Coping with Fear

When it comes to speaking in front of large audiences there’s all sorts of chicken and egg issues.

If you just tell yourself it’s not a problem you can be conversational and you’ll be relaxed but the trick is how do you actually tell yourself.

This is easy because what’s happening is your eyes are seeing all these people and at some level you have an emotional response.

You have a physical response at an emotional level which is oh my God look at all these people looking at me.

And that’s what tightens us up.

That’s what makes us scared.

That’s what makes our brain shut down because your body’s telling you run and unfortunately it’s that nervous response that then creates all sorts of other speaking pathologies with respect to this large audience.

Now we’ve all seen people who are really good dynamic talking one on one to a couple of people maybe sitting around a boardroom they’re commanding they’re funny they’re interesting they’re engaging and put them in front of a large audience and my fellow citizens of the world I’m very happy to be here today.

And god awful because they’re nervous they start reading from a script and you may think I know a solution to that.

I only seen using a paper script I’ll use a teleprompter.

My fellow Americans I am happy to be here today at this amazing convention.

We’ve all seen speakers at political conventions people who are not full time newscasters trying to read a teleprompter and the result is often disastrous because the teleprompter for those who aren’t professionals and who haven’t practiced enough makes people sound awful because all of a sudden your speed is the same your volume is the same.

The pausing is the same.

The tone is the same and you sound like a robot.

So when you see people at major trade associations major conventions and they’re using a teleprompter it’s often disasters they’re thinking Oh I’m scared I’m nervous I’m afraid of what else say what not to say I know I’ll play it safe I’ll read a teleprompter and some convention organizer trying to be helpful his May this teleprompter available to them and it just makes people worse because it turns them into a robot.

It solves one problem.

I don’t remember what to say because I’m scared but it doesn’t solve the bigger problem which is I look and sound scared to everyone in the audience and I look and sound boring.

That’s a huge huge problem.

So we have to get back to what we’re really trying to do which is come across natural relaxed comfortable confident and still communicate actually get people to focus on the message understand a message remember a message so that they do what we want them to do.

Let’s not lose sight of the real goal here.