I share that, you can be free of that. I don't mean that you don't ever have any concern about it. I mean that that doesn't have to stop you from going and giving the talk, going and asking the person out, going, you know, sharing your work with the world, being who you want to be. But the question is, what is that insecurity? What are you afraid of? The way we deal with that fear of judgment is not to downsize your life and hide so no one can judge you. It's to get more resilience. It's almost like a protective layer around that. Like, you know, I've been getting more into long distance running. I just joined a friend of mine who did a super long race. He did a hundred mile race cause he's a beast. And I ran the last 30 miles with him and it was the most up and close and personal I've ever been to an ultra race. I've done a lot of long distance stuff on my own, but never in this type of community. And I really liked it. Perhaps I'll record another episode about it in some way, but one Thing that's happening when people go these long distances is their feet are getting effed up in the most gross possible ways. My God, don't even look at pictures online of ultra racing feet if. Unless you want to be horribly disturbed. In any case, I wasn't like a medic or anything there, so I didn't see a ton of it, but I saw a little bit, a little bit of the carnage. And I remember my friend who was running had started to get these pretty gnarly blisters on his feet. Now he just sort of powered through and, you know, dealt with the pain. But other people have to tend to them depending on how bad they get. And one of the things you do around a blister, a sensitive thought, trust me, this is going somewhere, right? There's a sore spot. Think of that as your insecurity. People are gonna think I'm dumb. That's your blister. That's your sore spot. What you do is if you want to keep running, AKA keep talking, keep putting yourself out there in the world, you put a protective layer over the blister, and then that becomes a membrane that protects the blister from the thing that's rubbing it, which is your shoe in this case. There's a protective membrane between you and someone else's perception of you. So you need to be able to build that membrane. You don't protect yourself by getting your foot out of your shoe and never running again. I mean, I guess that's a form of protection, but you really limit your life, right? And it's the same thing with the fear of others judging you. It's like you're gonna really limit your life. So what you need to do is develop this strength, this resilience. So here's how you do that. What exactly are you afraid of? Make a list. What are the three or five things that someone might judge you for as you give your talk? You're dumb. You lost your train of thought. You don't know what you're doing. You're an imposter. You're anxious, and that's weak or pathetic. Those are the biggest ones that I hear. And the wording might be slightly different, but literally, write it out. If you don't write it out, you're not actually going to get any more confident with public speaking. I mean, you could be listening to this through, I don't know, for curiosity, for entertainment. But if you. If this one really resonates with you, and this applies even if you don't go give talks for A living. You just want to be more confident in groups of people, get clear on what those top three are at least. What are the things? What are the judgments you're afraid people are gonna have of you? And then this is what we work with, because this is a form of exposure, really, right? I mean, at the root of relieving ourselves of any anxiety, there needs to be some two things. One is some confrontation of what we're afraid of. That's known as exposure in behavioral therapies. And though there's another thing that's needed, which is some changing of your perception, you need to somehow see things differently, see yourself differently. And that's where that inner side of that inner work comes from. And so when we think of exposure might think, okay, go out there and do a bunch of public speaking, which we'll get to in a minute, like, what kind of practice could or should you be doing? But I've seen this all the time where people do a lot of out there in the world exposure. They go face their fear, whether it's speaking or approaching people or dating or other things, but they don't feel like they're getting anywhere. And often what's happening is the purpose of exposure is not just to take a lot of action. It's to actually change your perception of the situation of yourself. Something inside clicks where you realize, like, oh, this isn't dangerous, or, oh, I can do this. And we can help that along by saying, okay, what am I really afraid of here? And it's these judgments, okay, so now it's no longer about public speaking. It's about what? Where do these judgments come from? Is this the voice of my dad or my mom or my siblings or other kids at school? This is a deeper inquiry and an invitation for you to get right with yourself, to address and heal those fundamental underlying insecurities that are always there. They might just be more pronounced when you're trying to go public speak, but there's benefit to addressing those. And there's a lot of other episodes in this show about how to not care so much what other people think of you, how to deal with criticism, that sort of thing. So I don't want to spend the whole episode focused on that. But that's a big part of relieving