You are a bundle of nerves. You have an important presentation to give. You have been dreading it for days. You barely slept last night, and you can feel your heart pounding and the panic rising.

You look in the mirror, smile, and repeat three times, “I am a calm and confident speaker, and I am going to be amazing.”

Instantly you feel calm and reassured. Two hours later, you give your presentation. It is a huge success!
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That’s great! If positive affirmations work for you, by all means, keep using them. But if instead, you have an inner critic that responds, “You liar. Don’t fool yourself. Last time was a disaster and this is going to be just as bad,” you need to try something else.

There are plenty of useful articles about public speaking, but many of them repackage similar tips. Remember to pause; practice your presentation thoroughly; maintain eye contact; focus on your audience; tell stories; and so on. Don’t get me wrong — it is all great advice! But I get excited when I stumble upon new insights.
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In this article, I have put together five less-known tips. Some of these I have discovered through my own practice and all of them I have put into effect or tested for myself. 

Few people can engage an audience without preparing and practicing. Even presenters who look like they are speaking ‘off the cuff’, have usually prepared thoroughly— or have presented the same material many times previously.

When I first started as a public speaking coach, I stressed the importance of good preparation. But I noticed that some people would still turn up unprepared. And they often started their presentation by telling us that they hadn’t prepared.

I realized that they were using this as a ‘get of jail card free card’. If they told us how unprepared they were and it didn’t go well, they could always blame their lack of preparation. It was an excuse for failure. But it was also self-sabotage.

And so, I doubled down on my preparation message. I even suggested that if people turned up unprepared, they shouldn’t tell us!
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Then I started noticing something else. While I always have a few unprepared clients, the majority spend so much time preparing that they become rigidly fixated on what they have prepared. They often memorize or read their script. They don’t sound natural, spontaneous, or conversational. And my preparation message was potentially making this worse.

Here in New Zealand, two high profile people recently made public statements expressing self-doubt. In different ways, Dr Ashley Bloomfield and Todd Muller have helped expose that leaders are not immune from self-doubt.

Dr Bloomfield, Director-General of Health, has become something of a national hero during the COVID19 pandemic. 

A few months ago, I had a phone call from a young woman who needed help. Anna (not her real name) was a marketing graduate who had landed a great first job in the grocery sector. But she was suffering from anxiety because she was required to present to a corporate audience of more than one hundred people. The audience included members of the senior leadership team.

She explained to me that she had had a bad experience of public speaking at college. And it still haunted her. Apart from that one experience, she had done very little presenting. 

I discovered she would be presenting with two other more experienced people. I suggested that she tell them that she was nervous so that they could provide her with some support. But she couldn't do this, she told me, because everyone expected her to be excited about this "opportunity". Instead, she was full of dread!

Her story sounded familiar. Many years ago, I graduated with good grades but limited public speaking skills. Eventually, in my forties, I joined Toastmasters. But that was after twenty years of intermittent anxiety and avoiding public speaking at times. 

​It is easy to recognise an “authentic” speaker but unpacking what this really means can be confusing. Public speaking is a performance;  so how can you perform and be authentic at the same time?

Although public speaking is a performance, it is not the same as acting. As an actor, you are pretending to be someone else, but as a public speaker you are yourself. In fact, the trick is to come across so naturally that it doesn’t look like you are performing!

But this highlights a problem for inexperienced speakers. The advice to “be yourself’ is not helpful when you are trembling bundle of nerves. 

“Be yourself” does not mean for you to stand up and tell everyone how nervous you feel, then waffle on about your topic! You might look “real” but in a raw, uncomfortable way that lacks professional credibility and leaves the audience squirming.

Instead, you need to bring your best self to the stage – you “on form”.  A high energy version of yourself. The self that you might bring to a job interview! And it takes much practice to achieve that. Being “real” is not quite enough. An authentic speaker also has confidence and credibility.

Let’s take a look at what an authentic speaker does – and how you can do the same. 

​Previously I have rejected suggestions to run Fear-less courses online because I was not convinced that it would work effectively. Then Covid19 came along! I had to cancel a course due to start on the first day of lockdown. And I had to decide whether to shut up shop and wait it out, or to try something new! I decided to run a ‘trial’ online course via Zoom and this article is about what I found.

I am doing something new for this month’s blog article. I want to tell the stories of a seven  people who decided that they were no longer going to let their fear of public speaking define them.

Why am I doing this? Most people with a fear of public speaking take years to do anything about it. They wait until the impact on their career or personal lives is so damaging that they have to act. I hope that these stories will encourage people to take action sooner. I hope that people will read these stories, recognise something of themselves, realise that it is possible to move past a crippling fear of public speaking, and find the courage to take action.

These are all true stories (although some names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people behind these stories). I know all these people personally – most but not all are past clients. There is a common theme that you might recognise. Most of these people say they still get nervous and that they are still working on improving their speaking skills. But in all cases they are no longer overwhelmed by fear to the point that it is impacting their lives. They are now able to feel the fear and do it anyway! ​

​More than half the people who register for Fear-less public speaking courses are actively avoiding public speaking. Some have chosen their career to avoid it. Others have turned down a promotion. Many palm off every speaking ‘opportunity’ to someone else. As well as being highly stressful (it is harder to avoid public speaking than you think) this means that they don’t improve. In fact, the harder they work to avoid it, the greater the fear becomes.

Inconveniently, to get better at public speaking you have to do it! – which means moving outside of your comfort zone. This may seem obvious however there is a bit more too it. You get the best results by moving just outside of your comfort zone. While you will never improve by staying inside your comfort zone, being forced to move too far out of it can also be detrimental. For example, if you were forced to give an important presentation to a large audience with little experience and feeling terrified, the chances are it will go badly. And this will just make you dread public speaking even more.