Are You Afraid Of Speaking In Public?

I talked about public speaking here yesterday and it got me to thinking last night about why I don’t do more work with people that have a fear of public speaking here in Orlando? After all according to research, people fear public speaking more than they fear death. If you ask me for help in avoiding death I would be terrible, because other than the obvious don’t smoke, don’t play about with loaded guns and don’t role around in fish blood and guts and go swimming with sharks, I wouldn’t know what to say.

 

Public speaking is another matter though; because that is a fear and I am brilliant at helping people eradicate fears. Sorry for those of you surfing here looking for pointers on self-modesty. I’ve let you down yet again, but what else can I say? I genuinely am very good at it.

 

I believe that anybody can conquer a fear of public speaking and I believe that because up until a year or so ago the very thought made me feel nauseous. It still doesn’t fill my full of the joys of spring and you wont normally find me grappling with the facilitator to get control of the mic at a speaking event, but I don’t have sleepless nights anymore, and I can do now it if I need to. My nadir was a presentation I had to do about 4 years ago where I knew I didn’t know my material very well. Half way through the presentation I blanked and had to excuse myself for fear of throwing up on the laptop and the first row of people. Splashing water in my face in the bathroom and anxiously scanning for a window I could climb out of I knew I had to so something to change my outlook. So I did.

 

I started to read some books on the subject but most of them treated the symptoms rather than going deeper and getting to the cause. Now what I don’t mean by getting to the cause, is taking a client back to some event when they were 5 and had to sing in front of the school and their pants fell down. That isn’t helpful in my view even if it is mildly amusing. What I do mean though, is the pictures that the client is making inside their head when they think about speaking. Not just the pictures but also any, sounds, tastes and smells they may also associate with the event. Those 4 senses usually (not always there are some exceptions that I’ll not go into here) lead to the negative feelings, so if you can change them you change the subjective experience.

 

That’s as much as I am going to say at this stage other than if you have a fear of public speaking that you want to get over and you live in the Orlando drop me a line.

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