Conquer Public Speaking Anxiety

How To Conquer Public-Speaking Anxiety

Public speaking is a commonly dreaded human fear. It is one of the top sought-after competencies by organizations worldwide.

by Amanda Tobe and Tatijana Busic

DO YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF a great communicator? Hopefully the answer is Yes. When the Graduate Management Admission Council surveyed the needs of 500 global employers, ‘communication excellence’ ranked as the most in-demand asset that an employee can bring to the table, with ‘presentation skills’ ranking close behind at number four. Clearly, the ability to make a compelling presentation is a critical competency for career success. Yet many of us dread it.

Experts at Chapman University estimate that at least 25 per cent of us experience significant levels of public-speaking anxiety also known as ‘speech anxiety’. This type of anxiety falls under the larger umbrella of ‘performance anxiety’ and is similar to the struggles that professional athletes and actors experience throughout their careers.

Public-speaking anxiety involves a pervasive and chronic pattern of worry and rumination about bad things happening when we talk in front of others. The imagination runs wild and we concoct scenarios of failure. This ‘worst-case scenario’ think-

ing can lead to a sense of dread every time we imagine speaking in front of others, in both our personal and professional lives. Some people feel utter panic — the fear of losing control, which triggers a cascade of complex physiological symptoms such as rapid heart rate, shortness of breath, shaking and blurred vision. Experts contend that dysfunctional and irrational thoughts can actually trigger this type of intense psycho-biological experience. The good news is, if we work on changing our thoughts, we can change our mindset and build the confidence needed to speak in front of others.

In this article we will highlight six key scientifically proven strategies aimed at improving your mindset and reducing your fear of public speaking.

1. Deconstruct Your Beliefs

At the core of performance anxiety are deep-seated core beliefs centred on negative outcome expectations. In many cases, we can trace our anxious thoughts to the beliefs we hold about

ourselves and the world. These ‘beliefs’ are actually learned patterns of thinking and are often informed by our past experience. When it comes to public-speaking anxiety, self-defeating beliefs are a leading trigger of maladaptive thoughts, feelings, and behaviours.

Many people who struggle with speech anxiety truly believe that they’re not good at it or can’t do it, and therefore they don’t like to do it. It is as though they believe they are hardwired or destined to feel nervous and to fail whenever public-speaking opportunities arise. This type of automatic thinking can lead to a self-sabotaging attitude and patterns of behaviour that further reinforce negative core beliefs. And the cycle continues.

Repeatedly telling yourself ‘I am just no good at this’ leads to perceiving fear as fact, and we begin to search for evidence in order to validate this perception — leading to a popular psychological phenomenon known to as the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’.

The good news is that every one of us can hone our self-reflectiveness and self-awareness skills — two higher-order executive functions in the brain — and transform the core beliefs that chain them to public-speaking fear. The first step involves deconstructing your belief system. These are the beliefs you have learned over time that relate to showing emotion, confidence, a need for approval, achievement, perfectionism and success. For example, individuals with public-speaking anxiety often overvalue beliefs such as, ‘It is important for people to like me’; ‘Showing emotion means showing weakness’; and ‘My self-worth hinges on how I perform’.

In our practice we often use a ‘connect-the-dots worksheet’. This is a helpful visual tool where the dots represent your beliefs and the ‘picture’ they form when connected reflects your publicspeaking anxiety. Examining core beliefs in this way can demystify your fear (e.g. ‘If this is what I believe, no wonder my hands shake!’), which allows you to move to the next step: identifying more realistic beliefs. For example, ‘How I perform or speak in front of others does not define me’ and ‘It’s okay if I’m nervous; it shows that I care’.

Research shows that confident public speakers often hold more optimistic beliefs about coping with their nervousness. Having this knowledge is empowering, because we can begin to recognize situations and maladaptive thinking patterns that trigger our worry and anxiety. The bottom line: reducing publicspeaking anxiety requires accessing and revamping the source of your fear.

2. Engage in Positive Self-Talk

Individuals who struggle with public-speaking anxiety are especially prone to negative self-talk. Researchers at the University of Guelph found that anxious job candidates are often plagued by negative thoughts that distract them during job interviews. When candidates were asked to describe their interview anxiety, many reported an excessive preoccupation with negative thoughts. For example, individuals described anticipatory fear about poor interview performance, having too much going on in their heads, worrying about answering questions correctly (or at all), and experiencing ‘racing thoughts’.

