3 Reasons not to use NLP to overcome fear of public speaking

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Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a controversial topic.

I started my research for this post with a relatively open mind.

I say relatively, because I do have some biases against NLP. Many NLP-trained people spout the nonsense about only 7% of your communication being based on the words you say. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that I like to have scientific research to back up what I say - my experience was that NLP doesn’t always meet this standard.

Nevertheless, I decided that I would have a fresh look at NLP and the research to see whether I could recommend it as a method to conquer your fear of public speaking.

My conclusion is NO.

Here are my reasons:

1. NLP methods are generally not scientifically proven

NLP consists of a collection of different models and techniques - some of which are supported by research and some of which are not.

NLP has its roots in psychological theory, but has developed in its own separate silo, and does not have a large body of independent research (ie: research carried out by non-NLP practitioners) to substantiate it.

I did find two research studies from the 1980s which tested NLP treatments for people who were nervous about giving a speech. The people who received the NLP treatments did no better than people who had sat in a waiting room for an hour (the control group).

However, some aspects of NLP cures for fear of public speaking seem to be well-grounded in cognitive psychology and some NLP processes have established counterparts in mainstream psychology (eg: anchoring is classical conditioning).

2. Some NLP techniques are just plain wacky

In some NLP trainings, “mind juggling” is taught to relieve anxiety. It involves throwing a heavy ball from one hand to the other (here’s a video demonstration of “mind juggling“). Some NLP practitioners make extravagant claims for it:

This is one very simple technique that cures panic attacks, anxiety disorders, sleep problems, chronic pain, grieving and/or obsessive-compulsive behaviors in a safe and non-intrusive way.

On the same website the supposedly scientific explanation for this cure is given:

It is a basic neurological process that resynchronizes the blood flow to both hemispheres of the brain which leaves you feeling centered and calm.

Starting to sound a little wacky here - but I dug deeper… and found the website of the apparent originator of this NLP cure - Nelson Zinc:

After researching the neurophysiology of anxiety and conducting experiments with anxiety sufferers, we concluded that anxiety was closely associated with a functional imbalance between the right and left hemispheres of the brain. It has been theorized that when the sensory and motor functions of the two hemispheres were uncoordinated, anxiety resulted.

If you have any psychological training - this will sound a little strange (the amygdala and hippocampus are the regions of the brain more often associated with the biological basis of anxiety). But further on he provides proof!

The March 1985 issue of Scientific American contained a vivid confirmation of the theoretical aspects of the technique. A photo of a positron emission tomography (PET) scan showed unequal blood flow in the brain of a victim of panic disorder. The left side of the brain is overactive, while in the right activity has decreased significantly. The photo made it abundantly clear that anxiety results from the isolation and imbalance of hemispheric activity.

This makes the basic mistake of confusing correlation with causation. I wasn’t able to go back to the 1985 issue of Scientific American to check out the original photo, but a 2000 review of Neuroimaging Studies of Human Anxiety Disorders does not support Zinc’s conclusions.

3. The competence of NLP trainers is highly variable

There is no uniform training and qualification system for NLP pracitioners - so it’s difficult to judge the competence and experience of a person who claims to be an NLP practitioner. In some places, you can do a 7 day training course and then call yourself an NLP practitioner.

I have met some people who have NLP training and claim to be able to help other people - and they are totally clueless. It horrifies me to think of the damage that they could do.

And the skill of the practitioner is key. Andrew T Austin an experienced English NLP practitioner says:

Well-meaning therapists and NLP practitioners will often attempt the phobia cure with an inadequate understanding of the process and of how and why it works.

In summary, I don’t write off NLP as a whole - after all its borrowed a lot from other more rigorous areas of psychology. And if I really wanted to use an NLP practitioner, I would find one with a proven medical or psychological background who also draws on NLP techniques as part of their toolkit.

