What causes people to be afraid of public speaking? Is it suddenly being the centre of attention, the audience in silence, and all of their eyes being upon them? For many the answer is yes! They imagine, for no rational reason, that they are going to mess it up, (which could simply be that they fear that they will be less than perfect), that people will laugh at them and they will never live it down. But the real problem here is not about making a fool of yourself, it is about not being able to cope with making a fool of yourself. Indeed, making a mistake can be the best thing that you can do in a presentation. If you then joke about it you will find that nothing will endear you more to your audience.
Example - a simple one is that you could pretend that you have forgotten what to say and just announce "I've forgotten what I was going to say, I'll just take a sip of water while I think about it!" Try it - it works! Imagine you are talking to an audience about a project that is supposed to lead to significant improvements in revenue. You could say perhaps "When we have implemented this system I fully expect sales to rise by £3,000 a month (when you and the audience are expecting a figure of around £300,000), hesitate briefly watching the audience develop looks that seem to say "why are we here listening to this nonsense?" then simply say, "oh well I'd better cancel the family holiday to Australia that I'd planned with my bonus this year!" Then follow up with "of course I meant £300,000". The audience will relax immediately, many will smirk and some will even laugh.
Think about how you feel when you are nervous about having to give a presentation. Adrenaline is flowing through your body, equipping you to fight or flight, but unfortunately you cannot run away (well you could but that would probably be just too embarrassing!) and there is nothing to fight. We need to find a way to use all that adrenaline and by pure coincidence, you can use it by utilising the presenter's number one weapon when it comes to delivering great presentations - enthusiasm! Use that energy to give your presentation vibrancy and passion. The fact is without some nerves where will you get the energy from, the passion from, to sound convincing in your delivery? Nowhere! Nerves are good!
How else can we help ourselves to calm down before we start our presentation?
We can try deep breathing which does help to relieve tense muscles, a quaking voice and queasy stomach. When we are nervous, we tend to take shallow breaths. This robs our brain of oxygen and can create a negative reinforcing cycle. What happens is that we take a shallow breath out of nervousness and as we try to speak, we realize that we will not be able to finish our sentence, so we speed up. That makes us more nervous, so we take even more shallow breaths. When this cycle occurs, just pause, take a deep breath, and continue.
You are much better than you think you
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