How to Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking in 15 Ways

How to Overcome Your Fear of Public Speaking in 15 Ways

This post provides detailed information on how to overcome your fear of speaking in public; this will help you improve your personal life and business.

Please, read on:

Fear of public speaking is one of the phobias that some people had while growing up; funny enough, some adults still have this phobia in them.

This could be attributed to some reasons like low confidence, low self-esteem and fear of failure in some people.

However, there is no way you can excel in your career as a public speaker if you are not able to deal with this fear.

In fact, it is not possible to kick start your career as a public speaker without first dealing with your fears, this is important and cannot be underestimated in any way.

Here are best ways to overcome your fear of public speaking:

Focus on your purpose
Remove the thought of failure from your mind
Don’t entertain thoughts that weigh your confidence down
Practice how to calm yourself when you are tensed up
Do some good exercise
Visualize your success
Prepare yourself well ahead of your presentation
Establish a connection with your audience
Stand in a self-assured posture
Stop forcing yourself to be perfect
Know your thing
Learn to be calm on stage
Keep your mistakes to yourself
Let no one know you are nervous
Arrive early before your performance.

Focus on your purpose

When you are given the opportunity to talk to people, focus on what you are expected to do.

That means, you should avoid distractions as much as you can. Your thoughts should be how best you can get the job done efficiently without hiccup.

The more you focus on what you are going to do, the more you get ideas on how best you can do it.

There are some ideas that will not enter into your mind if you keep thinking of things that have no business with the job you have at hand.

Focusing on your purpose will also help you plan yourself even before you mount the stage.

You will put yourself on serious pressure if you don’t focus more on your purpose.

That is self-inflicted pressure. You can avoid it by remaining focused on your job.

Remove the thought of failure from your mind

There is a big relationship between what goes on in your mind and your performance.

That is why you cannot perform better than the current state of your mind.

You have to ensure that at all times, your mind is filled with the right thoughts.

One distracting thought you will need to get rid of is the thought of failure.

Though at some point in time or the other, you may experience failure, yet it is not enough to have that thought as an anthem in your mind. It is only a learning process, nothing more than that.

So, if you want to overcome the fear of public speaking, erase the thoughts of failure from your mind.

You cannot be filled with the thoughts of failure in your mind and expect yourself to do exceptionally well.

Free your mind and you will see that fear will leave.

Don’t entertain thoughts that weigh your confidence down

This is also in the same realm as the point above. Your confidence level plays a key role in your performance.

When your confidence is low, it will reflect in what you do.

Also, when your confidence is high, everything becomes possible.

Now, what affects confidence or why your confidence goes down often is the thoughts you harbor in your mind.

There are a lot of thoughts that could weigh you down. These thoughts include your current level, seeing some people who probably can do the job better than you at the moment, and thoughts of mistakes, and a whole lot of them.

If you see someone who seems to be doing the job better than you, don’t think too much about it.

You can learn from the secrets of that person and keep working hard. It will profit you nothing to think negatively about yourself.

You are harming your confidence in the process.

Practice how to calm yourself when you are tensed up

Sometimes, you could find yourself being tensed up for no reason. It is sometimes not totally avoidable to be tensed as there are a lot of factors that could make you get tensed up.

Some of them happen on their own and you may not have the power to stop them from happening.

What you do when you are tensed is what that is important.

What do you do when you get tensed up?

Do you leave the stage or do you get yourself round the tension? The latter will be the better idea as it will show how skillful you are.

One of the ways to get round your tense situation, especially when you are on stage is to take a deep breath and pause a little.

If you have water available, take a little and relax your nerves. However, try not to make it look obvious that you are tensed up, especially when you are on stage.

Do some good exercise

Exercise is a great way to get both the body and mind in great shape. With exercise, you are able to strengthen the joints and many other parts of the body and keep them in good shape.

But mental health is the more important of the two though many don’t know this.

When you exercise regularly, your mind is made better and you will feel light.

In the process of having fun, you relax the brain. It is difficult to be active in exercise and be thinking hard about what happens next.

So, exercise helps keep you focused on the present event and prevents your mind from wandering about.

Exercise again can help boost your confidence.

When you set certain targets for yourself during exercises and accomplish them, it gives you the needed confidence to do well on stage.

Visualize your success

In place of thoughts of failure and thoughts that weigh your confidence down, think about your success.

This is what foresight helps you accomplish. You see what the future holds rather than what is happening at the moment which could be negative.

One of the ways to remove fear of failure is to look intently into the future and see the endless possibilities in the public speaking career you have.

You will always have people who serve as your inspiration as to what is obtainable in this field.

Visualizing your success could be the motivation you need to do away with fear of public presentation.

Visualizing your success could make you work harder than before. It is a good source of inspiration and confidence you need to do your thing.

Prepare yourself well ahead of your presentation

If you fail to plan, then you have unconsciously planned to fail. This applies to whatever you do on planet earth.

You have to be sincere with yourself in this matter rather than depending on luck.

No one gets to the top by luck, you must work your way to success.

Someone once said, “If I am given a hundred years to cut a tree, I will spend ninety-nine years sharpening my axe and use just a year to cut the tree rather than using a year to sharpen my axe and ninety-nine years to cut the tree”.

Another said, “It is better to think twice and cut once than thinking once and cutting twice”.

The secret of power is knowledge and knowledge is relevant information.

Before embarking on any public speaking function, be it lecture, seminar/workshop, talk show, etc. ensure that you have gathered your facts, statistics, and other relevant information you may need to make a great presentation.