The problem with negative self-talk and pervasive worry is that it holds us hostage to the anticipation of bad things happening and halts our attentional ability to stay focused in the present. Anxious thoughts are highly taxing: They suck up our cognitive power and energy, are highly distracting, and lead to a hypervigilant focus on worst-case scenarios. This incessant worry only magnifies the problem, making it more difficult for individuals to think on their feet and engage with their audience.

When we are nervous, the stories we tell ourselves matter. We need to proactively shift our internal dialogue to focus on resilience and ability, rather than deficit and fear. A good place to start includes identifying self-affirmations and expanding one’s inner storyteller to reflect our strengths and capabilities. For example, we recommend taking time every day to write down empowering statements about your speaking ability, such as ‘I am becoming a dynamic speaker’ and ‘I am a job candidate who can express her qualifications clearly’. Such self-affirmations can

Repeatedly telling yourself ‘I am just no good at this’ leads you to perceive fear as fact .

play a huge role in regulating both our thoughts and our emotions. In short, changing your thoughts can change your feelings. Changing how we feel about our public-speaking ability (e.g. saying internally ‘I have what it takes to do this’) strengthens selfefficacy and deepens our motivation to tackle the challenge.

3. Visualize Your Optimal Performance

Olympic athletes are master visualizers; in fact, visualization is a core component of most athletic training. We forget that the rigour athletes demonstrate is equally applicable to other highpressure life situations, like public speaking. Peter Jensen, a Toronto-based sports psychologist, has helped over 70 athletes win Olympic medals using visualization as part of their mental preparation. Many athletes, such as Olympic Gold medalist Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, have talked about rehearsing or visualizing their performance in their heads hundreds, if not thousands, of times before their Olympic moment.

Visualization is a psychobiological process that involves creativity and imagination (‘I can see myself at the finish line!’) and regulates our physiological, emotional and behavioural responses and interpretations of threatening events (‘As I imagine myself succeeding, my body feels more relaxed and I feel hopeful’). You can visualize by conjuring up a positive image of yourself successfully navigating a high stakes situation, and then ‘experiencing’ that image as much as possible using all five of your senses. To do this, ask yourself ‘how does this image look, feel, smell, taste and sound?’

In the case of public speaking, try creating a positive image of yourself speaking in front of a large group, a panel, or in a job interview. It is helpful to visualize an upcoming speaking engagement or another setting that evokes images of relaxation or confidence. This requires thinking about how you want to feel, think, and act — but also how you want others to feel. When you visualize or imagine a speaking engagement, you activate the same regions of your brain that help to ground your attention in the present. Repeating this exercise is paramount in developing new

A Sample Speech Anxiety Hierarchy

1. Sit and observe a presentation given by someone else to senior leaders

2. Introduce yourself in a group setting at your company or in your industry

3. Propose a solution or an idea at a team meeting and collect feedback

4. Kick-off a team meeting

5. Kick-off a divisional team meeting

6. Share an idea 1:1 with a senior leader

7. Give a formal presentation to your department

8. Give a formal presentation to senior leaders

patterns of thinking. Always remember: The brain differentiates very little between imagined or real events, making visualization an excellent and highly accessible tool. Following are five tips for powerful visualization:

• Visualize the entire experience as extensively as possible, beginning from the moment you wake up that morning, commuting to the location, etc.

• Focus on personal improvement rather than outcomes that are outside of your control (such as getting a promotion or winning a sales pitch).

• Focus on your audience, message delivery and how you want the people in the audience to feel, rather than focusing on your talk as a ‘solo performance’.

FIGURE ONE

• Use all five senses whenever possible, including engaging in physical movements. For example, practice gestures and pacing while closing your eyes.

• Practice daily and leverage meditation practices. Meditation can be a great way to improve your visualization skills.

4. Create a Practice of Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a practice that helps to direct your attention to where you want — and need — it to go. Grounding your attention in the present, it is a highly effective strategy for managing stress and anxiety. Being mindful equates to a heightened sense of awareness of the present and the non-critical observation of any thoughts and feelings that arise. This mental practice suspends judgment, alleviates anticipatory fear, and allows us to live in the present moment.

As indicated earlier, public-speaking anxiety often involves a hyper-focus on negative predictions concerning one’s ability to perform. Thoughts such as ‘This is not going to go well’, ‘People will see how nervous I am’, and ‘I’m going to forget what I have to say’ debilitate the ability to ground one’s attention in the present. In effect, mindfulness is a form of mental training. Think of it as a muscle that, with exercise, strengthens over time and enables you to respond more adaptively to fearful thoughts about public speaking — and other things in life.

