Most public speaking classes are designed to help you do it better. Which, I guess, makes sense. The logic being, if you can get good enough at presenting, you’ll never make a mistake, which is a big part of the fear. Public embarrassment. But to me, that’s like being afraid of snakes, and only learning how to avoid snakes. It’s all good, until there’s a snake.
From my experience, it doesn’t matter if you tell me how to hold my hands properly, inflect the right words, and structure the ideal pitch, if as soon as I get up there, I panic and blank on everything.
What you actually need is to practice being bad at presenting. Practice blanking, and recovering from blanking. Practice panicking, and how to handle it and keep going. Instead of learning to be perfect, which is in reality just a way of avoiding failure, practice failing!
And this doesn’t just apply to public speaking, but all of life. But for the sake of this workshop description, it’s about public speaking.
If you, or anyone on your staff is a nervous presenter, reach out to us and book a Fearless Presentations workshop.
Through a series of improv games and exercises, we’ll get them thinking on their feet and more able to go “off script,” caring about their audience and communicating an idea more than focusing on how “well” they’re presenting, and overall find their voice and style and actually learn to enjoy sharing and connecting with others.
Don’t let your fear of public speaking hold you back in your career. You can overcome it, it just takes work. And by work, I mean doing improv games and a lot of laughing.