Addressing Fear of Public Speaking | On The Homefront with Jeff Dudan #83

Welcome to on the Home Front. I'm Jeff Duden. If the thought of speaking in front of an audience makes your heart race and palms sweat, you are not alone. It's one of the most common fears. But fear not. In today's episode, we're diving into practical tips and tricks that have worked for me and I am going to share them with you. We'll explore why public speaking triggers that fight or flight response and how to overcome it. Why the audience's eyes on you can feel daunting, but how to embrace it. Plus, I'll introduce you to the meander method, a simple technique created by me to organize your thoughts and speak confidently without a script. So grab a pen and paper and let's get started on turning your public speaking fears into a powerful presentation. Couple of fundamentals. Number one, ignore irrational fear. Speaking in front of people is not fatal. There is a natural fight or flight response that you get when you look out at the audience and you see all these people attentively looking at you. There's a specific reason why that freaks you out. But here's the deal. If I'm up in front of people and I die, it's not from speaking in front of people. It's from other poor life choices. It's a coronary artery attack from eating that rib eye one too many times. But, but it's going to have nothing to do with the fact that I'm speaking in front of people. So second, embrace the eyes of the tribe. Okay. And this is a lot of what freaks people out about speaking in front of people. It is if you are looking at a group of people and all of their eyes are on you. What that used to mean is when we were tribal people is that you are outside of the tribe. Either something sneaking up behind you and you're going to get eaten by a saber toothed tiger or you've done something wrong, you're being ostracized, something and you're going to get hit with sticks and rocks or something like that. So when everybody's looking at you and you're part of a tribe, that's not a comfortable place to be and you want to know like, what's going on, what's behind me, what is everybody, what's going to happen to me that people are anticipating and everybody's looking at me. So what I find is you have to learn to embrace the eyes of the tribe. Gaze into the audience, hold people's eyes for just a second. When you make eye contact with somebody, take advantage of that to just pause and make them wait for what comes next. And above all, smile, big smile, smile with your eyes, call it a smize, but just look at people and be comfortable inside of that. Be thankful that you have people's attention. Number three, don't borrow trouble from things that are unsaid. Every speaker forgets to say something that they meant to say. Every speaker goes out of order in their presentation at one point or another. Unless it's like a written speech. Maybe you're a politician and you are reading from a scripted thing. Other than that, most speakers, they're going to be talking extemporaneously and just, you know, free flowing the dialogue. That's the very best way to be when you're speaking to people. I'm going to tell you how a method that's going to help you get there. But don't, don't. If you forget to say something, don't stumble over yourself and say, oh, I forgot to say that. And also, that's another good point. While I'm there, don't break character, okay? You are doing a performance. You are giving these people high value. You want them to give them the best value, best value possible. Don't pull the curtain back and show them what's going on in the back of your head. Don't go and say, oh, well, I really meant to say this, or oh, that wasn't that good. Those little awkward transitions that people make to make, they think it makes themselves more comfortable, but it really does is it interrupts the flow of the idea or the font or the delivery. So just don't do it. Just, you know, if you forgot to say something, just keep moving forward. And there's no reason for you to let the audience in on things that you're concerned about or worried about. It just doesn't add any value. It's not particularly harmful. I mean, people do it all the time, especially speakers that aren't professional, but it's just not helpful. It's really not going to add anything. So you might as well keep it clean, keep moving forward. And if you forgot to say something and you're already past it, just let it go get it next time. So I'm going to give you a method. It's called the meander method, okay? And it gives you the ability to take a walk through your concepts while you talk. And here's how you do it. So take out a blank piece of paper, do it right now, and take that piece of paper and divide it into no more than six equal squares on that page. Now I've done keynotes that were over 100 minutes and I had two pages of squares and maybe there was eight squares on each of them because I was moving from many different topics and different models of thought, different theories, different stories that I wanted to tell. But for most talks, four to six squares is all you need. If I'm doing a podcast with somebody, I might do two pages of six squares because I've got six topics I might want to go to. But at the end of the day, take a Sharpie and make these squares. And then in each square, start with a header that is a one to three word bullet point. It's a main idea, it's a topic. It could be things like family. If I want to talk to this person about their family. It could be things like books, if they've got some books that I want to talk about. It could be something about a specific company, whatever. It is a key main