This is the third post in the series “Review of the top ten methods to overcome fear of public speaking”. Previously I’ve looked at:

1. Affirmation and visualization

2. Hypnosis and Relaxation training

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15 baby steps to overcoming the fear of public speaking

In the three previous posts (Overcome your fear,  No perfect presentation, Seven thinking sins) I have talked about the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) approach to overcoming the fear of public speaking. I’ve focused on the cognitive principles on the basis that if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably doing presentations (the behavioral part of CBT). But maybe you know somebody who gets so nervous at even the idea of presenting that they avoid it whenever they can. This post will look at what they can do to help themselves, using the behavioral principles of CBT. On the assumption you’ll forward this link to them, I’ll now start talking directly to them.

Here’s the important thing about the behavioral approach. It’s not about just going out and doing it. You need to take a gradual approach. In psychology this is called systematic desensitization.

Imagine if you were frightened of birds. A therapist working with you would gradually expose you to a bird. They might start by showing you a small picture of a bird and keep it far away from you. You’d be nervous at first, but gradually you’d realise no harm was going to come to you and your symptoms of fear (heart beating, sweating) would die down. Then the therapist would bring the picture closer and wait again till your symptons faded. The therapist would then repeat the process with other pictures, then a feather, then a stuffed bird, then a bird in a cage, and finally a live bird flying free. So the process is slow, graduated and systematic.

To apply the same process to public speaking, start by making yourself a list of behaviors related to presenting - but which don’t involve an actual presentation - until the very last behavior on the list. The behaviors will involve speaking to one person or several, and some should include making requests which are likely to be turned down. This is important, because often one of our fears around public speaking is the fear of being disapproved of or rejected.

We call these behaviors Must-busters - because they are about showing you that your “musts” are not true. If you have a strong fear of public speaking, you probably have some strong musts, like:

“I must not make a fool of myself”

“I must not humiliate myself”

“I must always be approved of by anyone I talk to”

So here are some examples of Must-buster behaviors:

1. Initiate a one-on-one conversation with your manager about something inconsequential
2. Speak up in a small meeting at work (2 or 3 people)
3. Ring a wrong number on purpose and say “I’m sorry, I seem to have dialled the  wrong number.”
4. Ask for change in a shop
5. Initiate a one-on-one conversation with your manager asking for feedback on your performance
6. Ask for change in a shop which has a sign “No change given”
7. Initiate a one-on-one conversation that you’ve been putting off
8. Speak up in a slightly larger meeting at work
9. Go to a networking event with a friend
10. Initiate a one-on-one conversation with your manager to explain an idea that you have about how processes could be improved at work
11. Go to a networking event with a friend and initiate a conversation with one person you don’t know
12. Go to a networking event without a friend and initiate a conversation with one person you don’t know
13. Go to a Toastmasters meeting (without speaking).
14. Joining a Toastmaster club
15. Enrol on a public speaking or presentation skills course
16. And finally, giving your first speech at Toastmasters or giving a short presentation at your next team meeting at work.

These are just examples to inspire you. Make yourself your own list because we’re all different in terms of what we find most frightening. Once you’ve made yourself the list, rate each behavior according to how hard you think it will be for you. Then put the list in order, starting with the easiest behaviors though to the hardest.

Commit yourself to a schedule to complete these behaviors, it could be one a day, or one a week. Expect to feel fear as you approach these tasks. Part of the learning is that you can handle feeling the symptoms of fear. It’s helpful to share what you’re planning with a friend, so that they can both support you and keep you accountable.

It is possible to overcome the fear of public speaking (note: it won’t go away altogether!). Overcoming this barrier and being able to speak up when you want to will make a difference to your career and to your personal life. Go well.

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The Seven Thinking Sins of Public Speaking

In the previous post in this series There’s no such thing as a perfect presentation, I looked at how to analyse your thinking and change “musts” or demands” into “goals” and so reduce the pressure you put on yourself.

Over the years we’ve worked with hundreds of people to help them reduce their nervousness. So we’re familiar with the common thinking patterns that people have around presenting. Here are the Top 10 Thinking Sins that contribute to the fear of public speaking.

