When you stand up to speak in front of others, you're risking a great deal.  You can fail to engage the crowd, you can make a fool of yourself, you can attempt too little or too much and miss the mark.  And while the risk is almost always greater in your own mind that it is in reality, it is a real risk nonetheless.

Knowledge of that risk is what causes people to play it safe when they’re preparing their presentations.  Ironically, that’s the most dangerous tack to take.  Playing safe means you go for the dull rather than the emotional, the read rather than the conversational, and the preachy rather than the interactive.  All of those choices feel safer and are in fact liable to produce a much worse presentation.  They are choices that close you off to your potential audiences rather than opening you up to them. 

Then, when you get up to speak, you’re thinking to yourself, "Why did I agree to do this?  It could all go horribly wrong!  People are going to think I'm an idiot!" or something along those lines.

The result of that emotional self-talk is a series of behaviors that, alas, tends to increase the likelihood that precisely the feared result will occur.  People who fear failure in speaking are defensive, and that defensiveness shows up in a variety of ways, all bad. 

They may pace nervously — the familiar 'happy feet' of some speakers.  They may clutch and un-clutch their hands in front of their stomachs.  They may cross their arms, hide their hands behind their backs, or keep their arms firmly fixed to their sides, only waving their forearms, in a characteristic gesture of many business speakers that I call the 'Penguin flap'. 

All of these gestures, and others besides, signal nervousness to the audience.  But more than that, they signal that the speaker is trying to protect himself.  The speaker, in fact, is shutting off part of herself from the audience. 

The result is that the audience begins to feel the same way.  That’s because we have these neurons in our brain called mirror neurons that copy the emotions of the people around us.  When we’re focused on a speaker, and that speaker is behaving as if it’s important to protect himself, we feel danger and want to protect ourselves too. 

The result?  Everyone closes down when it’s most important to be open. 

And it gets worse.  If the audience sense that the speaker is holding back, it will not connect with the speaker – in fact, it will fail to trust him (or her).  The work of shutting down and closing off will wrap up with everyone the opposite of where they should be. 

That's not of course what the speaker intends, but that's the tough luck of public speaking. 

If you're preparing a presentation, then, go for openness. Risk big, rather than playing it safe.  Then, when you’re actually delivering, try to begin right away avoiding self-protection.  Get over yourself and your nerves.  Put your focus on the audience.  Be open to the audience.  If you can manage that, they will carry you and give you back far more energy that you put out. 

The irony is that the best way to protect yourself in public speaking is to give up any thought of self-protection at all.