Conquering Fear

According to the Book of Lists, the number one fear is the fear of public speaking. This eclipses even the fear of death! Wait a minute—if the number one fear is public speaking and not death, it means you'd rather be in the coffin than give the eulogy!

Call it nervousness, call it stage fright, call it whatever you want. If you can't speak in front of a group, you won't get very far in the business world. I'm probably not the first to tell you that. If you have no problem speaking in front of people, then skip this section. But if you have some anxiety when it comes to presenting to groups, pay close attention. Some powerful techniques can help you deal with being scared speechless.

So what gives? Does your fear increase as the next person enters the room? Why does the anxiety level rise in proportion to the number of people in the audience? What really causes this fear? You might think it's a simple lack of confidence. That, however, is just a symptom of a disease for which we need a cure! The fear is actually rooted in your physical presence in the situation. Think about it: If you didn't have to be there, you wouldn't have any fear!

Suppose you split communication into three types: written, spoken, and face-to-face. Match those with the way you work. You create documents such as letters, faxes, and e-mails for the written word. You use telephones and voice mail for conversational correspondence. You have meetings and presentations for the face-to-face method of communicating. Only one of these (face-to-face) requires your complete presence. The other two physically hide you from the receiver of the information.

When you write, you have time to edit and restate your words until you are ready to send them out for response. When you speak on the phone, you have less time to edit, but you are free to sit comfortably, and it doesn't matter how you may be dressed or how you look. In fact, the telephone demands very little effort, especially now that you can screen calls, invent interruptions, and use the ever-handy hold button. Even voice mail gives you a chance to plan your response in advance. These two methods of communicating are less stressful simply because we can't be seen for who we really are at the moment, and we get more time to collect our thoughts. When we are less visible, we have less fear. It's that simple. This protection from people helps get through the communication effort with ease.

So let's take a look at the major problems associated with your physical presence in a situation. You can conquer the fear of presenting in two ways—attacking the causes and learning to relax.

Attacking the Causes

Over the years I have found four main reasons why people fear public speaking: looking foolish, being judged, appearing boring, and wasting the listener's time. Possibly hundreds of other reasons exist, but these four usually cover most people's fears.

When you examine these reasons, do you see what they have in common? Each is a result of being self-conscious. It becomes a question of “What will they think of me?” The focus of the problem is internal. It is self-directed.

So here is a good rule to remember: When the problem is internal, the solution is external. You need to concentrate on things outside of yourself in order to remove the doubt. This concentration always involves some type of action. Let's examine the four problems I mentioned earlier and see what solutions—or actions—can be used to combat the dreaded fear of presenting in public.

Fools Rush In

“I'm afraid that people will think I'm stupid!” I hear this one a lot when people discuss their anxiety concerning public speaking. First I ask, “Are you stupid?” And only the really stupid people take a moment to think about that one. Hey, everyone is stupid at times. Look at me. I'm one of the stupidest people I know. There are hundreds of people who will testify to that. But, then again, I hang around with a lot of stupid people who can't tell the difference. Then, when I'm with the really smart people, all 10 of them, I use the skills in this section of the book to mask my ignorance!

Forrest Gump said that “Stupid is as stupid does”—a brilliant statement about actions speaking louder than words. If you do something crazy, others might think you really are crazy!

For many people, the typical uneasiness of speaking in public comes from this fear of looking foolish. What would cause that? Are you poorly dressed? Have you prepared your information? Are you speaking from a script you honestly believe has merit? Looking foolish is a feeling you get when you don't have as much control of the content as you want to have.

It's no different from the feeling you had in school when the teacher called on you and you didn't give the correct response. You were embarrassed. You didn't have the answer, and you looked stupid! But if you knew the content—and hence the answer—you felt exactly the opposite. Your first action is to get control of content. If you do this, your fear will begin to disappear.

Although you might think that content is controlled though memorization, that is not the case at all. The best way to get control of content is first to conceptualize your information, and then visualize the manner in which that information will be delivered.

→ To learn about conceptualizing and visualizing information, see “Providing 'Do'and 'Say'Scripts” in Chapter 22, “The Message—Scripting the Concept.”

You need to script your message using concepts that link together to form the discussion or the argument. Normally, written scripts, or Say scripts, force you simply to read back the content without really knowing it. Conceptual scripts, or Do scripts, are those that segment the topic into main ideas, each of which has some associated action. The action helps you remember the concept and allows you to present without any notes.

When you link action to your words, you visualize the concept for the audience. Once you have obvious control of content, you won't be singing the “I'm feeling foolish” theme anymore.

Judgment Day

Another reason you might dread public speaking is the belief that the audience is judging you. What could possibly motivate a group of people to dislike you the moment you step in front of them? Why would such a group suddenly unite in the hopes of squashing you like a bug? What would they gain? Always remember that the audience is made up of people like you. The key to that statement can be found by changing the emphasis. People like you. They do.

When you meet someone for the first time, don't you hope the meeting is positive? You're basically the same as everyone else in the world, and everyone wants to make a positive impression with each new person he meets. Before you open your mouth, the audience starts off by liking you.

Of course, some preexisting situations can cause the audience to not like you. If the circumstances are hostile, negative, or life threatening, then the audience is preconditioned to feel a certain way before seeing you. Otherwise, the audience is on your side. They want you to be effective.

To reduce the fear that people are judging you, just believe in people as you do yourself. Approach an audience with the belief that they are just like you and that they just like you. This will begin to reduce the anxiety of feeling that you are being judged in a bad way.

