Facing your fear of public speaking

Many studies have showed that fear of public speaking ranks up with the fear of death.  Most of these fears arise from worry that you will mess up or that you’ll forget your lines.  However, once you make it about others and the content of your writing as oppose to yourself, a huge load is lifted off your shoulders. Most of the time, you are the one who wrote your speech or lesson, and if you are confident that your words convey the right message, you will feel a lot better about yourself having to speak in public.

I personally have a mild fear of public speaking. During sophomore year in my English class, we had this huge speech that we had to write and perform for a minimum of five minutes. When we first received the assignment, I blocked out the fact that we had to perform it in front of the whole class and wrote about something a little bit personal. It wasn’t incredibly private and I’m sure others would have had no problem sharing it in public but I definitely did.

On the day of the presentation, I was internally freaking out. Before I even entered the class, I was hyperventilating. The little voice in my head was explaining in meticulous detail all the ways I could possibly screw up and that was all I was thinking when it was my turn. As I walked up to the front of the class, I was breathing hard, so after getting permission from my teacher, I stepped outside to calm myself down. Once I had regained my breath, I realized that instead of being the kid with the well-written, life-changing speech, I was the kid who got an asthma attack.

It took a while to muster up the courage to re-enter my class, but I did, and, surprisingly, no one said anything, they just smiled. After class, the teacher pulled me aside and said, just this one time, that I could turn it in on paper until I could get over my fear of public speaking. I was very grateful, and worked hard to get better at public speaking. The next time we had a presentation, I managed to get up there, breathing calmly, and deliver my speech, maybe not to the best of my ability, but pretty well in my opinion.

It just took me longer to realize that the people watching didn’t really care about the way I talked or how long my speech was, content was all that mattered to them.

Some things that really help me no and hopefully in the future with public speaking would be making eye contact with as many people as possible. This makes it feel more like talking to that one person, rather than an audience. Also, actively respecting your audience leads to them respecting you must as much, which is a nice feeling that makes it easier to talk to them. One last tip to keep in mind is to always believe that your audience will succeed. Most of the time, if you make a small slip-up, the audience would rather just choose to ignore it for your sake than point it out, successfully embarrassing you.