“If you want to conquer fear, don’t sit at home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”
– Andrew Carnegie
For those of you unfamiliar with who Andrew Carnegie was, he was a self made millionaire who built his fortune primarily in the steel industry in the late 19th and early 20th century. I like this quote because it remind us that sitting around and simply reading about something doesn’t really help us. In the case of fearing public speaking, it holds true even more.
I am a big believer in “immersion therapy”. The idea is that you overcome the thing you fear by continually facing it. With people who are afraid of public speaking, this can be a daunting task. The catch-22 is that you’re afraid to speak so you don’t get up to speak. By not getting up to speak you never gain any confidence from facing your fear. You can’t overcome your fear if you don’t face it so you stay afraid. And now we’re back to not speaking because you are afraid.
Try to find small ways to face your public speaking fear everyday. Try talking to everyone you meet: clerks at the grocery store, someone standing next to you in an elevator, etc. You will find that the more you talk to people everyday, the more confident you will become. Higher confidence will lead to a stronger will to overcome your fear. That could lead to being able to get up and speak. The more you get up to speak the more confident you will become. And now the catch-22 is in your FAVOR!
Speak well!
Using humor in your speech or presentation can give you many benefits. It can help warm up an audience to you. It can show them that you’re interesting and they should be ready for anything. It can also help you relax by setting a tone of fun and that you’re interesting to listen to.
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To say that there is no ego in a person who does public speaking regularly or for a living would be clearly a false statement. But for those of us who only speak from time to time, when you see a speaker who can walk out in a room of 30 people or a auditorium of 3000 and literally “own the room”, it really is an amazing transformation. To imagine how you could ever be that much larger than life is mind boggling.
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“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”
– Albert Einstein
This quote reminds me that, when it comes to public speaking and the fears we have, that:
- We are the cause of our fear. It was something in us that eventually drove us to have this fear.
- We need to have a new mindset or paradigm shift in order to get past that fear.
It’s always possible to overcome fear and adversity. The main issue here, as mentioned by one of my favorite people to quote, is that we have to change our way of thinking in order to overcome the obstacle. The things you do to improve your situation are one method of changing your mindset. For example, the fact that you are looking for quotes and other resources for public speaking is already helping you with that mindset change.
So, keep moving forward and keep moving to a new mindset. Eventually you will find that your thinking is different from when you were afraid and it’s at that point you will have overcome your fear.
“Faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
I like this quote because it relates to the act of starting your journey. For most people with some fear of public speaking, the biggest hurdle is just getting up in front of the crowd. If you can get yourself to go up and even talk to just 2 minutes, that’s the first step. The whole staircase, in this example, is the climb up to becoming unafraid of speaking.
So, to quote a famous ad, “Just Do It!” (-Nike)