1. My presentation must go perfectly

Truth: There is no such thing as a perfect presentation. And neither is it a laudable goal. Audiences prefer authentic to polished, they prefer conversational to slick. It’s normal to stumble over a word or forget for a moment what you want to say next. Your audience will forgive you.

Solution: Your goal is to forge a connection with your audience. Focus on that, not the perfection of your speech. Accept that you’ll make some mistakes - that’s human.

2. I must be interesting and engaging

Truth: It’s a tall order to say that you must be interesting and engaging at all times. Sometimes people in an audience do drift off into their own thoughts for a moment. Or maybe they’re exhanusted from being up all night with a teething baby. It’s not about you.

Solution: Your goal is to be interesting and engaging. Focus on the people in the audience who are connecting with you - they are energy chargers. The people who aren’t paying attention to you are energy suckers. Looking at them will demoralize you and your energy will drop. Or you’ll get so obsessed in trying to get their attention that you’ll become too zany.

3. I must not forget anything

Truth: You’re the only one that knows exactly what you’re going to say. Your audience probably won’t even notice.

Solution: Your goal is to remember to say the key points in your presentation. Have notes and take the time to look at them. If you know that you find looking at notes difficult in a presentation, practice. Practice with people in front of you. Here’s how to look at your notes. Stop talking, look at your notes, know what you’re going to say next, look up, find someone to talk to - look at them and start talking.

If it’s really important put it in a handout. That way it’s not a disaster if you forget a key point.

4. I must know more about the topic than anyone in the audience

Truth: No you don’t. This is a recipe for over-researching and stress. There will often be people in the audience who are more knowledgeable in the audience than you.

Solution: Your job as a presenter is not to know more than anyone else, but to communicate and explain what you do know with your own perspective. See this post on presenting with experts in the audience for more ideas.

5. I must be able to answer every question

Truth: Oh-oh! More over-researching and stress. You’re not expected to know the answer to every question that an audience member might ask.

Solution: Become comfortable with saying “I don’t know.” We’re trained from a young age to automatically answer questions and it can be very difficult to say “I dont know.” In your rehearsals, have colleagues pepper you with questions and practice not answering the question. Experiment with different ways of saying “I don’t know”. Expert witnesses in court cases will often say: “That’s outside the scope of my expertise.”

What about questions you should know the answer to. But that knowledge deserts you when you need it most. Think through how you’ll handle this. For example, you could say in a self-deprecating way “I should know the answer to that - but it’s not coming to mind right now - I’ll get back to you as soon as my memory returns!”

6. I must not show any sign of nerves

Truth: Just about everybody can relate to having some nervousness about public speaking - so most people in your audience will feel empathy. As long as you have done your preparation and have useful well-organised content that meets their needs, they will forgive your nervousness.

And it may be that your nervousness doesn’t even show. You can feel your heart about to beat out of your chest and you can feel the sweat trickling down your sides. The audience can’t.

Solution: Accept that you will have some nervousness and that it may show. That is not the end of the world. You can still deliver your presentation. Many very experienced presenters and other professional performers (actors, singers) get nervous. They still go out there and perform. Being nervous is part and parcel of presenting and public speaking. Experienced presenters have learnt how to manage their nerves. You can learn to manage your nerves by using the principles of cognitive behavioral therapy.

6. It will be a disaster if I can’t get the datashow to work

Truth: No it won’t. Speeches and presentations can exist without visuals. We’re often told stories of conferences when the technology stopped working and the presentation without Powerpoint was the best presentation of the conference.

Solution: Take reasonable steps to ensure that the technology will work. Arrive in plenty of time to set everything up. Have your slideshow on a flash drive so you can use someone else’s laptop if necessary. Don’t store your flash drive in your laptop bag. That way if your laptop bag gets stolen, you’ll still have your flash drive.

If your slides are absolutely essential to your presentation (eg: screenshots of the software you’re demonstrating) print out a hard copy, so that you can distribute them as handouts for your audience to look at during your presentation.

