Category: Public Speaking Anxiety
If we were only going to write one article for Pspeak, this would be it! And if speaking in front of a group of people didn’t seem so scary, speech anxiety wouldn’t be one of the top three fears among people, and we might never have built Pspeak.com in the first place.
This module is where you’ll gain understanding about why people get nervous in front of a group, and, more importantly, what you can do about it.
There’s a lot of information to follow. You should know that NOT ALL OF IT will apply to every person who experiences speech-related anxiety. In fact, some people may have anxiety based on just one of the following factors while others may be impacted in many of these areas.
We recommend you consider the whole module and then decide which information relates most strongly to your situation. Work hard afterwards to strengthen those areas. We also recommend you follow the steps in your customized Rapid Learning Area or Learning Path from beginning to end – even before you get too involved with what’s about to follow. There’s a very important reason for this, so important that we’ll start with it now.
To Be, or Not to Be
You may recall the famous line from William Shakespeare, “To be, or not to be, that is the question I ask of thee.” This line may be interpreted to mean several things.
For our purposes, we’ll interpret it to mean that in life you can either focus on what not to do, or you can focus on what to do. Focusing on what to do can be much, much easier, more enjoyable and more rewarding than focusing on what not to do.
For example, consider someone who wants to become an excellent piano player. Their list of things to do would likely include getting a piano, taking lessons, practicing a lot, watching great pianists play, and eventually giving performances. That’s not a complicated list, although it certainly is no easy task.
If the same person focused instead on what not to do, the list would get much more complicated, and it could be literally endless. It might include things like don’t forget to buy a piano, don’t forget to show up for lessons, don’t fight with the teacher, don’t fall asleep during lessons, don’t break your hands trying to smash wood with karate chops, don’t accidentally set fire to the piano, don’t watch how to play guitar videos instead, and a million other things that would not help one become proficient at playing the piano.
The point? It’s FAR easier to set a list of things to do than it is to worry about what not to do.
When you go through the steps of what to do when it comes to public speaking, including those outlined in the Learning Path, you won’t have to deal with the “do not” aspects of public speaking.
If you follow all of those steps from the beginning, it will be much easier and more fun to speak in public, you’ll be more proficient, and you’ll have significantly less anxiety about it. With this in mind, if you haven’t been through our Rapid Learning Area or Learning Path processes before, please go there after this module.