TJ Walker recommends recording yourself telling your story on your phone, watching it back, and keeping what works until you like what you see. Visualization and meditation won't fix stage anxiety. Practice on video until the fear of being boring goes away.
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Question of the day comes from Imidudin Ilias. She's a student in the complete storytelling course for speaking and presenting. The question is, what techniques can help reduce stage anxiety? During storytelling presentations, the number one thing that can reduce anxiety is for you to practice your story. Practice your presentation on video. Just grab a cell phone, any webcam will do. Record yourself. Watch it if you think it's boring, flat, uninteresting, guess what? It is. The solution isn't to drink green tea. Meditate, visualize a standing ovation, or visualize your audience in their underwear. The solution is do it again. Practice your story. Practice your presentation on video. Look at it again. Do more of what you like. Do less of what you don't like. Keep practicing on video until you love what you see. Until you think, wow, I would watch that person give a presentation if it weren't already me. If you get to the point where you're seeing a presentation that you're giving on video and you like it, it becomes virtually impossible to be nervous or uncomfortable or to have stage fright. The stage fright, the nervousness comes from thinking, oh, what if I'm not interesting? What if I'm no good? What if I'm boring people? Well, it's. It is a risk. There's always that risk. The solution is to actually make sure you're interesting. And you can do that not by writing and rewriting and rewriting your script, because you might have a good script, but if all of a sudden your head is down and you're reading in a flat, monotone way, you're not going to be interesting. A presentation is something visual. It's oral. It's the sound you're making out of your mouth. It's what you're doing with your body or not doing with your body. So the only way of testing that is by practicing it on and actually looking at it and continuing to do it until you love it. So that is the solution. Thanks so much for joining me today. This is Filtered with TJ Walker. I'm your host. Every single day, I come to you analyzing top business stories, economic technology stories, filtering it through the lens of communication skills and personal development skills, all with the goal of helping you not just understand more about the news, but to be more successful in your personal life and your professional life. Thanks so much for joining us today. If you're new to the program, please make sure you subscribe. Please make sure you follow if you're watching on any social media platform. Thank you for doing so. Please make sure you follow us and subscribe on YouTube. Please leave comments. Sign up for notifications if you're listening to this show on any podcasting platform, whether it's Spotify, Apple Music, Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, any platform. Thank you. Be sure you follow or subscribe. Don't be fooled. If you hit subscribe, you're not going to get a bill, you're not going to be charged. It is totally free to listen to this show. And please, please leave a review for the show. It's extremely helpful. We're still a new show. Every review helps. Please don't leave just one or two or three or four stars and tell me what you like. And if you don't like stuff, well, go to Feedback and leave feedback right here on the show or to my email. Thanks so much. I'll see you tomorrow.
