Glossophobia is the technical term given to a severe fear of public speaking. People who suffer from glossophobia tend to freeze in front of any audience, even a couple of people. They find their mouth dries up, their voice is weak and their body starts shaking. They may even sweat, go red and feel their heart thumping rapidly.

If you suffer from glossophobia you shy away from any opportunity to speak in public. Your symptoms are usually so severe you get terribly embarrassed and fearful of any public speaking.

However, people with glossophobia can be cured. The first step is in understanding what your condition is caused by. Then a program of light physical exercise is next to help combat the hormonal causes of this phobia. After that, a simple management system is all you need to keep the condition at bay.

Labels: fear

Many people experience a fear of failure in public speaking. They are not fearful of public speaking itself; instead they are scared of looking foolish or appearing to fail in some way. It is this that prevents them from speaking in public.

The fear of failure is an anxiety brought on often by the way the person was treated as a child. They may have been chastised for failing to achieve certain results at school, for instance. Or they may have been told they do not live up to parental expectations. Whenever such individuals are placed in any kind of situation where they feel they are being "tested" these memories of the past trigger the anxiety.

If you suffer from a fear of failure in public speaking you need to address any issues from your past which could be affecting your performance and making you more anxious than necessary. Therapists can help you resolve issues of parental or school expectations which may be limiting what you can achieve. Alternatively, self hypnosis can assist you as well. But whatever you do, make sure you deal with the underlying cause of the fear of failure, otherwise you will never be able to confidently speak in public.

Labels: confidence, fear

People who have a fear of public speaking often find it difficult to get started. They tend to "warm up" and take time to get going because they are nervous. Only after a while, when they have realised the audience is not going to attack them do they settle in to what they are saying and relax a bit.

However, you can cope with this kind of public speaking fear by ensuring you have a strong opening. What you need is an attention-grabbing start which you have practised several times so that you could do it without thinking about it.

Once you have that organised you start your talk with it. This will immediately grab your audience and you will see their keen interest in you, boosting your confidence and making you have less fear.

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Many speakers say that standing on the platform without any audio visual aids is the most nerve racking thing they can do. All I can say is that when I run training courses, I make people do just that. Every single time, without fail, for the past 20 years, trainees have said to me that they are amazed. They suddenly feel free and realize that their confidence is HIGHER when they stop using slides. The very thing they were using to provide support and act as a kind of comfort blanket appears to be the very thing which is causing their nervousness and fear. Giving up audio visual aids is one of the most important and biggest fear reducing steps you can take.

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Being anxious before a speech or presentation is not unusual. Indeed it is normal for many people. Anyone who is not a little anxious before speaking probably is not thinking hard enough about the likely impact of their talk. People who want to make an impact have a degree of anxiety because they want to be sure that their speech will work.

The anxiety may be caused by a fear that the speech might not work properly. Or it can be due to an expectation of failure. However, a common cause of anxiety is a 'high' of happiness and excitement. So, even confident, excited presenters will have some degree of anxiety.

If you are not anxious before a presentation or a speech you clearly have no expectation of failure, but neither are you excited by your talk. In other words your audience will perceive you as just as bored as you feel. Anxiety is good for you and your audience. However, too much anxiety can inhibit your performance. This is when anxiety turns to stress or worse, panic. To avoid excess anxiety the best remedy is careful planning and preparation as well as plenty of practice.

Labels: fear

If you are a nervous speaker, you must tackle your lack of confidence and get rid of your fear of public speaking. Not only will you feel better, but it actually helps your audience as well.

Audiences themselves feel nervous if the speaker is lacking confidence. And when an audience is nervous or concerned for the speaker in any way they actually stop listening to what is being said. Hence if you display any nervousness or exhibit your fear of public speaking, you will not get your message across.

So, even if you think it's only a single speech, you may be nervous but it will all be over after 20 minutes, you may not succeed at all. Your audience could notice your fear of public speaking and therefore miss what you say. You need to be sure that you exhibit confidence and you will find the steps necessary to do that in How to Abolish Your Fear of Public Speaking.

