Klasroom Blog

Have you ever been sitting in a room while listening to an obviously nervous speaker fighting stage fright? How did you feel? Uncomfortable?

As a speaker or presenter, you have a duty to get your audience in a place where they can receive what you are saying. It’s incumbent you as a communicator to make your audience comfortable and you do that by managing your anxiety and fighting your stage fright. Here are five simple ways to fight that fright to finish.

Greet your anxiety
In those few moments before your speech when you get tongue-tied, when your throat tightens, your pulse starts racing, you breathe rapidly, your hands, knees, lips, and voice starts trembling, your palms get cold and sweaty, that nausea and uneasy feeling bites at your stomach, you feel an imminent fart and finally you feel the cold and icy grip of stage fright, understand that it’s only normal and natural.

It’s not peculiar to you, everyone feels it, the greatest speakers of all time, even Shonda Rhimes feels stage fright, she mentioned it in her book. ‘Year of Yes’.

However, you need to learn to manage your anxiety because fundamentally your work is the work of a communicator whether it’s planned or spontaneous.
Just admit that you are nervous and that that’s completely normal and natural. It’s not going to reduce the anxiety but it will stop it from spinning out of control.

Unlike performances where there is a right and wrong way of doing things, in public speaking there is no right or wrong way, nobody knows the note or lines except you.

Practice your speech conversationally-Start with questions
The source of the anxiety is the situation, the reason the situation makes us nervous is that we see it as a performance. To get rid of stage fright we need to reframe this anxiety and see it as a conversation rather than a performance.

This is why asking questions is the easiest way out of anxiety. You put the spotlight on your audience as questions are by nature dialogical; they get your audience involved. Use questions adequately, it could be rhetorical questions where you don’t expect an answer but by asking a question you involve a dialogue because a conversation is a dialogue. It could also be a poll.

Also avoid tone or words that distances you from your audience such as ‘one must consider’, as opposed to ‘you should consider’. Use words used in a conversation.

Visualize
Before your presentation go into the presentation room if you have access to it. See the room and the people in the room, see them responding positively to your presentation, this desensitizes you such that on the presentation day it no longer appears new.

It would be something you have done before in your mind’s eye.
If you can’t get access to the presentation room before the presentation day, you can find out about the room on the internet and visualize it. It is also important to know the kind of people that will be there. What you should visualize is a positive response to our presentation. Decades of research show that visualization makes people feel more comfortable and less anxious.

Practice Proactively
Exposure is the antidote to phobia, the more you practice, the more you do it, in an environment similar to the real performance. Run it twice the night before and 3 times on the morning of the D-day, do it standing up, do it around a dinner table, do it around a coffee table, do what works. Get all the necessary approvals ahead of time to ensure that your script is ready at least two days before your speech.

Be present-oriented
The future concern makes us nervous so what you can do is to become present-oriented and unconcerned about the future consequence. For some people, it’s music, the sound of music rings them into the moment, some play video games, some count backward from an odd number, and others say a tongue twister.

Tongue twisters will especially help you to verbalize. Nervous speakers often don’t practice out loud, they practice in their head, and as humans what we think doesn’t always translate to what we say. Also, tongue twisters warm up your voice. Just ensure you do the simple things that make you present-oriented.

You can also stretch and breathe. When we are nervous, we tend to take shorter and shallow breaths. Close your eyes, breathe through your nose and out through your mouth then push out your belly with each breath. You don’t overcome stage fright; you adapt to it.

Everyone has their unique technique of fighting stage fright so you have to find the one or two techniques that work for you.
You are an entrepreneur and at some point, you will have to speak publicly, to your employees, to your clients, for presentations, the list is endless. Don’t let nerves hold you back, fight that stage fright.

Which technique will you be trying out first?