[black_mamba]

Public Speaking for the Socially Anxious

Hello everyone.

As I’m sure most of you are acutely aware, public speaking ranks as one of the most feared situations by most non-SA people. Not great white sharks, not car crashes, not killer aliens, but talking in front of an audience of fellow humans. And that’s the general feeling amongst people who are normally very comfortable, even at their happiest, in social situations. So for us lot, it is often doubly-terrifying.






This guide I have written has three aims:

• To document how and why I attempted (and I believe succeeded) in overcoming my intense fear of public speaking.
• To discuss how the knowledge I gained can be applied to other people in similar situations
• To serve as a hub for sharing pre/post and during-presentation tips. The tips are sourced from my own ideas, books and websites I have read, presentation training I have been given at work, and the various members of SA UK!

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Before I start, I think it would be useful to explain the philosophy behind the way I share advice in this post. I am by no means a mental health professional and do not claim as such. What I am aiming to do is offer my story, how I improved my skills and how this could be applied to others. It is often directly applicable practical advice. I make no attempt to address the root cause of the fear involved. For some people this is not critical, but others like to understand the mental-process that accompanies the advice. I cannot offer this. This is not a CBT course.

The only drawback with this style of advice-giving is that it doesn’t really encourage independent thought on anxiety. I liken it to me explaining to you how to fix your car (assuming you did not already know how). I am telling you which component to purchase, which tool to use and exactly how to use it to replace the faulty part. However I am not telling you WHY. If you knew the mechanics of the component and the system it works within, you could figure out the root cause of a similar problem next time independently, and therefore fix it without any help. And the same goes for mental thought mechanisms, I think.

So this guide doesn’t deal with the why but the how. If any of you are familiar with the site soyouwanna.com, it’s going to be like one of their guides: enough to get you going, but not entirely enough to act as a stand-alone volume of knowledge.

Additionally, don’t assume this all perfect advice (is there such a thing?), most of this advice you’ll see repeated over and over online and in books and such, but I’ve mixed it with a lot of personal opinions which don’t necessarily work for everyone.


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My Story (with pictures!)




Me in 2005 pre-presentation:

• Visibly shaking
• A rush of something (adrenaline?) so intense I felt as if I was fading in and out of consciousness. This led to a fear of fainting during the talk.
• Visualising myself physically running away

Me now, pre-presentation:

• Still nervous, but anxiety is small enough to be manageable
• Visualising myself talking, and people smiling and listening

I had been avoiding presentations my entire life up until my final year at university, when I knew that continuing this behaviour would hurt my final degree classification significantly and hinder my chances of finding graduate work. I ended up doing three presentations in total in that final year, and I went from being a D grade to an A grade presenter in the space of one year. Sometimes I get the feeling that if I can do it, then anyone can, especially considering how terrified I was initially. Quite literally, a few years ago the mere thought of presentations twisted my bowels into knots, broke me out in a cold sweat and made me want to puke all over the floor.

Proof that you can enjoy presentations, eventually, after butt-loads of practice i.e. YEARS, don’t ever think I have some natural ability to do public speaking, I was truly phobic of it. My key was practice, practicing in schools many times with volunteering work, practice at uni, in front of friends, on my own, and at a public speaking training course at work. To put it into context, I carried out approximately 8 presentations before I started getting so confident I started looking forward to them!




That's a smile, believe it or not!!

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Ready for the challenge?

There are a few ingredients you need for success here: persistence, determination, and patience.

Persistence
I say this because I do not believe that many people could overcome this fear without doing lots of presentations (practice or real, both count).

Determination
Hopefully you will be determined enough such that even when you feel scared, even when things are not going to plan, you still have your end goal in mind.

Patience
Like anything difficult in life, you must learn slowly in easy, manageable steps. Learning to swim, ride a bike, drive a car, these are all skills we take time to learn, often employing the expertise of friends or professionals to help the process and investing lots of time and energy to master them. The same goes for a public speaking, whether you want to become just ‘ok’, good, or an expert at the art of public speaking all depends on how much time and energy you invest.

In my experience it is often the most socially confident speakers who deliver the worst presentations. Maybe they under-prepare because they believe that public speaking is just like speaking to your mates, only louder? They incorrectly assume that public speaking requires no or little practice, and their performances are subsequently mediocre.

There will be two parts to improving your public speaking skills:

1. Get over the fear such that you get up there and talk!
2. Improve the content and presentation style such that the audience enjoy the experience and/or you get better grades/more kudos at work.

Of course these two are interlinked. Reduce the anxiety and you will focus on your content more during the talk. Spend more time improving content and you will feel more confident about presenting the work, so anxiety decreases.

If you only want to reduce the fear and give an ‘ok’ performance (i.e. survive!) then there is nothing wrong with that – the same advice still applies. I have not attempted to present the two levels of advice separately as that would be near-impossible as they are so closely related!

***By the way if any of the following sounds super familiar it is because some of this advice was taken directly from SA UK forum posts. Originally, I saved them into a single Word document and read them when preparing myself for my presentations. Sorry I cannot remember who originally posted them, it was amazing advice and very useful! Thank you to those people.