5 Top Tips You Must Know to Remove the Fear of Public Speaking

NAIL THAT PRESENTATION
My Top 5 Tips (in the space of 25 minutes!)
I recently had a journalist ask me for my top 5 tips to public speaking. They gave me 25 minutes to get it to them so I had to think on my feet. Having never really thought about it before, I decided to go with my unconscious mind and I stuck with what I had! I wrote down the 5 most valuable tips I could think of to help people overcome their fears and here they are...
1 Be Yourself
Not always, but in most talks people will be judging you. That's just the way it is. What we need to do is be comfortable with ourselves. When we put on 'armor' or whenever we try to be someone else, it's because we think that the audience is out to expose us. We've got to ask ourselves then - expose what? I'm sure if you saw somebody come on stage and deliver their presentation being completely themselves you would admire them. You might even envy them. My tip then is to work out what's causing your fear. Then you can start to do something about it! So, take a few moments and have a think.
Do you worry about:
• The venue?
• The people that are there?
• The size of the audience?
• Your past performances?
• Your capabilities?
• What's possible and what's not possible for you? I.e. you start sentences with the words, "I can't...", "I must..." and so on.
• Yourself? Do you feel unworthy?
• Who you are in front of others?
Now there may be more fears than one, but identify them now and decide what action needs to be taken. Then take action and you'll soon find you start to destroy the limiting beliefs. You must take action now though. Question your beliefs and think about how you might need to think about yourself differently. A great way of learning to be yourself is to bring in a story to your talk, maybe an experience in your life that is relevant for your message. You will find that not only do you reveal a bit about yourself, but you'll also settle down as it's easy to talk about and people will connect with you. Which brings me onto my next tip...
2 Turn your speaking into conversation
Too often I see people giving talks at the audience instead of to the audience. To really enjoy your public speaking you will need to get a rapport with everybody there. Ask your audience questions, rhetorical or not, and make sure you connect with them. Tell them stories, ask them to participate, include members of your audience into your talks. Do this from the very beginning. Even take a show of hands - it makes it look as if you genuinely care about communicating your message. All of this will settle you down very quickly and you'll find you feel more comfortable with each performance. You'll find that all the best speakers in the world do this. Having studied endless speakers, the best speakers engage their audience and keep them captivated (even with the driest information) by asking them questions and having a conversation with them. Speak to your audience like you were having a coffee with them 10 minutes ago. No need for armor just let you be yourself.
3 Informing versus Performing
A key skill is to remember what your message is (try and make it have impact) and give your audience that message. It's as simple as that. When you have a clear message there will be no need to dress it up in a perfect performance. Think about the best singers in the world - there is a time a place for the big performances, but an acoustic version of their song can be more powerful. True greats know this. Therefore think about your message and what you want the audience to go home with. Then you'll find everything flows much more easily and you will give a better 'performance'. Inform your audience. You don't have to give them an all singing, all dancing performance.
4 Prepare
This is for me, the biggest part of your speaking. You will have to prepare. Failing to prepare is preparing to fail. A good friend always tells me about the 6 P's. Piss Poor Preparation = Piss Poor Performance. He's right and I've learnt this lesson the hard way! Look, you have to prepare in the right way. Mental and Physical. Without going into all the in's and out's, there are 3 steps I recommend: 1. Get your content down (using a system e.g. 4MAT) 2. Think about how you look - body, hands, movement 3. Practice in front of the mirror and in front of others There is so much you can do, but these steps are fundamental for a good performance.
5 Mind Set
As it is 'the 5 top tips', I have combined two together to give you bonus information! The first point is that if you truly want to lose your fear for good, you'll need to begin by changing your motivation. No longer do I want you to think about losing the fear, but gaining the confidence. There are two ways of looking at motivation - 'towards' or 'away from'. Towards is when you want something really bad you'll end up getting there no matter what it takes. Away from is when you want to get rid of something so bad; you are unconsciously keeping it with you. Let me explain.
If you want to make money, as you want to be rich and live a certain lifestyle then you'll do anything to get there. You'll be open to opportunities as your mind will be primed for those chances. This is towards motivation. If you want to make money because you are fed up of being poor, you'll get comfortable and then lose all your motivation and become poor again. This is away from motivation and is very common.
Often you might have away from motivation when trying to lose weight, and also trying to get rid of fears. If you try and lose the fear because you just don't want that feeling anymore, then you might eventually get lucky. One bad day though and the fear can come flooding back. Instead, think about how you can gain the confidence you would love to have and then start focusing on exactly what that would be like. Your mind can then start giving you what you truly want.
My second point is about anxiety and how you can start to unlearn the feelings associated with public speaking. I want you to look at public speaking as a skill or a science - logical steps to go through for your mind. Somewhere along the line, you will have learnt to 'do' public speaking in an anxious way. In other words, we have learned to be anxious. The exciting thing about this perspective is that if you have learned how to be anxious then you can relearn how not to be anxious! When your mind is willing to change, many will find that their public-speaking anxiety has suddenly become more manageable! However, for many of us the mind has to convince the body that it can stand in front of an audience and survive.