I get asked a great deal about anxiety, fear, nerves, nervousness, butterflies, panic attacks, terror – about public speaking.  A recent article inspired me to talk about the best ways to deal with public speaking fear – and a recent email asked me to blog about the topic, specifically the issue of a shaky voice.  So, with thanks to Jesse and Didier, here goes. 

Here’s a link to the article: http://bit.ly/cf8CJe.  The two main takeaways are first that if you are the non-alcoholic son of an alcoholic father, a quick drink will steady your nerves for public speaking and not significantly impair your cognitive abilities.  Second, we might have evolved the fear of public speaking for good reason – scanning an incoming crowd for hostile faces might have meant the difference between life and death.  We’re particularly good at finding the angry, unhappy faces in a crowd.  That tends to make us nervous.  Hence our fear.  Something like that, anyway. 

But how much use is that to people coping with the modern, ordinary fear of public speaking?  Let’s get to the help.  What can you do to lessen or eliminate your public speaking fear and the annoying physical symptoms that go with it, like experiencing a shaky voice at the start of your talk?

There are 3 basic categories of things you can do. 

First, you can work on the speech itself – the content.  You can rehearse it over and over again until you’re beyond boredom with it.  That helps with the nerves because one source of those nerves is, understandably enough, the fear that you won’t know the talk, or you’ll forget something, or someone will ask you something you don’t know the answer to.  So practice, practice, practice. 

Pick a subject that’s close to your heart, and talk only about things that matter to you.  That will help with the nerves too, because a part of your brain (the rational part) will see the chance to speak as an opportunity.  And fill the speech with stories that you care about and think are interesting, because stories are easy to remember and tell. 

Second, you can work on your physical symptoms.  To deal with the shaky voice, for example, breathe deep in the belly, tense the diaphragmatic muscles, as if you were about to be punched in the stomach, and let the air come out slowly as you talk.  With practice, that belly breathing should eliminate the shaky voice.  It should also help generally with your nervousness, because we tend to breathe shallow, quick breaths when we’re alarmed, and deep, slow breaths are the opposite of that.  Thus, your body will send a signal to your brain that things are OK. 

If you’ve got a lot of adrenaline, get some gentle exercise before your talk.  Don’t exhaust yourself, because you need energy to get through the speech, but take a little off the top.  It’s hard to be nervous when you’ve got that nice, relaxed, post-exercise feeling. 

Just before the talk, find a quiet place to yourself if you can.  Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart.  Starting with your feet, tense and relax your major muscle groups in isolation, one after another.  Give yourself a very gentle face rub (lots of tension in the facial muscles) and you’re good to go.

Finally, you can work on your mind.  There are a couple of ways to approach it.  First, every time you get a conscious thought about how things might go awry – a very common way we all work ourselves into tizzies before talks – replace the thought with a calm, reasoned mantra like, “I’m going to be fine.  I know the topic, I’ve rehearsed, and I’m ready to go.”  The point is to stop the vicious circle of panicked thoughts leading to feelings of panic leading to more panicked thoughts. 

But most fears originate in the unconscious mind, so you should work on that too.  Find a positive mantra like the one above, and repeat it to yourself throughout the day, and especially when you’re falling asleep at night – and when you’re awake in the middle of the night.  If you do this faithfully and thoroughly, within about 3 weeks you will see a major difference in your nervousness.  Who knows, you may even come to enjoy public speaking! 

I'm going to take the next couple of days off to get ready for the Public Words Speaker Forum 2010.  It's not too late to sign up.  Email me (nick@publicwords.com) for a special blog readers' discount if you're local or going to be in the area.  If you're already headed this way, see you Friday!