Establish a connection with your audience

Most of the fear people tend to have about public speaking is always a function of not having a connection with the audience.

The audience is the more important people to consider in any public speaking event, their comfort and understanding is of paramount importance.

In the light of this, it is important to know how to establish or attain a good connection with the audience.

To do this entails finding a way to get a response from them during your presentation.

This has to do with asking the audience questions and allow them do likewise. Asking for contributions could be helpful too.

Sometimes, it could entail having to leave the stage to move around a little bit to develop a closer connection with the audience.

If you can do that, you could dispel the fear of public speaking. Once you get used to your audience, then you have no reason to fear.

Stand in a self-assured posture

In public speaking events, how you carry yourself matters a lot. How you comport and carry yourself could contribute to the sort of attention you may likely receive.

Your posture must exude confidence and nothing short of that. You have to stand as a presenter and not as anyone else.

If you are provided with a podium to use, note that the podium is not given to you to lean on anyhow.

The podium is a bit of a support and also provided in case you need something to place your book or presentation materials on.

That is why the podium is provided.

Leaning on the podium and always having your eyes fixed on the podium itself is an example of a bad posture.

Also, putting your hand on your waist or your pocket for a long period of time during the presentation is not a good idea.

Let your hands be out of your pocket and folding of arms is not also a good presentation posture.

Stop forcing yourself to be perfect

Perfection is in your attitude not necessarily how wonderful you can be in what you do.

This is important for you to know that you don’t have to put your body over the line simply because you want to get to a certain level in your public presentation career.

Mistakes happen and will always happen when we expect them and when we don’t expect them.

This is sure to make you understand that you may minimize your mistakes to the barest minimum but will experience some at some point.

Your attitude when you make mistakes is what is important. You don’t have to kill yourself or suffer confidence crisis just because you had a bad moment during your presentation.

You just have to dust yourself up and get going. With regular and harder practice, you will get better and better daily.

Know your thing

This is simply becoming the best in what you do. You can be a popular figure in what you do if you know what you do.

For a marketer, he/she needs to know what he/she is marketing in case he/she is faced with questions, he/she will be able to give convincing answers without mistakes.

Public speaking has areas and dimensions (niche). It is important you know the niche where you belong and set out to be the best in it.

In every niche, you must find people who have trodden that path before you, get in touch with them and get coached by them.

You can be good in many aspects of public speaking, but finding your niche is still a key factor to your success in this field.

Your niche is what will set you apart among your colleagues. So find your niche and work your way to the top of the ladder.

Learn to be calm on stage

The stage can be unpredictable. Funny things can happen when you are on the stage doing your thing.

This is why you must be skilled enough to handle whatever you encounter while on the stage. Again, the stage is highly unpredictable.

One of the things you cannot predict when you are on stage is what to expect from the audience.

In fact, in public presentation, you hope for the best while you prepare for the worst.

Not to sound negative here, but the truth is that you cannot predict what can happen.

The first step towards getting things under your control is to learn how to be calm, especially when dealing with the audience.

The audience could throw some personal questions or even give a different view to what you are saying; you have to maintain your calm in the process.

Keep your mistakes to yourself

As a public speaker, one good thing that can happen to you is that not all mistakes appear to be mistakes in the eyes or ears of the audience.

There are times you may use words wrong and the audience wouldn’t know.

If that is the case, it is not necessary to start apologizing except it is a mistake that requires an apology.

An example may be in a case where you mentioned someone’s name wrongly with the wrong intonation.

When you are corrected, it is necessary you correct yourself on the spot.

However, if it has to do with maybe wrong use of adjectives, it is not necessary to apologize.

If you do, it will become obvious that you don’t know what you are doing.

So, when you make mistakes in this line, please endeavor to jump over it and continue what you are doing.

Let no one know you are nervous

Your nervousness is your problem and not meant for public consumption.

Telling the audience that you are nervous is a big turnoff for them.

What you are simply telling your audience is that you lack the confidence to stand before them to do your thing. That is bad marketing of your career.

When you discover that for some reasons you are nervous, you need not tell the audience.

You should deal with it in a professional way without making obvious that you are nervous.

There are ways to deal with nervousness and telling your audience is not one of them. They can’t help you.

When you are feeling nervous, get hold of the podium and transmit the tension to the podium.

Take a deep breath and if you have water provided for you, drink a little and relax your mind.

Look at the faces of the audience, take a deep breath again and continue.

Arrive early before your performance

The easiest way to put yourself under pressure is to arrive late to your speaking event.

It affords you little or no time to relax and think of how to take on the stage.

In contrary, coming earlier than the scheduled time for the event can help you deal with pressure.

Arriving to your place of assignment gives you enough time to observe the audience before you are called up for your presentation.

And you know that will go a long way to dealing with fear of public speaking you might be having.

You just have to be there at least 30 minutes before you are called up.

Again, arriving early allows you to do your final preparation. Though you might have prepared yourself before leaving your house, it is still necessary that you look at your notes once again and know if you may need to add some things to it.

When you are well prepared, you will gain the confidence to deal with fear of public speaking.

Conclusion

Public speaking comes with its own pressure. This most times leads to some people entertaining fear of public speaking.

Due to this fear, some tend to turn down invitations for public speaking events or even when they accept they tend to perform badly.

So, this article has revealed 15 secrets you will need to know if you want to overcome your fear of public speaking.

Go through it again and know how to implement each point discussed.