Terrified of Public Speaking? I've Got You
Three quarters of adults dread making any kind of speech. Sharing my very best learnings after 25 years of standing up in front of a crowd
I wrote my wedding speech this week—not for the civil ceremony this Saturday, but for the big bash in October. It’s good to be prepared, but even by my standards it’s a little over the top. However, if I know one thing as a writer, it’s that you have to commit the words to paper when they come, because before you know it, they will have evaporated into the ether and you will be kicking yourself for not taking the opportunity when it came. Often when these impulses bubble up, I’ll wake the next day to find I’ve penned clichéd couplets or cheesy stanzas. The third glass deep kind of writing. But when I read this one, aside from a few typos, I had no edits.
Speech making is a different but complimentary skill to speech writing. Standing up in front of people and speaking is something that needs practice and anyone can become rusty. I have done it hundreds of times over the years. I’ve presented in front of both small and big audiences in my professional life, I’ve even done a Ted Talk live in front of more than 4,000 people. All this to say, I am not shy. And yet, I’ve felt the effect of nerves lots of times.
There are so many schools of thought when it comes to both writing and giving speeches, but I wanted to share with you how I approach them. Obviously, there is a difference between speeches for celebrations versus speeches in a professional environment, but the building blocks are always broadly similar.
The first thing I always remind myself of is that a speech is a story, and your job is to carry your audience with you through a beginning, middle and end. A speech is also a performance.
I absolutely understand that for many of you, this piece will trigger something unpleasant. Stage-fright (known in its extreme form as glossophobia) is so incredibly common, indeed the National Institute of Mental Health estimates that it impacts 73% of the population. Even seasoned speech givers can suffer from performance anxiety from out of the blue. There is a good reason for this: for most of us, it is an intensely stressful situation. As soon as you stand to speak in front of other humans, more often than not, the reptilian brain kicks in. This part of our mind, known as the basal ganglia is the most ancient layer in terms of evolution and the first to form—creating the very base of the brain. It controls aggression, dominance, territoriality and ritual displays.
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