Why You Fear Public Speaking and How to Overcome It

Here’s how to reduce the fear of public speaking as recommended by a professional speaker.

Public speaking continues to be a top fear of humanity. Whether you’re speaking to a group of ten or ten thousand, public speaking is nerve racking. Yet most professionals agree that public speaking is a powerful skill capable of transforming one’s business or career.

As a professional speaker for over eight years, I’ve had experience training small groups of executives, pitching business plans to key stakeholders, and delivering keynote presentations to thousands of people around the world.

The below is my best advice for removing anxiety before any presentation.

But before I share my pro tip, lets better understand why humans fear public speaking so much.

One of the core needs of humans is a sense of belonging. Humans have a deep desire to be accepted, cared for, and involved in meaningful community. Humans are tribal species who live, work, and survive together.

As a survival technique, humans are biologically wired to scan the social group to identify where they stand.

Let’s take the social group of work as an example. Our brains scan and evaluate if we are in the center of the team as a leader, in the neutral middle, or being pushed out or excluded from the team.

If the early humans who roamed the plains were excluded from their tribe, their chance of survival was minimal. After all these years, humans still avoid exclusion and seek belonging.

When you speak up in a group, pitch a new idea, or deliver a keynote presentation you risk exclusion. Our palms get sweaty before public speaking because we fear being embarrassed or judged for our thoughts, ideas, or suggestions which would ultimately lead to the group rejecting us and pushing us out of the group where survival is limited.

How do you overcome this human hard-wiring and reduce the fear of public speaking?

Uncover the unknowns.

Humans fear what they don’t know. And leading up to a presentation, there are many unknowns.

Here are a few examples of the unknowns that exist for public speakers…

• Content, structure, and length of the presentation
• Size and demographics of the audience
• Size and layout of the presentation room
• Audio and visual set-up
• Flow of the agenda

Whether you’re conscious of it or not, these unknowns are what contributes to the anxiety felt by public speakers. 

Turn unknowns into knowns and your public speaking anxiety will decrease and confidence will increase.

Here’s how to turn these unknowns into knowns.

• Content, structure, and length of the presentation
  • Get to know your audience’s wants and needs and allow those to drive the content of the presentation
    • The more you focus on the audience’s needs, the less you’re thinking about your own anxiety 
  • Get to know your presentation by practicing it out loud
    • Speaking out loud will help you spot weak ideas, irrelevant data/stories, and disjointed transitions
• Size and demographics of the audience
  • Get to know who will be in the room
    • Conduct interviews with audience members in advance of the presentation or arrive early to interact/observe the audience
• Size and layout of the presentation room
  • Get to know the presentation room by arriving early and scoping out the environment.
    • Acoustics, size of the presentation screen, restroom location, etc. are helpful for putting public speakers at ease
    • The more you can mimic the live presentation (e.g. being on stage, using a microphone, clicking through the slides, etc.) the more confident you’ll become
• Audio and visual set-up
  • Get to know the tech that is needed to display your presentation (testing the audio (of your mic or presentation videos), 
    • Ensure your slides are displaying appropriately on the presentation screen
    • Test the audio of your microphone and/or presentation videos
    • Have your presentation backed-up in multiple formats (.pptx, PDF, etc.) in the cloud (Dropbox, Box, etc.) and on a USB drive
      • If you present a lot, consider having adapters that allow you to present from your iPad or iPhone in case your laptop crashes
    • Establishing a relationship with the AV techs (if there are any) is important because they play a crucial part in the success of your presentation
• Flow of the agenda
  • Get to know what’s happening right before and right after your presentation
    • Have a clear understating of where you need to be and when
    • Ensure you end on time, no audience member ever got angry at a presenter who ended on-time

The unknowns that are possible during a live presentation are countless. However, being proactive about uncovering the bigger unknowns is crucial for reducing the anxiety of public speaking while increasing the likelihood of a successful presentation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ryan Jenkins is an internationally-recognized keynote speaker and author on the topics of leadership, generational differences, and the future of work. He is the co-founder of SyncLX, which creates lasting learning experiences for companies’ #1 asset, their people.

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