As an instructor of our university’s public speaking course, every semester I’m approached by nervous students asking me how to cope with their anxiety related to public speaking.
Students aren’t the only ones. In fact, multiple studies confirm that both students and the general public regard public speaking as more frightening than death itself. Considering that public speaking is an aspect of many people’s jobs (while risking life and limb isn’t), it’s understandable why people would fear it more.
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Like my students, you might wonder how to work through your public speaking-related anxiety.
1. Prepare for success
The first step for doing so is well documented: get started. From the Mayo Clinic, to psychologists, to the actress Mindy Kaling, virtually everyone agrees that intense preparation reduces your anxiety because it builds a solid foundation for your success, thereby increasing your confidence in a positive outcome.
If anxiety motivates you to start preparing or practising your speech a little earlier than you normally would, it’s doing its job. It’s driving you to do the very thing that will reduce your anxiety. When it comes to anxiety and public speaking, the first and best thing you can do is to take the first steps – to start writing the speech and start practising it. Even making mistakes will help you eventually correct them.
If you’re too nervous to ask friends or colleagues to listen to your speech, there are now AI tools that can help you. Apps such as Yoodli or Orai can listen to you deliver your speech and give you feedback on content, delivery and style. While they can’t replace a human audience, your confidence might get a boost as, for example, you notice your own progress at decreasing your use of filler words or using inclusive language.
2. Ignite your start-up confidence
But sometimes anxiety prevents us from working at all. It creates a deficit in what I call start-up confidence. Everyone who’s stared at a blank page and worried about their ability to come up with something to say has faced this kind of anxiety.
This tends to happen when we imagine that the process of preparing the speech is too big and refuse to even begin working or practising until we know everything we need to know first.
Lacking start-up confidence is a real problem. Interestingly, research in psychology shows that low-status people tend to experience more anxiety than those with high status. But other research points out that having a coping mechanism or an overall sense of control gives lower-status people a buffer against feeling anxious.
When it comes to coping mechanisms, the first and best solution is still to try and seize control of the situation. Work hard, master as much as you can, practise frequently, realise that your words have power and know that your mistakes can be corrected.
But knowing this doesn’t always tame your anxiety or give you the confidence you need to carry on. In the moment, when anxiety strikes, it can be very difficult to take control of your own racing thoughts – yet that’s exactly what you need to do.
Many people find metacognitive techniques such as mindfulness helpful for calming uncontrollable thoughts, and there’s research to show that practising mindfulness meditation reduces anxiety.
At the very least, when you sit down to start writing or get up to speak and you begin to feel anxious, name the feeling to yourself, notice what triggered it and try to observe how anxiety is affecting you in the moment.
3. Fake it ’til you make it
In the long run, you’ll want to build up your confidence by trying, making mistakes, correcting them and gaining a sense of control on the stage. In the short term, you might need to pretend to be more confident than you actually are – in colloquial terms, to fake it ’til you make it.
The key to faking confidence in public speaking is in controlling your non-verbal communication or body language. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do, but there are some general tips anyone can try out.
First, be conscious of how you’re moving (or not). One of the clearest signs of anxiety is a person frantically pacing back and forth or rapidly waving their hands around. Yet clutching your hands to your body or standing rigidly still isn’t what confident people do either. Instead, use gestures and move slowly and purposefully.
Second, don’t be afraid to take up more space. The advice your grandmother gave you about standing up straight is good here. You don’t want to make yourself seem smaller than you actually are – especially not when studies show that height is positively related to income.
This tip also extends to how you gesture and move. Gesture expansively if not dramatically. Move purposefully with a long, confident stride rather than taking baby steps.
And remember that, to perform this body language, you’ll need to practise it while memorising your speech. Sometimes you’ll find that practising and performing confidence actually makes you more confident.
In the end, there’s no magical solution to dealing with public speaking anxiety, but there are everyday tools you can use to give yourself the confidence you need to succeed at public speaking.
Thomas Duke is an instructor at Nazarbayev University.
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