Turning High Anxiety Speech Into Low Anxiety Speaking
You’ve been tapped to give an address to your annual horseshoe club’s banquet and find yourself experiencing high anxiety speech fears. What do you do?
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Here are six quick tips.
Decide on one main message you want to deliver. If they forgot everything else, what one item would you want them to take away. Once you decide on that, you can build your entire presentation around it.
Focus on your audience, not on how you perform. Think about how they well benefit from the information you are going to provide. How they will use it, why it will be important for them. Even if it’s not earth shatteringly important, your message will help them expand their appreciation of your theme. You are giving them a gift of your insights. They will be pleased to receive your input.
Your not going to be perfect, so don’t sweat the small stuff. Even is you have a big gaff, forget a key line or loose your place, so what. Your audience has seen it before and if anything will feel more embarrassed for you that you will. And what’s more they will forget it a lot sooner as well.
Before during and after, keep in mind positive thoughts. This is one area where positive mental attitude really does help, and the converse hurts.
Take some deep breaths before it’s your time to speak. A couple of positive self affirmations before hand help many people. Something like, “I like Myself” or “I’m going to knock them dead,” etc. can help give you that mental boost just before you walk on stage.
In general, I recommend against memorizing any but formal speeches. But do memorize your beginning and ideally your end. For the rest of it, remember your key topics. Keep a note card with the outline in bullet points, if necessary. And then just discuss each point from the heart in your own words. This can help give your presentation a nice natural flow.
Of course you will want to run though those thoughts a number of time and try out different ways of saying them. During your actual speech, you will borrow those points that flow together the easiest.
Another key ideas is to harness the power of your high anxiety speech. Convert nervous leg twitching into an excuse to walk away from the lectern or podium to approach the audience. On the other hand, if its trembling palms you need to combat feel free to anchor one on the deck, podium or lectern, but keep the other free to make gestures. Ideally, switch hands after a while or let go altogether. With practice the natural adrenaline rush of speaking in public can be used to give you an “edge” in your presentation. Try to focus the anxiety speech events cause you into a productive force.
Finally, identify a few friendly faces in various sections of the audience. Move your eyes from one to the other. And visualize them smiling at you, even if they aren’t. This will cause you to have good eye contact with your audience and will allow you to see positive feedback as you scan the room
In the long run, the best cure for high anxiety speech fears is to get experience giving talks. Each additional speaking occasion will reduce the anxiety level, until you actually look forward to your next speech.
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