Review of the top 10 methods to overcome fear of public speaking #1

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There’s a ton of internet advice on how to overcome the fear of public speaking. Much of the advice is of the “what worked for me” kind. Or the advice is the first stage of trying to sell you a a hypnosis CD. So how do you decide what advice to follow? In this post series, I’ll be reviewing the 10 most recommended methods. Here’s the list (not in any particular order):

1. Affirmations
2. Visualization
3. Hypnosis
4. Relaxation techniques
5. Neuro-Linguistic Programming
6. The Lefkoe method
7. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
8. Medication
9. Just do it
10. Toastmasters

If you think there are others that I should be looking at, let me know. My aim is to look for evidence of effectiveness on a more than anecdotal basis. In this post, I’ll start with affirmations and visualization.

1.  Positive Affirmations

A positive affirmation is a statement stated in the present-tense which describes how you’d like to be. Here’s an example from the ThinkSimpleNow blog on conquering your fear of public speaking.

“I am a fantastic speaker and I deliver engaging presentations.”

You repeat the affirmation to yourself and stick it somewhere where you’ll often be reminded of it. It’s easy to find people who attribute their success to affirmations:

Before a sales meeting once, I was repeating similar affirmations to myself as I got ready in the morning, and in the car as I drove to the meeting. I sold with flying colors. That’s when I really learned the power of affirmation.

An article in Psychology Today ; Self-Help: Shattering the Myths says about affirmations:

Psychologists say this technique may not be very helpful. Changing how we feel about ourselves is a lot more complicated, explains William Swann, Ph.D., of the University of Texas-Austin…Self-affirmations, even when endlessly repeated, don’t make much of a dent — and when they fail to work, they may leave us even more demoralized.

Self-esteem research by Robert Josephs and Chris Jacobs indicates that people with low self-esteem don’t accept positive feedback from themselves - it has to come from someone else. The research is reported in Psychology Today in an article on affirmations:

Jacobs says the study’s results cast doubt on the value of self-affirmations, a self-esteem building technique found in many self-help books and programs. For people with a poor self-image, it seems, repeating the phrase “I am credible” won’t make it so.

This to me, is the critical issue with affirmations. An important component of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - a proven treatment method for depression and anxiety - is the believability of the new thought processes. Can affirmations really have an impact if you don’t believe what you’re saying?

2. Visualizations

There are two distinct types of visualization - one is supported by scientific research and one is not. But they’re often mixed up. The two types are:

a. Positive visualization, and

b. Mental rehearsal.

Positive visualization

In a positive visualization you imagine the results of giving a successful presentation. Here’s an example of a positive visualization:

You see yourself speaking to the audience. You’re doing a great job. The audience is leaning forward - they’re engaged, nodding and smiling at you. At the end of your presentation, they give you a resounding round of applause and people come up to you and complement you on how well you did.

I’ve been unable to find any scientific evidence that backs up the use of this type of visualization for effectively reducing your nerves or improving your performance. Here’s why I think that might be:

1. It’s not realistic - audiences are not always smiling and nodding. They’re not always fascinated by what you’ve got to say. Although this type of visualization may momentarily make you feel good, does it help your confidence when you’re faced with a more normal audience?

2. It has you experience the outcome of the presentation, rather than the process of delivering the presentation. Again that may make you feel good during the visualization, but it doesn’t deliver any other benefits.

Mental rehearsal

When you mentally rehearse your presentation, in contrast to the positive visualization above, you go through the whole process of giving the presentation - not just seeing the outcome. You see the audience reaction as you realistically think it will be. You imagine what might go wrong and rehearse how you will effectively cope with it. There is a large body of evidence that backs up the use of mental rehearsal (also called mental imagery, mental practice and coping rehearsal). Here’s a quote from the wikipedia entry on mental rehearsal:

Educational researchers have examined whether the experience of mental imagery affects the degree of learning. For example, imagining playing a 5-finger piano exercise (mental practice) resulted in a significant improvement in performance over no mental practice — though not as significant as that produced by physical practice and the authors of the study stated that “mental practice alone seems to be sufficient to promote the modulation of neural circuits involved in the early stages of motor skill learning.” (Pascual-Leone et al 1995).

This article on Imagining instructions: Mental practice in highly cognitive domains summarises much of the research. Mental rehearsal  is used widely by top athletes in many sports to improve their performance. It’s most effective at reducing your nerves when you use it to prepare for things not going well. Here’s a report of how Billie Jean King, a former top tennis player, prepares for a speech:

“She drives us crazy, absolutely crazy, planning for everything and anything to go wrong,” Kloss said. “She’ll say, ‘What about this? What about that? What if this happens?’ By the time Billie gets on stage or on the court, she’s laid out every possible scenario in her mind. And at that point, she’s totally calm.”