point that I'm going to want to dig into or that I'm going to want to speak about and articulate to the audience. Make that the big header inside of one of these squares. Then under each bullet create a three to seven sub bullets. Again, just one to five words, very, very short. These words are just triggers for you because if you don't know the material well enough to, well, somebody gives you a one to five word trigger that then you probably shouldn't be speaking about it. So these are just stones crossing a river. They're going to get you to the next place to where you're safe. And you can pause there and you can stand on that stone and you can talk all about what's going on inside of that square. These triggers, these stones, they're just enough to get you into the neighborhood. So main bullet point is the neighborhood. I'm going to go and we're going to talk about this particular big topic. And then there's going to be a variety of small bullet points that I want to weave into the conversation or weave into the presentation that I'm giving. So now once you get into one of these squares, and this is the key trick to it, stay in there, stay in that square. And now talk about it extemporaneously, just off the top of your head comfortably and touch on these different words or ideas or phrases or concepts that you put into that square. The last thing you want to do when you're giving a basic talk that's not a speech, if you're giving a talk, is write out 15 pages of notes that you're going to read because you end up. I've done like the. I've only. Honestly, I've only botched one speech in my entire life. And the funny thing is, it was years ago. It was probably 2015, something like that. And I hired a speaking coach to teach me how to do this. I'm like, I want to be a better speaker. And I hired this speaking coach and they're like, you need to write everything down that you want to say. So I went up on top to this talk in front of a. A couple hundred people, and I had the entire speech written out and it was like 12 pages of it. And what happens is, as I'm talking about something, then I would naturally expand on that topic a little bit. Oh, but wait a minute. What I'm talking about, that's two pages down. So now I'm like, well, I've already said that, so I can't say that again. And then you don't have anywhere to go back to and reset because you're in the middle of this talk and you can't possibly remember what's been said and you can't hold yourself accountable to, like, you know, what's been missing. So you end up. You might as well just record it and play it for people if that's the talk that you're going to give again. I've seen politicians, they've got very specific words that they want to hit. They're delivering a very specific message. They don't want to be making stuff up as they go. So, like, for the purpose of those types of talks, sure, read it, put it on a teleprompter, look straight at the camera. And that's what news people do. I mean, news people have no idea. I don't know if any of you have ever been in a news studio or a news station. You go in there and what you realize is they have no idea what they're even gonna say. And these people are just so articulate at reading the teleprompter and hitting the words as they come across. And then, you know, I don't even think it touches their brain at the end. They just walk off stage and that's it. They just deliver it. That's not what you're doing when you're. For. Most of us are becoming a speaker. So you want to have a quick, comfortable conversation inside of this square. You want to have a neighborly conversation around each sub bullet, and then you want to move on. You can reference back if it's appropriate later. In the speech, if there's something that pulls together and you want to pull a concept forward to match up with the concept you're talking about, that's fine. But other than that, don't go back, and I put it this way, move on. Don't overstay your welcome at your neighbor's house. You know, don't, don't, you know, like I'm doing right now, probably. But, you know, if it's been said, it's dead. Get off of it and just keep moving. So I'm going to give you an example. Here's a working example of this for anybody that's watched and sorry to our. You know, we have so many listeners in the uk, Australia and New Zealand and some other countries out there. So for the purpose of this example, this is American football. I know you like the other football, but so American football post game interview. Five buckets. Okay? This would be five buckets on a piece of paper. Number one, you're going to want to compliment the other team and their fans. Number two, you're going to recognize your coaches and teammates. Number three, self deprecate. Number four, celebrate or if you won, celebrate. If you lost, maybe analyze with some humility and then get back to work. And then number five is move into a future state. So here's what this would sound like just off the top of my head if I was going to do this. Let's just say we just won a game. I'm walking off the field, somebody sticks a microphone in my face. Hey, Jeff, what do you think of this game there? First of all, this was a tough contest. It's always a difficult place to play because these are some of the most involved and knowledgeable fans in the NFL. And, you know, this team is always prepared when we come in here. So we know it's going to be a battle. And, you know, we got a lot of respect for them. And, you know, it's just a tough place to play. And I was real glad that we were able to get out of here. We're fortunate to get out of here with a win that we really needed right now. Okay, Recognize