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Overcoming Anxiety in Public Speaking

October 21, 2024
Practical tips to ease public speaking nerves and learn to calm in-the-moment nerves with specific techniques.
Overcoming Anxiety in Public Speaking
October 21, 2024
Practical tips to ease public speaking nerves and learn to calm in-the-moment nerves with specific techniques.

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ON THIS EPISODE OF AMPLIFY

In this episode of Amplify with Jess Ekstrom, you’ll pick up some practical tips to ease those public speaking jitters and shift your mindset from being a “spotlight” speaker to a “lighthouse” speaker, focusing on guiding and serving your audience. Plus, you’ll find out why embracing your authentic self instead of aiming for perfection makes you a more impactful speaker. And Jess dives into how imposter syndrome can show you’re heading in the right direction!

SHOW NOTES

Did you know that most folks are more scared of public speaking than they are of sharks? It’s kind of crazy, but it also makes sense! Whether it’s Jaws or facing a live audience, your body reacts to nerves in the same way—it’s just a biological thing.

In this episode, I’m giving you some tips on how to ease your nerves if you have a speaking engagement coming up, whether that’s on stage as a keynote address, in a meeting, or giving a speech at a wedding.

I’ll walk you through quick tricks, like using peppermint and box breathing to calm yourself in the moment, and why making eye contact is a game changer.

So the next time you step on stage, you’ll have the confidence to own it.

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Rate Amplify on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and leave a review for Jess Ekstrom.

Amplify with Jess is produced by Earfluence and brought to you by Mic Drop Workshop.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Amplify with Jess Ekstrom, a show designed to help women get out of their heads and into their zone of influence. Happy Monday, everyone. Here’s some food for thought to start your week.

Did you know that most people fear public speaking more than they actually fear sharks? Which is absolutely insane, but it makes sense. The likelihood that we’re going to have to speak in public is probably greater than the likelihood that we’ll encounter a shark. So let me show you some tips on how to ease your nerves if you have a speaking engagement coming up, whether that’s on stage as a keynote address, in a meeting, or giving a speech at a wedding.

First, let’s debunk some myths as to why we are nervous to speak in public. Sometimes we say to ourselves, “If I feel nervous, then therefore I’m probably unprepared or not qualified to do this.” Not the case. I get nervous to speak, and I’m a professional speaker. I’ve done TEDx talks about how to speak in public. LinkedIn Learning has hired me to teach public speaking.

I know I’m a good speaker, and yet I still get nervous. So it’s not about preparation. Of course, it’s helpful to be prepared, and we’ll talk about ways we can do that and how to actually build your talk in this video right here. But preparation is usually not the source of our nerves. We can be overly prepared, which can actually increase our nerves. Maybe you can relate to over-preparing for something where you rehearse and rehearse and run it and run it again, and it actually increases your nerves.

So let’s get out of our heads that anytime we’re nervous to speak, it’s because we’re unprepared. What I would say is the source of our nerves is our intent behind speaking. So at Mic Drop Workshop, we classify two different types of speakers. The first type of speaker is called a spotlight speaker. A spotlight speaker goes up there with the intent to impress others, but that’s totally outside of our control.

We can speak to one group of people and have the exact same talk, and they love it, and speak to another group of people with the exact same talk, and they don’t like it. So the idea of going up there to get a 100% approval rating is just setting yourself up for failure. A lot of times, we are up there trying to guess, “Oh, does this person who has a straight face hate me right now?” Or even if someone falls asleep in our presentation, we think it’s on us, even though we have no idea what their life was like or what their night was like the night before.

And so going up there with the intent to impress others and wanting to be seen as perfect can really increase our nerves because then it’s not in our hands anymore. It’s in the audience’s hands. We have to be approved by them. So instead of being a spotlight speaker, I want you to transition your mindset to being what we call at Mic Drop Workshop a lighthouse speaker.

So with a spotlight speaker, the light is on them, whereas a lighthouse speaker shines a light on their audience. When I say audience, this could be to an arena of 30,000 people, or this could be inside a boardroom with three people. It doesn’t matter who your audience is. It could be to one or to many, but a lighthouse has the intent of guiding their audience. That’s exactly what a lighthouse does. It’s not shining the light on them. It is there to guide their audience.

So they’re going up there saying, “What can I do with my time and this microphone to best serve the people in this room?” And when that’s your intent, it’s not about you. So if you trip, or stumble over your words, or mess up and have to go back and start your train of thought all over again, as long as you are getting the point across that can serve the people in the room, that’s all that matters.

And quite frankly, audiences are not looking for some perfectly rehearsed robotic speaker. We’ve all been in the room where someone is up there, and it feels like they’re reading a script in their head. We want someone who’s authentic, and we want someone who is there to help us get from A to B. So a lighthouse speaker doesn’t have to be the most perfect polished speaker. It’s there to guide the audience, guide the people in the room.