Metaphors can be a very useful tool for honing your mindfulness muscle. For example, imagine your thoughts as a train, your mind as the train station and actually watch your thoughts pass through the station, rather than parking themselves there. Many individuals with public-speaking anxiety experience significant dread in the days leading up to the anxiety-inducing event. When negative anticipatory thoughts arrive, try being curious about them rather fixating on them as some kind of absolute truth. Dedicate yourself to practising mindfulness and to being curious about your experience.

5. Experiment With Breathing Exercises

Ahh, breathing. It’s always with us, we can always access it, and it can be our best friend. Learning how to breathe effectively

amidst stressful situations releases oxygen to the brain, bloodstream and organs and activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Parasympathetic arousal keeps us calm and relaxed. However, when we perceive a situation as threatening, our sympathetic nervous system is triggered and we start to feel like we’re in real danger. Sympathetic nervous arousal tells us to run, hide, or freeze and ignites a strong physiological response (i.e.rapid heart rate, shallow breathing).

We can help mediate our powerful nervous system by learning how to breath well and deeply. When we engage the parasympathetic nervous system through breathing, we are less scared and better able to work through fearful thoughts and maintain our attention on the present. It can take some experimentation to find a breathing strategy that is personally effective. One exercise based in yoga practice is called ‘alternating nostril breaths’: You rotate breathing in through one nostril and closing the opposing nostril. Another common breathing exercise to calm the mind is called ‘4-7-8 breathing’: Breathe in for four seconds, holding your breath for seven seconds, and breathe out for eight seconds.

A third exercise is what is referred to as ‘holotropic breathing’. There are many wellness studios in the Toronto area (including Mindset Brain Gym in Yorkville) that have guided classes dedicated to this form of breathing. It involves instructors guiding participants to engage in rapid breathing followed by slower more relaxed breathing for a period of one hour to release blocked energy and reduce feelings of anxiety. This is a form of ‘fitness for the breath’ that increases oxygenation and decreases anxious thoughts. Regardless of the chosen exercise, the key is to become aware of your breathing to calm your nervous system.

6. Create an Anxiety Hierarchy

In order to minimize public-speaking fear, you need to face up to it. Avoiding it simply feeds it and makes it bigger over time. One effective tool is ‘real-life desensitization’, or gradual exposure to the fear-inducing situation. Clinical psychologists recommend creating a fear hierarchy in the shape of a pyramid, with situations that evoke the least anxiety in you on the lower end and situations that evoke high anxiety at the top of the pyramid.

Self-affirmations can play a huge role in regulating both our thoughts and our emotions.

Before creating your own fear hierarchy, you need to define your long- and short-term public speaking goals. For example, if someone hopes to deliver a TED talk one day, this would go at the top of the pyramid. The levels or steps of the hierarchy become your short-term goals — such as speaking at an industry conference, participating on a panel, introducing yourself at a networking event or introducing a speaker at an event. You then start at the bottom of the hierarchy (with the least challenging situation) and work your way through each level until you reach the top of the pyramid. The objective of desensitization is twofold:

1. To unlearn an association between an anxiety-inducing situation and an anxious response, and

2. To reassociate feelings of safety, relaxation and confidence with the feared stimulus.

What provokes anxiety for you may not provoke it for someone else, so creating an anxiety hierarchy is a highly personalized exercise. Once you have created your own hierarchy, you need to start looking for speaking opportunities, which may involve getting a little creative. For example, you might volunteer to speak as part of a social club that you are part of, or you might offer to kick off a team meeting at your office. In our experience, many individuals notice that their fears begin to lessen as soon as they begin the process.

In closing

As indicated herein, transforming your mindset is essential to overcoming distress and managing your public-speaking fears. We hope that this article sheds some light on a few useful strategies aimed at cultivating an adaptive and productive mindset. Remember, creating a plan to tackle public-speaking anxiety is not a one-size-fits-all approach. It takes a great deal of experimentation, courage and dedication.

It has been said that Warren Buffet does not have his business degree on the wall in his office. Instead, he features a diploma from a public speaking course that he took to manage his own fears. When asked what the single most important skill is

to develop in your career, Buffet’s answer was, “To hone your public-speaking craft.” Buffet has spoken about how a fear of public speaking can become a major career staller. “If you can’t communicate and talk to people and get your ideas across, you’re basically giving up your potential.”

The fact is, avoiding public speaking opportunities may give you short-term relief. But the long-term effects on your career growth will be the much greater cost.

Dr. Amanda Tobe is a Psychologist who specializes in helping professionals, leaders and students overcome speech/performance anxiety, confidence challenges and workplace stress. Dr. Tatijana Busic is a Clinical and Organizational Psychologist who works with individuals and organizations. They work together at Busic Professional Psychology in Toronto.