This is my third and final piece of this series on the anxiety of public speaking. 

Adrenaline can cause speakers to do odd things.  It can cause a kind of tunnel vision, where the speaker gets fixated on an idea, or uses the same word or phrase over and over again or gets lost down a rabbit hole and can’t find their way out.  It can cause a speaker to wander all over their mental map, suddenly waxing enthusiastic on a host of topics rather than sticking to the point.  And it can cause blank spots, white noise, and a complete loss of memory of what happened during the presentation.  I’ve seen a speaker’s knees literally knocking, heard their voices shaking, or pitched extremely high or low, witnessed weirdly repetitive gestures, and seen speakers pace the stage as if they were warming up for a marathon – or getting boxed in to one corner or another of the stage as if they were trapped by unseen forces.  The variation is endless.  Adrenaline and the anxiety it creates are powerful forces and we humans can become ruled by them under the influence of a speech and a crowd.

A study from 2015 that I ran across recently found that anxiety reduces empathy.  That makes simple sense. As your symptoms increase, you naturally focus more on them – on yourself and your symptoms – and have correspondingly less capacity to focus on others.  The effect translates directly into public speaking. At extremes, you are so cognizant of your anxiety that you lose track of yourself and the audience.  Hence the lack of awareness that often goes with the repetitive motion or gesture on stage.  Early on as a speaker I was the pacing type, and it took me a good deal of work to train my feet to stand still when they found themselves on a stage ready to roam. Every single step seemed to make sense at the time. All that energy had to come out somewhere!

The lessening of empathy means that you are less able to read the audience. The normal feedback loop that keeps you clued in as to what is going on with that audience becomes a doom loop instead.  What can you do to turn that feedback-poor spiral around and become more aware of what is going on in the room?

My own breakthrough came at a seemingly random moment in my speaking career.  I was going on stage to speak to a group of 500 CIOs on communication, and I was suffering the usual adrenaline symptoms.  The conference organizer, annoyingly to me at the time, was chattering away about the audience, who they were, what companies they were from, what they were looking for from me, and so on.  We had already had a briefing call, and I was only paying half attention, thinking it was all a bit unnecessary.  Couldn’t she see that I needed to focus and quiet myself and prepare without all the chatter?

But then something she said clicked.  “These folks are not experts in communication.  They are experts in IT.  This is their chance to get up to speed on something that feels far out of their comfort zone.”

Boom!  I was thinking about my comfort zone and my symptoms.  She jogged me to think about the audience’s.  I realized that the presentation was not about me.  It was about them – what they could be open to learning about body language and storytelling, topics they hadn’t spent their careers studying.  I was merely the conduit.  The Zen of public speaking is that the speaker doesn’t matter, once all is said and done.  What matters is the audience and the extent to which you can help them get the message.

I walked on stage with a sudden serenity that carried me through the talk and allowed me to focus on the audience in front of me.  How could I help them become better communicators?  By tuning in to them, I could watch for signs of confusion and comprehension and better align what I was saying to their needs.  I was able to have a deeper conversation with that audience than I had had before.  And my tigerish feet mostly stayed put as I connected with one part of the audience or another.

If you can put the focus of public speaking where it belongs, on the audience, and the message, it will free you up to be in service to them.  That’s the Zen of public speaking.