If you can’t use slides at all, think through how you’ll deliver your presentation without them - flipchart, whiteboard, nothing? It’s quite possible to deliver a presentation without visuals.

7. My mind will go blank, I’ll go red and I’ll die of humiliation

Truth: You can handle this - you’ve probably handled far worse things in your life and you won’t die. Mind blanks can happen in the stress of a presentation.

Solution: Accept that it’s possible that a mind blank might happen and prepare for it. Have a set of notes that you can refer to, or arrange for a colleague in the audience to prompt you from a script.

Rehearse dealing with a mind blank. Do this in front of 1 or 2 friends. Start delivering your presentation, then pretend that your mind has gone blank. Stop, look down at your notes, take a breath, find where you are and what you want to say next, look up again and find someone to talk to - and start speaking again.

Get feedback from your friends on how long it took, and how it looked. To you it may well feel like an age, but it was probably just a few seconds. And your audience can see what you were doing and will be quite happy to wait till you are ready again. Practice this routine several times until it becomes a comfortable habit. Now if it does happen in a presentation, you’ll have your Plan B ready for action.

Paradoxically, because you’re now prepared for a mind blank and know that you can deal with it, it’s less likely to happen.

Conclusion

None of the things that you think at the time are disasters, truly are disasters. Stuff happens in presentations. Mentally accept that stuff happens and mentally prepare for when stuff happens. If you’ve got a “thinking sin” that I haven’t discussed here, that you’d like some help with, post it in the comments. I’ll reply with some ideas.

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There’s no such thing as the perfect presentation

Do you demand presentation perfection? It might be stopping you from performing at your best. This graph shows that having a high expectation for your performance will lead to improved

performance - up to a point. But when you continue to demand more of yourself, beyond the peak of the curve - your nerves get out of hand and your performance plummets.

In my post on overcoming the fear of public speaking I suggested using principles from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help reduce your nervousness.

CBT is based on the theory that your thoughts influence your emotions, which in turn influence your behavior.

Here’s an example of a typical thought you might have:

Notice the word “must” in there. “Must” implies an absolute demand which cannot be broken. The things we must have in life are air, water, food and shelter. If we’re about to lose one of those - it’s potentially a life or death situation - and your body will react with the fight or flight syndrome.

So when you say “must” to yourself you’re signalling to your brain to activate the fight or flight response. That causes adrenalin and cortisol to be released into your body. Your heart pumps blood round your body faster, your muscles get ready for action, your digestive system shuts down. When you get nervous before speaking does your heart beat faster, are your hands shaky, do you get butterflies in your stomach? Those symptoms are a result of the activation of the fight of flight response.

So using the word “Must” contributes to your nervousness. And it’s not true that your presentation must go perfectly - it’s not a matter of life and death.

This thought is neither true or empowering.

Having demolished the old must-based thought, the next step is to replace it with a new, more empowering thought.

I’m not advocating positve thinking. I don’t suggest you say to yourself “The presentation will go perfectly. The audience will hang on my every word and give me a standing ovation”. The problem with the positive thinking approach is that the other half of your brain will then join in and say “Yeah Right!” (Note: If positive thinking works for you that’s great - keep doing what works. But for many people it doesn’t work.)

The new thought must be rational and believable. For example:

This thought lowers the demands you’re making of yourself. It turns the “must” into a goal. It acknowledges the reality that speaking does often involves some stumbles. It still has you aiming for your best performance and makes it more likely that you will achieve it.

In the next post, I’ll look at other “must” thoughts you might have about public speaking and presenting and how you can challenge and replace them with more useful and empowering thoughts.

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Overcome your fear of public speaking the proven way

Advice on overcoming the fear of public speaking is easy to come by.

You may have been told, “Just go out there and do it, take every opportunity you can to speak”. But you still get nervous. Here’s a story from someone who has suffered through just going out and doing it:

At one point in my life I was a teacher. I did fine with students, but when it came to parent-teacher conferences, I would dread the experience (the “exposure”) weeks and weeks ahead of time. The anticipatory anxiety and fear was so strong that it gripped at my stomach and made me feel like it was bloody and raw. Over the course of nine years, I was required to go through thirty-three weeks of parent-teacher conferences. I was exposed to one of my greatest fears, and the repetition and further exposure to this fear did not cause me to lose my anxiety and feel more comfortable. Instead, I faced my fears and my fears became even stronger.

