Posts tagged as:

fear of public speaking

How to inspire an audience like Nick Vujicic

January 11, 2009

Watch this video and be inspired. Nick Vujicic is an amazing man. His ability to shift the audience’s emotions is something else. And with the hardest audience – hundred of teenagers in a school gym. Within seconds he’s created fun, excitement, and laughter. He’s got them. He shifts to sombre and serious. And then inspires [...]

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

November 11, 2008

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 [...]

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15 baby steps to overcoming the fear of public speaking

September 11, 2008

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). [...]

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The Seven Thinking Sins of Public Speaking

September 9, 2008

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 [...]

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There’s no such thing as the perfect presentation

September 4, 2008

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 [...]

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Overcome your fear of public speaking the proven way

September 2, 2008

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 [...]

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Claim your Space

May 27, 2008

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 [...]