So using mental rehearsal to reduce your nerves is not about imagining everything going smoothly, it’s about imagining the things that might go wrong, and then visualizing how you will cope with this.

For example, let’s say you’re concerned about your mind going blank during your presentation. Visualize this situation as if it were happening to you right now. Now see yourself staying calm. Pause and take your time to look at your notes. Find your place and work out what what you want to say next. When you’re ready, look up at someone in your audience and start talking.

If you’ve practiced this in your head, should you suffer a mind blank during the real thing, you’ll have conditioned yourself to react in a calm and unruffled way, and you’ll be able to smoothly resume your presentation.

So unlike affirmations and positive visualizations, mental rehearsal is an effective method for reducing your fear of public speaking.

In the next post in this series, I’ll review the effectiveness of hypnosis, relaxation techniques and Neuro Linguistic Programming for reducing your nerves.

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Mice show that you can overcome fear of public speaking

If you get nervous about speaking in public, the recently published results from a scientific experiment on mice, should give you some hope. The experiment showed that mice that had been trained to feel calm, coped better with stressful situations.

The mice were trained to associate a specific sound with safety. They were then subjected to a stressful event - a mouse swimming pool that they could not escape from. The mice would eventually give up swimming as if they had given up hope. But when the “safe” sound was made, the mice started swimming again.

The lead researcher, Eric Kandel said:

The behavioral changes observed in the mice squelched anxiety as effectively as antidepressant drugs such as Prozac. This shows that behavioral intervention works.

On the Redorbit site, Kandel is reported as saying:

The experiment suggests that there are good ways to teach people this skill, and points to new routes for developing better antidepressants. The happy place works. This is like going to the country.

So how can you use the results of this experiment to help you overcome nervousness about speaking in public? I’m not an NLP fan, but I have heard of people having success with the NLP tecnnique of anchoring and this research would seem to back up the effectiveness of anchoring . Here’s the wikipedia definition of anchoring:

Anchoring is the process by which a particular state or response is associated (anchored) with a unique anchor. An anchor is most often a gesture, voice tone or touch but could be any unique visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory or gustatory stimulus. It is claimed that by recalling past resourceful states one can anchor those states to make them available in new situations. A psychotherapist might anchor positive states like calmness and relaxation, or confidence in the treatment of phobias and anxiety, such as in public speaking.

To apply this to reduce your nerves when you’re speaking in public, a specific touch is the most practical, for example touching the pads of your thumb and your forefinger together. Train yourself to associate this touch with a positive, empowered state. Recall a time when you were in this state at the same time as you touch your thumb and forefinger together. You will likely have to do this many times before the touch will by itself summons the positive, empowered state. Once you’ve achieved this, you’ve given yourself a “button” you can use to reduce your nerves at any time before or during a presentation.

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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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The four secrets to speaking with experts in the room

Many people who are otherwise confident presenters get nervous when they know that other experts will be in the audience. They think that when they’re the presenter they should know more about the topic than anyone else.

Some presenters focus so much on the other experts, that the presentation goes over the heads of everyone else in the audience.

Here are the secrets to speaking to an audience - with experts in the room.

1. You don’t have to know more than anyone else

Let go of the belief that you should know more about your topic than anyone else in the audience. That’s an unrealistic assumption and will set you up to be a nervous wreck by the time of the presentation.

2. Plan with the majority of the audience in mind

When you first start planning your presentation, plan with the majority of your audience in mind. Forget about the experts. Forget about the newbies.

3. Tweak for the newbies

Go through your presentation and look for any jargon, terms of art and acronyms that they might not instantly understand. Add an explanation. This will only take a few seconds and will ensure that they can stay on track with you.  Sometimes the experts in the room will say - oh I didn’t realise what that acronym stood for - so it can be useful for everyone.

4. Tweak for the experts

Let go of having to say something new or surprising to them. You can’t - they know all the facts and figures. And if you try and impress them in this way, you’ll quickly lose the rest of your audience. Instead impress them with they way that you explain your topic. For example, use a metaphor which hasn’t been used before. Have them say to themselves: “I hadn’t thought about it that way before” or “That’s an excellent way of explaining that concept.”

So you can deliver a presentation which is useful and engaging for every person in the room. What tips do you have for speaking with experts in the room?

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