Heart is racing, hands are shaking and sweaty. You take a gulp of water because your mouth is dry. You wipe your forehead with your forearm, pace back and forth with clenched fist. Sound familiar? These are some of the actions done before going in front of an audience. For some, that audience can be 5 people while others it can be 1,000 people. Whatever the number, the intense feelings are always there but the actions might differ from time to time.
That was the case for me a few years ago. I could have been presenting to 5 team members or 50 people, my body would react intensely. It didn’t matter what I did before the presentation. What mattered was I was the centre of attention for some period of time. All eyes and ears were on me. I put so much pressure on myself that I wished the meeting or presentation was cancelled. Then there might be an opportunity for me to get out of it when it was rescheduled. I could create a lame excuse that I was unavailable during the next scheduled presentation. Voila! I do not have to present anymore.
Why did I want the presentation to be cancelled in the first place? It’s not because I was not prepared or didn’t know the subject. It was my thought pattern. There was always a whirlwind of thoughts running through my mind. Some that were exaggerated: What if my pants fall down? What if I get a panic attack? While other concerns I had were minimal like pronouncing a word incorrectly and people start laughing or what if I trip and fall when I walk over to the podium on the stage. Those could happen and kept thinking of the worse case scenarios instead of focusing on preparing myself and the material. A solution I found for these scenarios if ever they actually happen are to lean into those mishaps. I laugh at myself. No one is perfect. I learned through experience the audience will respect you for not hiding your mistakes and being open about it. That helped somewhat but I was still anxious before every presentation anyways.
I was fed up of feeling anxious and although I wasn’t doing many presentations, I was doing a few every year and wanted to do something to change the way I feel about public speaking. I came to the realization the reason I am feeling so flustered and nervous when public speaking is because I am not exposed enough to it. Additionally, if I wanted to grow in my career I needed to be able to speak better in public and therefore I needed to expose myself to presenting more. Simply introducing myself was a start to make me more comfortable for public speaking. At my work, there wasn’t many opportunities to present formally so I created some. I would present my projects to my team. I would volunteer organizing events at work so I could meet new people and at the same time, look for opportunities to help introduce some of the guests at events. Just the fact of meeting new people made me more confident in myself and talking to other people which led to being comfortable public speaking to small groups of people. I did not only apply this in my professional life but my personal life as well. I volunteered to help with my kids soccer practice. It exposed me to be around people I didn’t know as well as being the centre of attention.
The result is I’m more comfortable when presenting. I am now at a point where I try different methods of presenting to see what works and what does not. The feeling of extreme anxiety is gone. It’s more a sense of excitement with a sliver of anxiety. That is fine with me because that sliver of anxiety indicates that I care what I am presenting.
The next steps for me is to keep learning the details of presenting. The length of the presentation, what content to present to the audience, the pauses, the transitions between ideas, where to look, my body language, the introduction, the conclusion. There is a lot to master but I do it gradually. It’s constant learning and that is what is fun about it.
Go out there and expose yourself to presenting Take the opportunity even though is scares you. You might regret it the day before but if you are prepared and take it as a learning experience you have nothing to worry about. After the presentation you’ll be grateful you went through the experience. Got get it!
Take care.