I’m going to talk about why I never let nerves get in the way of ANY speech I give so that you can overcome yours. Follow me on Instagram: @masteryourtalk
1. Care Enough to Crush Your Fear (0:49)
To better understand your stage fright, you need to first understand what you’re actually scared of.
Is it a fear of messing up? Is it looking like the odd one out? Maybe it’s feeling out of place or forgetting what to say and how people will think of you. For me, it’s failing to deliver value to my audience and I believe fear in public speaking goes back to this core idea of making your audience feel like they’ve learned something from you. Some presentations I give can be as early as 8AM on a Saturday, my greatest fear, is my audience telling me watching my presentation was a complete waste of their time. It drives me insane, and worries me before any presentation, especially the one I gave recently to a group of female teenagers who were preparing for a technology start-up competition. They’ve been coached by very high-level executives on various topics, what if I don’t measure up? What if I don’t deliver to the level that they expect of me?
But here’s the punchline - I CARE so MUCH about my audience that I realized that showing any sign of nerves or fear would not only discredit myself as a presenter but bring LESS value to them and make my fear come true. You need to care so much about them and the value you bring them, that your DESIRE to BRING VALUE to them vastly outweighs any potential fear/nerves. This is how to overcome stage fright.
2. Embrace Your Audience (3:40)
If you haven’t watched my video about the 3 lessons I learned from my time in improvisation, one of the things I mentioned in that talk was that my time in the art of improv thought me to fall in love with disaster and say yes to everything since you learn in that form of art that the only way to make improv scenes that make sense is to embrace anything that happens in the act and constantly try to build upon things. One example I like to give from the speech I did recently with the high school girls was when I asked how good a version of my presentation and I was expecting someone to just raise their hand and a girl just yelled the answer, so instead of getting scared, I just embraced her energy and mirrored and used her a lot as an example in the presentation to show that this is the kind of place where you can do anything and be anything.
Instead of trying to make a presentation exactly the way you want it to be, since it’s for your audience anyways, learn the notion that your presentation is what your audience makes out of it. If they like being loud and you’re an introvert, it’s your JOB to recognize that since the whole point of this is being in service to them anyways even if you don’t necessarily need to be loud yourself - I mean show through your non-verbal cues that this is acceptable behaviour. This is how we live in a world that allows us to overcome stage fright.
3. Be Relentlessly YOU (5:55)
Look, the most important step to understanding stage fright is simply acknowledging that the fear exists regardless, and no matter WHAT you do, you can NEVER please anyone - that’s just a fact of life and there’s no getting around it.
Even if I preach, very religiously, I must say about being obsessed about your audience, you can only do so much to make as many people in the room love you as possible. There’s always going to be critics and being afraid of those critics defeats the whole purpose of appealing to the VAST majority of people who want to listen and use your advice, which means you should give no credit or attention about what people think of you in the sense that you can’t change your personality. You can only be the best you and in that pursuit, you’ll find your own public speaking style and figure out how to mix in that style with whatever audience you end up getting.
I’m a jack of all trades in the sense that I can be funny, informal, formal, professional and tad odd. I’m also able to display all types of energy levels to speak to the introverts and the extraverts, but I’m also generally quite LOUD, because I love commanding attention and I just get a thrill from when people listen to every word I say. Now, you can disagree with me - but that’s my style and I OWN it fully, so you should own yours too. This is how you'll be able to overcome stage fright.
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For business or one-on-one public speaking coaching inquiries, you can reach me at brendenkbusiness@gmail.com.
Special thanks to Maison Leporem for letting me use the space.
maisonleporem.com/