UNRAVELING THE MYSTERY OF NERVES
Becoming a More Confident Speaker

Do you get nervous communicating in certain situations—public speaking, pitches, other high-stakes contexts—so much so that it hinders your effectiveness, makes you feel like you’re not yourself, or leads you to avoid those situations altogether? If so, there are many potential ways to meet this challenge. The key is to discover what really works for you.

Below are some well-established approaches, and some that are a bit more unconventional, to address fear of public speaking. If some of these seem relevant for you, they may serve as a helpful starting point for further exploration.

PREPARATION & PRACTICE

  • Focus on Your Content: Develop clear, quality material that you can connect with, and understand its relevance to the people you’re speaking with. This applies equally to prepared talks and more informal conversations.

  • Revisit Your Goals: Clarify your goals for speaking, and then consider whether any of them are making your experience more difficult. For instance, while it’s understandable to want to be perfect, goals like this can intensify anxiety.

  • Shift Your Preparation and Reflection Process: Learn to prepare and practice in ways that really suit you—and to reflect skillfully on your communication experiences when they’re over.

  • Challenge Yourself Thoughtfully: Expose yourself to challenging situations in ways that help you grow—most often that means some form of gradually, but sometimes it means diving in or doing the opposite (stopping for a moment in order to be able to move forward afterward).

CONFIDENCE & PRESENCE

  • Develop Your Presence: Discover how you can increase your ability to be present and cultivate a stronger sense of presence.

  • Learn to be Seen: Learn to feel safe, even good, when people look at you.

  • Experience Being Heard: Develop your voice (literally and metaphorically) and experience the difference it makes when you truly feel heard.

  • Focus on Feeling Good, and Prioritize Play: Give more attention to feeling good and less to feeling bad or trying not to feel bad. Emphasize play—or learn to play—to enhance your well-being and effectiveness.

EMOTIONS & MINDSET

  • Reframe Past Experiences: Deeply reframe past moments of shame, fear, anger, or loss to significantly improve your experience of the present.

  • Transform Difficult Feelings: Find helpful ways to work with challenging emotions, and discover how they can work for you rather than against you.

  • Change Your Associations with Ambiguity: If you tend to experience ambiguity as negative, relearn how to approach ambiguity to enhance your experience.

  • Enhance and Focus Your Imagination: Imagine positive outcomes deeply and specifically enough to affect your involuntary experience.

PHYSICAL & LIFESTYLE

  • Free Your Breathing: Learn to breathe freely to reduce your threat response, help you stay present, and support your having a strong voice.

  • Relax Your Body and Become More Embodied: Develop your capacity to relax physically, and create a better relationship with your body (which includes relating well with comfortable and uncomfortable physical sensations, and movement).

  • Improve Your Sleep: Take the time to learn what helps you get better rest to make just about everything easier.

  • Change Your Diet and Reevaluate Your Medication: Adjust your diet, like reducing caffeinated coffee, changing meal times, or eating in ways that sustain you better. If relevant, revisit medications with your doctor or psychiatrist.

WILD CARD

  • Address Current Life Experience: Resolve significant life issues, even ones that seem entirely unrelated to your nerves, to free up your capacity to be present and potent.

  • Prioritize Good Connection: Get curious about people and your environment, and seek out contexts that nourish you. This can strongly impact your emotional well-being.

  • Change Other Habits: Identify and then thoughtfully alter habits that contribute to your nerves, such as excessive social media use or an overwhelmingly busy schedule.

  • Find an Obscure Key: Find a simple (possibly obscure) key to untangle the mystery of your nerves. Some unusual, simple keys that have dramatically helped people include seeing photographic evidence that they weren’t profusely sweating, loosening a belt buckle, getting better glasses, reimagining how their nose looked to others, and wearing comfortable shoes.

In my work with clients, I’ve seen all of these approaches and many others (including their opposites) make a real difference in fear of public speaking and stage fright. Because there are so many potential options that can be helpful, I’m playing with the idea of writing a book tentatively titled, 108 Ways to Get Over Learn from Nerves. In the meantime, I hope that just seeing these approaches is helpful, or perhaps gives you hope.

If you decide to go for it, you may be in for a simple or surprisingly nuanced process of transformation. Sometimes you can navigate this process on your own, and sometimes it’s more effective and feels better to have a friend, colleague, therapist, or coach supporting you.

If you choose to get support, that decision is highly personal. And this naturally leads to the last approach I’ll offer here: finding good quality support that’s right for you can really help.

This article is one of a few I’ve written related to addressing fear of public speaking and stage fright. More of my writings are here.


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