Maybe you know that as well as going out there and doing it you need to “think positively” - so you’ve practiced affirmations and visualized your success. If it works for you that’s great. But for many people, positive thinking is not the answer.

Use proven psychological strategies

I believe that we should approach overcoming the fear of public speaking with the same approaches that have been proven to work for other anxiety issues.

That’s because the fear of speaking is on a continuum with severe anxiety. The continuum has a huge range. From slight nervousness before you get up to speak. To loss of sleep for weeks before your presentation. And for some, it’s so debilitating that they avoid public speaking altogether.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the recognised treatment for severe anxiety. The Social Anxiety Network says:

Meanwhile, in study after study, cognitive – behavioral therapy began to prove to be the therapy of choice for many mental health care problems, including depression and the anxiety disorders. In fact, large-scale, long-range (i.e., longitudinal) studies over the past decade have consistently shown cognitive – behavioral therapy to be the only therapy that can be dependably relied upon to help people overcome clinical anxiety disorders.

The National Institute of Mental Health is the largest scientific organization in the world dedicated to research focused on the understanding, treatment, and prevention of mental disorders. It says:

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is very useful in treating anxiety disorders. The cognitive part helps people change the thinking patterns that support their fears, and the behavioral part helps people change the way they react to anxiety-provoking situations.

So if you get nervous before giving a presentation, use the principles from CBT which are proven to work.

What does this mean?

CBT involves both a behavioral approach and a thinking (cognitive) approach.

Maybe you go out there and present frequently, but you still get nervous. That’s because just going out there and doing it (the behavioral part of CBT) is not necessarily enough on it’s own. You have to change the way you think as well.

In the next post, I’ll look at the common thinking patterns that many of us have about presenting - and which contribute to making you feel nervous. I’ll look at how to replace those thinking patterns with rational and empowering thoughts.

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Claim your Space

Lisa Braithwaite from Speak Schmeak has commented on my post about the attention-getting myth. I started responding to her comment, but my response got so long I decided it was worth a blogpost in its own right.

The issue is how to best help nervous speakers at the start of a presentation . Lisa suggested that:

Using an opening that immediately involves the audience, for example, through asking questions, engages them while also immediately taking pressure off the speaker to perform.

When the audience is allowed to participate and share their own knowledge and life experience, they are more engaged. The presentation becomes about them, not the nervous speaker.

My take on it is different. Nervous speakers are generally at their most nervous at the start of a presentation. As they get into their stride and realise that the presentation might just go OK their nervousness often reduces. So my approach is to help the nervous speaker get into their stride with as little risk as possible.

And I think asking questions is risky. It can easily go wrong. For example, you might get no responses - or you might have a garrulous member of the audience who takes over. This leaves the nervous speaker in an even more difficult situation. Asking an effective question that elicits the type of response you want and then handling the responses you get is a skill that requires practice, confidence and experience.

In fact, I don’t recommend asking questions right at the beginning for any presenter. During a presentation, the presenter is the leader. And leaders should start by leading. A leader can become more democratic once they’ve established their authority and credibility as a leader. So at the beginning of a presentation, the presenter should “Claim their Space”. Once you’ve claimed your space, which could be as little as two minutes, then it can be an effective strategy to involve the audience by asking questions.

Finally - does asking questions and getting the audience to respond mean that people are more engaged? Not necessarily. Audience participation has to be well-managed for it to be engaging for everybody. I might be more engaged in the moment that I’m offering my own opinion - but listening to other people make unprepared and often waffly comments isn’t what I’m there for. In that situation, I would rather hear from the speaker who has (hopefully) thought about and prepared what they want to say.

Audience participation is a great tool - when managed with skill and at the right moment in the presentation.

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