How To Get Over Fear Of Public Speaking

Hello. My name is Michael Ronayne. I'm a director of the College of Public Speaking, and I'm going to be talking about different aspects of public speaking.

The advice for overcoming the fear of public speaking, first and foremost, is really, is to do it. Don't run away from public speaking. If you know you need to do it, practice it.

And often the fear is something like, you know, it's moving out of a comfort zone. It's doing something that you're not natural with. And if you think of a child on their first day of school, all the anxiety, all the worry about going into school for the first time, and typically at the end of that day when you pick them up again, "How was it?" "Fine, fantastic.

" Everything's wonderful. Now, that's not to suggest that once you get used to public speaking, the fear goes away. It doesn't.

Sorry to disappoint you if you were hoping that public speaking fear would one day evaporate. It never goes away. What happens instead is you learn to ride the fear.

And that's what you should be aiming to do. And there's a saying about when you feel nervous, you have butterflies in your stomach. Well, what we're aiming to do is obviously get these butterflies flying in formation, so you can actually control the fear.

Because the interesting thing about fear, from an audience point of view is the audience cannot tell the difference between nerves and enthusiasm. You see, you're standing up there on stage, your face has gone red, there's the blood thumping in your ears, and your heart's pounding fast, and you think, "I'm so nervous. I'm petrified.

" And often, all the audience is picking up is an extra degree of energy, an extra bit of focus. Because if you think of a lot of sports people, a lot of athletes particularly, they say that they produce their personal best and they break records, usually in competition. Why? Because in competition, there's that extra bit of adrenaline, there's that extra bit of nerve that really sharpens things up.

So as long as you're prepared properly and you understand that fear exists and it is your friend, you'll be able to cope with it a lot, lot better. .