yourself from this fear of public speaking is addressing those underlying insecurities. Why are you not okay with yourself? Why do you so what? Someone might judge you as stupid. Someone might judge you as, you know, see that you're anxious and judge that as weak that judgment Is painful because you judge anxiety as weakness, you judge yourself as dumb, or a part of you does inside and you believe it. So there's deeper work to heal there. Getting on your own side. Check out the book on my own side that I wrote a number of years ago for exactly that. The other side of it is going to be, you know, what do you do well with any form of overcoming anxiety, but also getting better at any skill? Nothing beats repetition and learning. Hopefully learning that is also not just trial and error. It involves a certain level of personal trial and error and a certain level of modeling. Those are the two things that are really powerful in learning. So, you know, if you're trying to golf swing, improve your golf swing, you got to get out there and hit a bunch of balls at the driving range. And you'd ideally be studying people who swing the club well and hit the ball straight and true, right? So there's modeling involved and the same thing for public speaking. So let's talk about the modeling. This is where you watch people who communicate with groups in a way that you like. Cause everyone's got a different style, right? Same thing with golf swings. I'm not a big golfer by any means or really know how to golf that much. But, you know, there's many different ways that people do it. Same thing with singing or dancing or creation of any kind. So same thing with your communication, your public speaking. Who do you resonate with? Who do you like? Who. Who do you get entranced by where you just want to keep listening to them talk, that is your person or people to start modeling. So I remember back. Back in the day when I was very scared of public speaking, I started to one, do just raw exposure, trial and error. And I'll talk more about that in a minute. But then I also started to listen to people. And one person I loved listening to was Les Brown. You may or may not be familiar with Les Brown. He had his big heyday in like the 80s and 90s. He's still around, still talking, still inspiring people. An amazing guy, just full of energy. And he spoke really quickly and eloquently and with a lot of passion. And I just loved listening to him. And so there is a way that just by listening and starting to say, okay, how can I replicate this? How can I be like this? And then a number, a couple years later, I went to a number of Tony Robbins events. And there were aspects of his style that I really liked, Particularly the way that he would gesture and use his body to really fill up the space you know, I'd seen a lot of speakers who would walk around, definitely, you know, being moving when they spoke was I'd seen before, but I'd never seen anyone like, wave their arms around and do these big dramat gestures. And I like that. And also gestures of the face, like there was this magnification of expression. And so I started to model that as well and give myself more permission to try these things out. So find who the people are that you resonate with, start to model that style, and then you gotta have a place to model it, right? And sure, you could start out in your bedroom alone, but ultimately you're gonna need to speak. You wanna get better at speaking, you need to speak. This is true. You wanna get better at golf, you gotta swing the golf club. You wanna get better at running, go running. And this is true for any skill. You want to get better at speaking a language, go maybe ideally to that country or at least regularly to a place where you can speak that language. So where can you do public speaking? Now sometimes people say, does that mean I have to join Toastmasters? Because that's what they think of. And if you're not familiar with it, Toastmasters is a. Is an organization that's got, you know, chapters all over the place, everywhere you could think of. Just look it up online, your local area. There's. I guarantee, unless you're out in the middle of the boondocks, that there's going to be a number of Toastmasters groups you can go to. This is a group of people that want to improve public speaking. And they got their own culture there, their own format there. There's little jobs people can do, there's practice sessions. There's all kinds of structure there that can be really helpful as well as an opportunity to face the dragon, you know, stand up in front of the group and give a talk. Now, if you're going to do something like that, I would recommend, if you're going to do it, do it. So what I often see is people go to Toastmasters and they're. They're kind of hover around the edge and maybe one day I'm going to give a talk. And then they sign up for a talk, and then once you know what, they're sick the day they're supposed to give their talk. I can't go today. And it's just, you know, you're here to learn this, right? So make a commitment before you go in. Like, I'm going to talk today. Even if it's my first meeting, I'm Going to introduce myself. I'm going to sign up for some. They'll always have like an prompt you job or something you could sign up for and lean into it. Like, that's the place to make mistakes. And that's another really important thing about learning in general. And I'm teaching my kids this right now. They're learning how to type on a keyboard. And