Confidence Unleashed: Mastering Professional Communication with Ease

So what can you do to reduce your anxiety when it comes to communicating in professional settings? For starters, let's step back and ask ourselves, why are we feeling anxious in the first place? If you absolutely knew that when you spoke, everyone would pay attention, everyone would understand you, and everyone would find you incredibly interesting and that they would remember what you're saying and then take the actions you want to, whether it's to buy from you, hire you, sign the contract, vote for you. Would it even be possible to feel anxious or nervous? Well, no. Then it would be almost painful not to be out speaking every single day. So I want you to look at it through that lens. So many people come to this through a negative defensive lens of I want to get through this speech, and as long as I don't look stupid, I'll be happy as long as I don't make a mistake, I'll be happy as long as I look professional. And they're going into a presentation with very low expectations. It's like going to your financial advisor the beginning of the year saying, as long as you don't lose $1 million for me this year, you don't have to make any money. Just don't lose half my money. Would you ever say that to your investment manager? I don't think you would go into any investment, investment strategy, a new financial manager with the idea that I'm going to bunch of money. Right. You should have exactly the same attitude when it comes to every speech, every presentation, every briefing, every talk you give. So keep that in mind. What's creating this anxiety is this obsession of, you know, not stepping on a crack, not falling down. That's not how you win races. You win races by focusing on the goal and running there faster or going faster. Some way to get to the end line, not by simply avoiding mistakes. So forget about counting the ums and ahs. Forget about worrying about what should I do with my left hand here? I have no control. Forget about that and instead focus on what ideas do you have that are important to you, that you really want this audience to know, to remember, and to act upon. If you do that, I promise you, your anxiety will melt away. Part of what creates so much anxiety is you're trying to do something impossible. You're trying to take 89 bullet points or 23 slides that each have 14 and a half bullet points on them. You, you're trying to cover way too much material in too small amount of time. So you start speaking faster and your head is buried. You're going, oh, I'm sorry, I don't have a lot of time. And you start apologizing and it's data point, data point, data point. And at some level, consciously or subconsciously, you know, you're being boring. Nobody's really paying attention. You're going through the motions of giving a presentation, they're going through the motions of kind of paying attention, and no one's really accomplishing anything. So that is what is creating anxiety when it comes to your communication opportunities in professional situations. So much of being a good communicator has nothing to do with what you're wearing, your eye contact, your hands, the quality of your voice. It simply has to do with having the discipline of being a better editor. Using judgment. The biggest problem most people have in professional situations is they do not use their judgment. So they try to tell people everything. When you tell people everything, you're really telling them nothing because you're just overwhelming them with data. It's kind of like if someone says, hey, I'd like to get educated, and you just say, well, go to the Internet. All the facts are there. Go to Wikipedia. All the facts are there. Well, yeah, but that's not helpful. That's too much. What's going to give you so much more confidence, what's going to reduce your anxiety in professional situations is knowing you have truly used your judgment. You've thought about everything. You know what is most important for this audience to know. And typically that means you've narrowed it down to five ideas or fewer. And whatever time you have left, you're going to flesh out those ideas with examples with case studies, with real stories. Not feel good stories about starfish, but real stories involving real conversations with real clients, real colleagues. Colleagues, real customers, about real problems, where you were, how you solved them, and why this particular story is relevant to you and the audience. If you do that, you're going to find your anxiety is going to melt away. That when you are in professional situations and you have an opportunity to communicate, you're going to be excited about it because you're going to know, hey, I'm going to help people and it's going to help me. Whether you're trying to get more clients or customers or doing it out of the goodness of your heart, you're going to feel good because you're actually going to help people and help yourself. Because that's really the number one source of anxiety when it comes to communicating in professional situations is this fear of, I'm not really going to help them or myself. So please follow these tips. Think about? What does your audience have to know that you know that's really going to help them narrow your messages down to just a handful? And then practice your presentation where you're talking to people and looking at people and not just staring at notes and looking at a PowerPoint deck. Do that and your anxiety will melt away.