Glossophobic? Call Time On That Fear Of Public Speaking
‘I DO NOT have the confidence to stand up and talk to a room full of people.’
Sound familiar?
Are YOU confident enough? How do you see yourself?
What do you say to yourself?
How you see yourself is known as your self-image. It will either help you create a life you love or limit you to the point that it hurts.
I used to believe that I wasn’t the sort of person who enjoyed speaking in public, yet it turns out that’s nonsense! The truth is that I wasn’t the sort of person who enjoyed the physical sensations when I stood up to talk to a room full of people (and with an unidentified 3.5cm hole in my heart no wonder!)
There were five main reasons why I used to hate the experience:
1. I was scared I’d forget what to say and mess up my words.
2. I didn’t want to be judged.
3. I hated the anxious feelings that terrorised my body because they made me feel out of control (knotted stomach, dry mouth, shaky legs, fast breathing, blushing).
4. I was worried that nobody would listen (which even contradicts #2!).
5. I was concerned that sharing my perspective was ‘showing off’ or demonstrating ‘ideas above my station’ (an unhelpful catchphrase from childhood!).
Which of those five reasons do you relate to the most?
I was allowing my mind (even fuelling it) to run horror stories. I was replaying the time when I’d given my share of a talk at university only to find, at the last minute, that nobody else had prepared their material. I bluffed it in front of 200 people only for the feedback to be ‘the first half was great, but the second half lacked substance or passion’.
I held onto the frustration and humiliation of trying to ‘cover up’ for the rest of my peers - and that’s, in part, what I associated with public speaking.
It was years before I checked back in with myself and realised that being scared of public speaking was NOT how I wanted to live my life.
I could clearly see that if I kept up that rhetoric, I was playing small. I was actively blocking opportunities for the people who needed my services to find me.
I was inhibiting my business growth, and I was definitely not walking my talk as a success coach!
German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said:
“Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be and he will become what he should be.”
In other words, start to expand your comfort zone, think beyond your past, and fully embrace who and what you want to be.
With this in mind, what will you do differently this week? Will you volunteer to present in a meeting? Record a video for your business that includes your voice and your face? You could take the first step, couldn’t you?
Not only have I decided that I want to make use of public speaking to share my message, I’ve joined a local networking group where I regularly share my message with 40 people - and in the past four weeks have been running the whole meeting. Forget fear - time to get it in perspective. If you’re a business local to Inverness and you’d like to join us for business breakfast and networking on a Tuesday morning, get in touch.
If you’d like my professional support to create positive change in your life and feel fantastic about it, get in touch sophia@sophiahanson.com
It’s never too late to be who you really want to be and leave the past where it belongs, and why would you leave it even one more day?
This article first appeared in Executive Magazine in June 2023.