Labels: fear

One of the main reasons people fear public speaking is because they are worried they will forget their words. They are often so concerned they will forget what to say, they need notes, PowerPoint slides or other devices that they can use as a prompt. However, audience research shows that if you do use notes of any kind you are less trusted and less liked than speakers who have no support of this kind.

So how can you remember what to say, without resorting to notes of one kind or another? The first thing is to be sure that your speech tells a story, or several stories. Stories are easier to recall, so if your talk is story based you'll find it is more memorable for you.

Secondly, use several pictorial examples - fill your talk with visuals that you have to describe. You will then end up with several "mind's eye" pictures about your talk that will make your speech easier to recall.

Props are also great for helping you remember what to say and therefore remove your fear of public speaking. Have your props arranged around the room; they will act as visual clues as to what to say next.

Labels: fear, memory

Many people appear to believe that they are unusual in that they have a fear of public speaking. They look at other speakers and see them exuding confidence and wish they could be just like them. They are envious of their apparent lack of public speaking fear.

However, almost everyone has some degree of fear of public speaking. It is a quite natural phenomenon. That's because we don't normally conduct any kind of conversation on a "one to many" approach. Almost all our conversations are "one to one"; even at dinner parties where you may have several guests you tend to only talk to one person at a time.

As a result our life experience tends to be talking to people "one to one", so as soon as we are plunged into a situation that is "one to many" - as in public speaking - we tend to be rather worried and concerned. Fear of public speaking is therefore a natural occurrence.

What the confident speakers have done is change the attitude they have to speaking. Instead of seeing the situation as "one to many" they still treat this as a "one to one" situation. They imagine they are talking to members of the audience on an individual basis, rather than imagining they are talking to the whole group. If you treat public speaking as a "one to one" rather than a "one to many" situation, you will find you lose your fear of public speaking more quickly.

Labels: confidence, fear

Are there any remedies for public speaking fears? That's a question I often get asked. It seems that people would like to pop a pill, or take a medicine that miraculously gets rid of fear. There is no such thing. Sometimes, actors and musicians are prescribed "beta-blockers" - drugs that affect the cardiovascular system - for severe cases of stage fright. However, when they stop taking the tablets, the symptoms reappear. So these remedies do not attack the main cause of fear. The best remedy you can find is to discover the real, deep seated cause of your fear of public speaking. When you have discovered that you can then deal with rectifying it. I find with the people that I deal with that the main cause of fear is rooted in childhood, being told by parents and teachers to "keep quiet". This tends to make you feel you shouldn't talk out loud; so when you are asked to speak in public it goes against everything you learned as a child. Dealing with this can be time consuming, but largely it is attitude change that is the only thing that is needed. If that isn't easy for you, sometimes you may find that cognitive behavioural therapy is helpful.

Labels: causes, fear, remedies

I often get asked if there are any remedies for public speaking fears. What kind of pills or medications are available? What herbs or foods can help reduce the fear of public speaking? However, such questions are really clutching at straws. Yes, certain foods and drinks can make you feel more relaxed. True, there is some evidence that aromatherapy with lavender oil, for instance, can help you feel better. But they don't get rid of the fear completely. Herbs, foods, and alternative therapies may help, but in my experience they have limited impact. The thing that has the most impact (explained in detail in How to Abolish Your Fear of Public Speaking) is physical activity, which is one of the natural remedies for public speaking fears. All you need to do is get plenty of physical activity prior to your speech and make sure you move around a lot during the speech. Podiums, fixed microphones, standing next to computers to click the slides on - these are all things which will make you more nervous, not less, because they reduce physical activity. Thousands of people who have followed my programme for abolishing the fear of public speaking report that the single most important natural remedy they followed was physical activity.