Okay, time for a reality check. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to remove completely the fear of being judged by simply believing the audience likes you. This may work during the 15 minutes prior to stepping onto the platform, but what happens when you look out into the room and see all those expectant faces?

To overcome the inner feeling of being judged, you'll have to concentrate on something outside of yourself, some action or activity to get your mind off the anxiety. To avoid being judged, you need to become a judge. You can do this by focusing on the anchors in the audience.

Simply select a few people in the room to focus your attention on while speaking. These friendly faces, or anchors, are points of concentration that you must continually seek. This removes the feeling of being judged as you present and puts the judgmental responsibility on you. You are forced to judge whether those anchors are staying attentive, still interested, and still maintaining eye contact with you. In other words, your action is to judge others as to their attentiveness to the message. This will push you to make the effort to keep them awake! If you're doing the judging, then the fear of being judged is transferred to the audience.

The Bored Room

“The stuff I have to talk about is so boring.” I hear this a lot, especially from accountants. I used be a public accountant, and I found it to be the best training for a life of crime. That's a lie. Political science is the best training for a life of crime. Accounting is the best training for a life of full employment! But that's another story.

The fear is that your presentation will be boring because the topic is boring. That might be true, depending on your topic. After all, not every topic needs to be delivered as a live presentation. However, the topic is usually not the problem when a speaker fails to capture the attention of the audience. When you finish, if the audience responds with a nice round of indifference, chances are you were the problem, not the content.

To combat a boring topic, you need to find significance. The action is to convey the importance of the topic. Look for a sense of urgency. The more you identify the critical components of your script, the more determined you become to discuss those components and get reactions from your audience. Reactions reduce boredom and give the audience something to do.

I'll use the accounting example. A monthly budget report might seem a bit mundane. But suppose you link budget information to ways that money will be allocated to make some specific task easier for everyone. Maybe the budget for computer networking can be increased. No big deal, unless you make it a big deal. If you point out that faster file transfers will reduce waiting time, in one sentence you go from lowly accountant to giver of free time! You can't do this all the time, but if you can connect parts of your message to the needs or desires of the audience, boredom will not be your problem.

Time Flies

“I think I'm just wasting everyone's time when I'm up there.” This is another anxiety producer.

The feeling of wasting time may come over you during the presentation more often than before it. Suddenly you have an instant loss of confidence, and you can't find a compelling enough reason to ask a group of people to continue to watch and listen to you.

Do you see the problem here? Wasting time can happen only if there is time to waste. It's the opposite problem of being boring. People are bored by monotony and too much of the same thing. Wasting time is when you don't have enough relevant stuff to say.

Believe it or not, the structure of your script might cause you to try to fill up the time. Just because you have an extra 15 minutes doesn't mean you must fill it with poor content. You have to make the best use of time in order to reduce the fear of having wasted it. In some cases, that might even mean letting people leave early. Perish the thought!

The easiest way to make the best use of time is with a form of action known as interaction. You can manage your time better by involving the audience throughout the presentation. This requires you to plan ahead, think quickly on your feet, ask questions, stir discussion, and even create controversy. Naturally, this shifts the concentration from yourself to your audience because you have to monitor their involvement. Activities that help audiences experience new things are seen as positive and not perceived as wasted time.

Instead of just planning time for the audience to ask you questions, plan time for you to ask them questions. Be proactive—come up with thought-provoking ideas to stimulate discussion. Not only do you involve people in the topic, you learn from the experience, too. This type of involvement helps reduce the fear that you are wasting the listener's time.

If you can't fill the time with enough information of your own, maybe the audience can help you. Again, you need to redirect the fear inside of you by placing the problem outside of yourself. Hand over to the audience the task of not wasting time. Believe me, they'll perk up.

Learning to Relax

Some say the nervousness before a performance is both natural and necessary. I say it might be natural, but it is certainly not necessary. If you can reduce a case of the jitters before a presentation, you will be able to deliver your message more effectively. One way to do this is to learn to relax physically. Of course, a limber body is always more relaxed under any pressure. Stretching exercises and aerobic activities, among many other benefits, definitely will help you relax when giving a presentation.

As I mentioned, one way you can help yourself prepare for those opening moments is with some kind of physical exercise beforehand, such as stretching or even something more strenuous. Another way to reduce the adrenaline rush and rapid heartbeat is to create other activity for yourself. For example, you can take a few slow, deep breaths before you begin. This increases the amount of oxygen in the system, but it reduces the heart rate before the adrenaline kicks in. More importantly, taking a few deep breaths gives you something to do, which takes the focus away from thinking about your presentation.

Once you start speaking, you may still experience some jitters. You can still create an external action—something to do to reduce the nerves—without the audience being aware of it. You might try wiggling your toes in your shoes. No one sees this, and your concentration again becomes focused on some physical action. Maybe your mouth becomes dry. No, you can't take a drink of water, but you can bite down slightly on the outer edges of your tongue or on the insides of your cheeks to create saliva and keep your mouth moist.

Again, you simply need to do something physical to reduce the internal nervousness, anxiety, and fear through external means. When the problem is inside, the solution is outside. The goal is to redirect your attention away from the internal workings of the mind onto things that are external to you.

The more you concentrate on actions, the less chance you have of being self-conscious, which ultimately creates nervousness. So take a few deep breaths, wiggle your toes, and start talking!