Let’s talk about some of the most common difficulties with public speaking.
As you attempt to improve your public speaking, you must remember that you judge yourself more harshly than those who are listening.
Let’s use an analogy: it’s like a girl who judges herself harshly for her appearance. She looks at herself in the mirror, picks out a bundle of reasons why she isn’t attractive, along with a thousand defects. But when she goes to school, none of the boys see those defects, and they find her really attractive.
Well, the same happens in public speaking. The audience in front of you isn’t judging you. It doesn’t matter if you judge a quality of yours to be a defect with all the harshness and negativity in the world. The audience probably doesn’t notice it. Even if they did, in my cases they don’t know what you’re going to do next, so it’s impossible for them to judge you.
Before we go further, let me confess that we were all afraid to speak in public at some point. And now it’s our job to speak in public and teach people how to do the same. That's why we’re here with you on this website.
It scared us all at first. But in the end, as we had a passion for public speaking, we were able to have more passion for it than fear. And over time we got so good that we were able to make a living from it.
So, if we could, you that’s there reading on the other side of this screen, you really can do it too. This is a matter of desire and of trusting that it's possible, very possible. that it's not impossible.
At some point on the journey, we realised that our fears were more to do with our stubbornness and perfectionism than our speaking ability. We used to think that everything we did wrong, we did it all the time, and so we were doing it all wrong, all the time!
But in the end you dedicate yourself to it, you accept there are always failures, and when you earn a living through public speaking, you make many mistakes. The key is that if you have something to tell, and you want to share it, that's enough. It’s not about being a wordsmith or a master orator. Even if you share it poorly or mediocrely, it doesn't really matter much. So long as you don't let your fears block you.
Common difficulties in public speaking include your voice shaking, feeling stiff, or freezing, which in the end is what we all fear most.
We think that anyone that does public speaking has experienced that feeling of tremor, the sweating, the stammering, the throat, the dry mouth, the dry throat… that’s all par for the course.
If you’re faced with the feeling that you’re going to freeze and forget what you’re going to say, we recommend you prepare.
There are plenty of techniques like mnemonics, mental maps, and others that make it much easier to remember things. When you have the subjective confidence that you have prepared it all thoroughly, that fear of going blank tends to disappear.
Trial and error is also a good idea. Test out your speech or presentation. Don’t just prepare teh content; test it and rehearse. Speak to yourself in the mirror, or to a small group of people, or to somebody you trust. This is particularly important if you’re taking the autodidact approach to public speaking.
In this way, you get a taste of the real situation and test out how you’re doing. And as you do it successfully more times, slowly you start to believe that you’re capable of speaking well when it really matters. If you have nailed it once, why wouldn’t you nail it the next time?
It’s also crucial to get outside of yourself. Almost all those negative feelings come from anxiety, so are internal.
While you are hearing your own voice, while you are trying to connect with your own feelings, you’ll probably have the idea that you are doing it wrong, because you’re no longer in the room, seeing yourself as the audience sees you. So we’ll cover a couple of methods to get out of your mind in the next article.