they'll get frustrated when they make mistakes during this little typing game they're playing. And I'll remind them, I'll say, if you're making mistakes, that means you're learning something. So one of them was getting really frustrated and he's like, oh, I'm not getting it. I say, okay, here's what you say out loud. Just repeat after me. When I make mistakes, it means I'm learning. And that's absolutely true. Right? Because if he typed at a pace where he made no mistakes, then he's maybe, you know, feels better because you don't feel like you're losing or making a mistake, but you're not getting any better. So mistakes is where you learn. It's the same for public speaking. So Toastmasters is an option, and it could be a great option for people. I did a little bit of that myself. I never really got into becoming a member and going to all the meetings, but I did show up to a few different ones and would always sign up for some impromptu opportunity to talk when I would go there. And there are other opportunities. You might not have an opportunity to line up a bunch of speaking gigs or something like that. Right. But what about the workplace? Can you raise your hand and speak in a meeting that you normally would not speak? Can you volunteer to lead something? Okay, okay, I'll lead that next meeting in which you're forced to speak. That's one of the best things we can do to make ourselves grow is commit to something that you know, the next week when it rolls around, part of you is like, I don't want to do that. That's a terrible idea. But you already signed up and you're kind of bound to do it. That is fantastic for your growth. You kind of, you know, you paint yourself into a corner and you got to find your way out. And that's where growth occurs. Cause there's always gonna be a part inside that's like, I don't wanna. Now's not the right time. I'm too busy. I'll do are easier and safer. So we gotta kind of lean into that edge. And another great opportunity that's maybe unique to this era, and certainly I noticed in myself has been radically beneficial, is to actually record something with the purpose of sharing it. Now, for example, this, right? This is a podcast that I'm recording. I'm gonna share with people. It could be a YouTube video or any other video platform that you wanna. And this, man, this really hits a lot of the buttons of exposure. You're gonna be uncomfortable. Oh, my gosh, People are gonna watch it. People could judge me. What if I make all those mistakes? Or all that same fears about speaking in front of a group in person are gonna come up in recording or something that you intend to share, and that's a key piece of it. I intend to share it. Cause if you just tell yourself, I'm just gonna record this and delete it, you don't treat it the same. There's, there's. You're not. You're not directly confronting the fear. If you want to record it with the intention of sharing it. And it's okay. If you want to record it a number of times, it could be very short couple minutes, and then you just want to redo it. A couple minutes, redo it. I would avoid getting perfectionistic and editing a lot and stopping and starting and stopping and starting and stopping and starting. Almost like, okay, you could prepare. And then when it's record time, you do your best to just record it all in one go. And if you don't like that, go, just record it all again in one go without pausing and editing and pausing and editing. And what that does is it simulates the experience of speaking with others in a group. Now, this has been amazing for me personally, so I did a lot of. I would look for opportunities to speak, and I think that's one of the biggest takeaways when it comes to exposure. So when I got a new job, they asked, you know, what kind of stuff do you want to do here and in addition to your normal duties? I was like, well, there's any opportunity to speak with groups, I'm looking, looking to do more of that. Like, I put it out there. So then they knew, oh, assign that guy that stuff. Even though afterwards, part of me is like, what the hell are you doing? But I knew that that's what I wanted to do. So for my greater good, I'm gonna commit to something that later I'll follow through on. And over time, you know, I would give talks in groups, but not that often I start, you know, I would teach some things online here and there. Back in the day, it was a tele Class before, you know, master classes were a thing and everything. But what I started doing, geez, almost 10 years ago now, 2014. Whoa. We're coming up on the 10 year anniversary of this show. As I started recording this show, I started recording weekly YouTube videos. It was a lot of hours of training. And the way that I record this podcast is the way that I suggested is minimal editing. I don't really go back and change something unless I'm coughing or completely stumble over my words. But if I don't articulate myself exactly how I want, eh, that's okay. We just keep rolling because there's a lot of energy moving through. And that's my speaking style is I want to speak authentically from the heart, less filtered and as much and as quickly as can come through me, I want to share. And if it's scripted in some way, then that really restricts that flow. And it's the same way that I teach in workshops and in person events. But basically I did this for a number of years, like hundreds of hours of recording, maybe even thousands at this point, right. And so when it came to, like, I'm going to speak