Labels: fear, remedies

Yesterday I was at a seminar where a member of the audience told me he could never do what the speaker that morning had done - to stand up confidently in front of a group of business people and simply chat to them. He said it all stemmed from the fact that his father was a perfectionist and every time he had to speak as a child, his father would correct him to make sure he was "perfect". As a result he had been wary of public speaking ever since. However, he realised that for his business he really needed to speak in public. So he asked me what were the steps to get over a fear of public speaking. The first step, I told him, was to deal with his attitude. That's often the main problem for people. They consider public speaking to be a problem, so it is a problem. Think of public speaking as something positive and guess what - it is positive. Some psychologists call this "framing"; if we put things into a negative frame, they become negative. So changing that framing is often the most important thing to do and it is the essential first step in just a few steps to get over a fear of public speaking. The next step is careful preparation of your speech or presentation so that it is easy to do and remember. The third step is proper practice - not just going over it in your head. There are several other things you can do to rid yourself of the fear of public speaking and these are all explained in How to Abolish Your Fear of Public Speaking.

Labels: fear

Whenever I work with people to help them overcome anxieties associated with public speaking it's obvious that one of the main difficulties they have is the fear of rejection in public speaking. This usually goes back to childhood. Children are fantastic public speakers: once they have learned to speak at around the age of two, they love showing off their new found skill. Any parent will know that children are chatterboxes. However, once they get to school this is not such a useful skill. Teachers can't do their job if the class is chattering away. So at around the age of four or five children start to get the message that speaking is not a good thing. This is one of the fundamental reasons why most people perceive public speaking to be a problem. Our fear of rejection in public speaking stems from the fact that in order to be accepted by our teachers at a very young age we had to stop speaking in public and learn to be quiet. Then if a teacher did ask you to speak in public, it was often only to answer a question. Since at five years old your knowledge is pretty slim, many children get the answers wrong. This further compounds the problem. Not only is speaking in public perceived by children as a difficulty, of they do say something they are likely to get criticism for being wrong. The result is that the education system makes us afraid of speaking in public and gives us a deep seated fear of rejection in public speaking. In my manual How to Abolish Your Fear of Public Speaking I go into more detail about how to get rid of deep seated anxieties and how to ensure they don't lead to a fear of rejection in public speaking.

Labels: fear

I often get asked "what are the causes of fear of public speaking?". There are two answers to that question. One is "it depends", the other is, "there is only one cause". The real cause of all the symptoms associated with the fear of public speaking is a rise in a hormone called adrenalin. This hormone gets pumped out from glands next to your kidneys, in your back, when you are under some kind of threat. The rise in adrenalin helps your body to become prepared to deal with the threat by diverting your blood supply away from the central part of your body, to where it is needed most - your muscles. The hormone also triggers a release in energy supplies from the liver and gets your heart and lungs pumping to get the oxygen around your body. Thanks to the rise in adrenaline your body can cope with anything - well almost. Your body cannot cope that well with constant adrenalin - so once you have started to deal with the threat, adrenalin is switched off and you can deal with whatever the problem is. The difficulty for most people with a fear of public speaking is the fact that the threat - the audience - never goes away. Hence adrenalin continues to be pumped around the speaker's body, putting them in an every-ready state. But in order to cope, they need the adrenalin switched off - and with the ever present "threat" of the audience, that never happens. This then leads to excess adrenalin circulating in the bloodstream, which is then responsible for all those nasty symptoms. (If you want more details about the mechanism of adrenalin and some specific measures you can take to deal with it see How to Abolish Your Fear of Public Speaking.)

What can sometimes take time to discover is why an audience is perceived as a threat. For some people it is embarrassment triggered by memories of school-days having to stand in front of the class. For others it is fear of criticism. In fact there are several possible reasons why the adrenalin rise is triggered. But they all point back to one thing - someone frightened of speaking in public sees the situation as personally threatening. Once you have located that specific threat you no longer have to worry what are the causes of fear of public speaking - you just deal with the threat.

Labels: causes, fear

Every time I see someone speak in public who is clearly nervous, I notice that they haven't even undertaken any of the basic steps to get over a fear of public speaking. For instance, they seem unprepared, often needing to refer to notes to remind them of what to say. Equally, they may also be doing the talk for the first time having never taken the opportunity to practice. These are actually the two most important steps to take in getting over a fear of public speaking - preparation and practice. Almost always when I'm dealing with people who are frightened of speaking in public I discover they do little preparation and almost no practice. You need to prepare very well - not just dash off a few lines to remind yourself of what to say. Also, you need plenty of practice - never less than six full "dress rehearsals" of what you want to say.

Labels: fear