your coaches and teammates, you know, and our coaches. Anytime we come into a place like this, especially down the stretch, our coaches are going to have us really prepared for what we're doing. And of course, I can't do what I do if I don't have time. And clearly our offensive line did an incredible job today. Our backs were running, running hard. They were taking care of the football. And, you know, when we get the running game going like that, it just makes it much easier for me to be able to find the open people down the field and to move the sticks. Self deprecate. And I really can't do anything unless the guys up front are doing their job. You know, I was fortunate that I made a couple of throws today. There's some things that I definitely needed to do better. I know I missed one late in the third quarter there, you know, that I'd like to have back, but, you know, I'm going to keep working on my game and improving and, you know, and just, you know, try to do my job as well as everybody else is doing their job because it takes all of us to get this done. Okay, number four, celebrate for a minute and then get back to work. Yeah. So this has been a great win. It came at a time that we really needed it and. But, you know, so we're going to take the rest of the night, we're going to enjoy family, but tomorrow morning it's right back to work. We're on a short week, so we gotta get in, we gotta get our treatments and then, you know, we gotta get prepared because we know that we're gonna, we got a tough team coming to town next week and, you know, so we only, we only have, we only have a short time to enjoy this and move into a future state. Yeah. So, you know, next week's gonna be important. We're right in the stretch here at the end of the season and we know that it's going to be a tall task. So we got to get some people healthy. We got to, we got to look and, you know, there's a couple things that we need to work on. Need to get a little bit better at this and that and the other thing. And you know, hopefully we'll, you know, we're going to do our best, whatever. Not a great finish there. But you get the point. It's, you know, if you listen to every single post game football interview for people that have been media trained, they have these anchors of buckets of conversation that they have. So what is that for you? Let's just say that you do a training and you do it repetitively or you have a talk that you give to your team in your business, or you have a presentation that you want to give. Make these buckets out to make sure that you demonstrate a command of the material that you have and that it's organized and then you put your own spin on it and it's comfortable and you don't have to look down at anything. You don't have to read anything. Because after, if you have these triggers and you have these stepping stones inside of these buckets, man, it just becomes really, really natural. And then you get to weave in your stories and you get to weave in the things that are unique to you, and you get to do it, most importantly, in your own voice. So. And I think the last thing that I'll share with you is, again, in addition to this isn't fatal is the audience wants you to win. Whoever's speaking to you, they really want you to win. Nobody wants you to go up there and choke. Nobody wants you to go up in front of people and not have a good presentation. So, like, you should. The opportunity to get up in front of a room of 5 people or 50 people or 500 people is just a great opportunity because if it goes bad, it's going to be over. But if it goes great, it can be something that's great for your career. It can be great for your company. It can just feel good. So I encourage everybody, trust yourself to take chances. Fail fast. You know, make the mistakes. When I failed on that one speech, I knew that I had prepared the wrong way. What I should have done is taken a highlighter and highlighted my key stepping stones throughout that and not read any of the words in between, and I probably would have been fine. But once I started down that path, it was two too late. But you know what? I've probably done a thousand things since then. And remember, the audience wants you to win. They really do. They do not want you to fail. They do not want you to stumble. They're rooting for you. And you should root for yourself as well. Just to recap this, number one, ignore irrational fears because this isn't fatal. Number two, embrace the eyes of the tribe and don't get freaked out. Gaze, pause, and smile back. Number three, don't borrow trouble from things that are unsaid. Don't stumble and open the curtain to what's going on in your head because you just realized that you forgot to say something that you wanted to. It's either going to come back naturally in the flow or just let it go. You'll get it next time. Number four, use the meander method. Okay. Four to six squares on a piece of paper. Main topic, bullet point. Three to seven sub bullet points below that. Once you go into that neighborhood, stay in that neighborhood, walk all the way around. Visit all the houses you want to visit. But don't overstay your welcome on any one point. So remember these sub bullet points, they're simple triggers. These words are just stones that are going to help you cross the river. And they're just enough of a clue for you that to get into the neighborhood and to have that comfortable conversation that you would have with neighbors and friends and people that want you to win. So with all of those things, again, simple tactic, it's really helped me, and I hope that it helps you too. Get out there, get up there and make it happen. Good luck.