in front of this group of people, I remember I noticed it after a couple years of doing the podcast. Then I would go give a talk to a group and I was like, wow, I can speak way more quickly, articulately, eloquently. It just kind of comes out of me without really thinking about it at all. I mean, maybe I'll plan a little bit my bullet points, what I want to talk about. But when it comes to the actual speaking, it's very unscripted. And it took me a moment to realize, oh, you know, I've been doing reps in my basement because my original recording place for this podcast in 2014 was back at this old rental house that we had. And I didn't have a recording studio or anything at that point. And it was literally this, this creepy closet in the back of the garage. And it was underneath the stairs going up to the upstairs somehow there was a little nook there. I don't know what it was originally designed for, but when we moved in, we didn't even know about it. We lived in that house for about a year and a half, maybe two years, and we didn't know about it for the first six months. And then one day I was in the garage and I was like, what's this door back here? And I opened it up and there's this little tiny room full of cobwebs and spiders. And like 500 big sticks. Not even necessarily like firewood, just sticks. I was like, huh. But at the time I was looking, I wanted. I wanted to start recording a podcast. And one of my mentors at the time was like, hey, you don't need to invest a lot in a recording studio. It was a rental house. Like, here's what you do. You get this microphone, plug it into your laptop, and put moving blankets, just nail them into the walls in this little nook. And so if you listen back to the first episodes of Shrink for the Shy Guy, those were recorded in the creepy closet. But so I'd been doing reps in my basement for many, many years. And by the time I got out there to do a lot more public speaking in person, in more. As video became bigger online, like teaching to groups on zoom and stuff, you know, I was. I was ready. And so that's gonna be the invitation for you. In fact, let's. Let's turn this into several invitations via your action step. Time for action. Action, action. Your action step is gonna be to confront on two levels. One is gonna be to confront the fears that you have. Someone's gonna see you as what? What are you afraid of? Being judged as. As being seen as. And letting that be okay. Surrendering to someone might see me as dumb. Someone might see that I'm anxious. And if that's not okay, then you're always going to be stressed and you're always gonna have a hard time with public speaking. And it's a softening and a letting go. And again, if you want more guidance on that, just search and look through other episodes of this podcast about letting go of the fear of judgment, fear of criticism, what they are going to think of you. That's a reoccurring theme in this show, and there's lots of episodes. You can Also search my YouTube channel for that @getmoreconfidence. Search on YouTube there as well. The other level of confronting or exposure is going to be to go practice something, record something with the intent of sharing. You might say, where I'm going to share it. I don't know, put it out on some sort of social media platform. And if you're like, oh, my God, that's way too scary. Well, don't put it out on your main page. I don't know, go create a new account on some platform, you know, TikTok or YouTube or a podcast. Just something. Just create it. Maybe no one listens to it because it's like a new thing, but maybe someone does so you don't know. That's enough to create the fear and the discomfort inside. And eventually you can graduate to like, yeah, I'm gonna share this on my main page with people. And it doesn't have to be a formal talk. It's just you sharing your ideas. And here's a key thing with this action step. Don't just do it once, right? That's like, I'm gonna go to the golf driving range, and I'm gonna. I'm gonna swing at one ball, and then I'm gonna drive home. Well, that was a nice outing. It was a nice Sunday drive to the driving range. But you're not gonna get any better at golf, right? We gotta do a lot of repetitions here, so record more. Sign up for opportunities to speak. Check out the Toastmasters. Whatever it is that you want to do, it's about turning this into, like, a little mini project and depending on your life and all the things you got going on, it doesn't have to be like, this is my new thing and everything's on hold. Just give it, you know, 20, 30 minutes a week, maybe even. That's not that much time, honestly, in a whole week. And you'll start to grow. It's not about tons of time. It's about a willingness to go into the thing that makes you the most uncomfortable. So everything that you listen to in this episode, if there's certain things that you're like, ooh, ooh, oh, that's really uncomfortable, well, that might be the thing to go to that's going to give you the biggest growth, the fastest. All right, thanks for being with me today. Until we speak again, may have the courage to be who you are and to know on a deep level that you are awesome.

Thanks for listening to Shrink for the shy guy with Dr. Aziza. If you know anyone who can benefit from what you've just heard, please let them know and send them a link to shrinkforthshyguy.com for free blogs, ebooks, and training videos related to overcoming shyness and increasing confidence, go to socialconfidencecenter.com.

Sam.