So the first part of easing your nerves as a public speaker is mindset. Shift your mindset from being a spotlight speaker to a lighthouse speaker. Instead of asking yourself, “How can I be perfect for these people?” ask yourself, “How can I best guide these people?” Switching your mindset before you speak from “All eyes on me” (spotlight speaker) to “How can I best serve the audience?” (lighthouse speaker) is great to do when you have time before you’re speaking, and you can help get yourself in that right mindset before you speak.

But let’s say you’re called on in a meeting, or you have to speak right now, and you don’t have enough time to go through why you’re there or the intent behind this. How do you ease your nerves when you’re in the moment? There are three ways that I’m going to help you do this. The first way is kind of weird, but trust me, it works—peppermint. So sniffing peppermint as an essential oil, or maybe you have a tea bag that you can carry with you before you speak, does something to our brain. It’s scientific—I’ll leave a source right here—that actually helps ease your nerves. It shocks your brain, gets you in the right frame of mind, and helps give you a reset.

So if you’re looking for something like a quick hit—pun intended—take a hit of peppermint. Whether it’s a sniff as an essential oil, or even putting it in your mouth, it helps kind of ease those nerves in a quick way.

The second way that you can ease your nerves if you are about to speak and you have only minutes is what I call, or what we call, box breathing. So box breathing is a great way to reset your nervous system, lower your heart rate, and gain control of your breath again. So we could all do it right now. Box breathing is when you inhale for four seconds, hold at the top for four, exhale for four, and hold at the bottom for four. Do that as many times as it takes until you feel your heart rate settle. If your hands are shaking, you’ll feel your hands get calmer, and then you’ll feel more equipped and more in control of your breath and your body to go up there and speak.

The third thing that I want you to do if you’re nervous while you’re in the moment, while you’re speaking, is eye contact. So sometimes when we’re speaking, especially if it’s to more than one person, we’ll look at the room like it’s a blob, like a room full of people. Also, whoever said to imagine people in their underwear to help you ease your nerves—let’s not do that. That would just make me more nervous.

So instead of looking at the audience—again, whether it’s three people or 3,000 people—as one singular audience, I want you to make eye contact with one person while you say one thing, and then switch and make eye contact with another person as you say another thing. This does two things: first, that eye contact makes you a very engaging speaker, because you know when a speaker is speaking to you, you’re like, “Wow, they are looking at me. They’re speaking into my soul.” But the other thing that it does is it helps remind yourself that you are speaking to humans. When you hold eye contact with someone, it goes from speaking to three people to one person. It goes from speaking to 3,000 people to one person. So it helps ease those nerves because we’re not speaking to an audience or a sea of people; we’re speaking to one person while we hold that eye contact for one sentence and then switch to another.

Now, if you’re someone who shakes when they start speaking in public, don’t worry. I got you. This is a totally normal thing. So sometimes our body can really help us deliver a great presentation, and I actually have tips around this right here in this video on how to deliver an engaging presentation and how you can use different parts of your body to help you with that.

But sometimes our nerves can get the best of us, and we start to shake, which also makes our voice quiver, and we really try to get a grip on it. So I’m going to give you one tool to help with this that I feel is the best reset you can have, and that is using your hands. So when your hands are shaking and your voice starts quivering, the thing that I want you to do is just bring your hands into center, interlace your fingers like this, and then put them either on your stomach or at your chest while you still continue to talk.

What happens is our hands actually control our speed and how quickly or slowly we talk. That’s why sometimes if you’re giving a talk and you have a clicker and a mic in your hand, it’s kind of hard to control the tone of your voice because you’re not in control of your hands because they’re occupied. So when you start shaking or your voice starts quivering, even if you’re not shaking but you just feel kind of nervous and you feel like you’re talking really fast, go ahead, take your hands, bring them in for a sentence or two.

And also, don’t be afraid to pause. A lot of times, a pause to us as a speaker seems like 12 years long

if we don’t fill that air time, but a pause to the audience is really great for them to keep up with you and also projects confidence as a speaker. So don’t be afraid to pause, take a breath, and bring your hands into your chest or stomach to help slow yourself down.

Remember that nerves are normal, and it shows that you care. Again, people don’t want some robotic person up there giving them a lecture. They want a real human. So don’t be afraid to go up there and be yourself, even if that means you make mistakes.

Thanks for listening to Amplify. If you are a fan of the show, show us some podcast love by giving us a rating and review, and give us a follow at Mic Drop Workshop and at Jess Ekstrom.

Coming up on Amplify, I was so hyper-obsessed with how I was being perceived that it was keeping me from being honest, vulnerable, and open. And it didn’t allow me to turn that negative into a positive until a long time after, right? Until I was able to say, “Oh, actually, I can use the imposter syndrome as inspiration because it’s only here because I’m putting myself out of my comfort zone,” right? Like, imposter syndrome is often a sign that you’re doing something right.

This episode was edited and produced by Earfluence, and I’m Jess Ekstrom, your host. Remember that you deserve the biggest stage. So let’s find out how to get you there. I’ll see you again soon.

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