How to train yourself not to be stage fright

Speaking is an art. It is important to make the listener understand and believe you, and your words should be powerful. Some people are very confident when speaking in front of their friends, but they become unsure when facing strangers or in public situations. This is because they are a bit stage frightened. I hope everyone has enough confidence so that they won’t be afraid if they are faced with the need to speak in some situation. So how can you train yourself to avoid stage fright?

Part 1: Why do we suffer from stage fright?

When people are facing a large audience, they are completely exposed and countless pairs of eyes are staring at them all the time. At this time, our bodies often subconsciously take self-protection measures. At this point, the body begins to secrete adrenaline and activates the sympathetic nervous system, which mobilizes various parts of the body: the pupils dilate; the heart beats faster; the breathing rate increases; and the sweat glands are activated to avoid overheating. These will stimulate us to subconsciously wrap our arms around our bodies. It all happens quickly when so many eyes are on you.

Some people may say that they don’t have this kind of nervous feeling. First, once you adapt psychologically, the physical sensation will become negligible; second, as you become more experienced, you can even use this tension to make your speech more exciting. Regardless of the reason, this situation is quite common, at least in the early stages.

If we can have the mentality mentioned in the previous answer that "no one is dead, nothing will happen, and if someone dies, there will be no bigger problem", perhaps there will be no such thing as stage fright. Non-professional speakers, especially newcomers, often worry about not being able to speak well and are concerned about the consequences: they worry that their boss will be dissatisfied; they worry that their poor performance will affect other people's evaluation; they worry that the project progress will be affected;

In fact, if you are not a professional speaker, you are often asked to give a speech for the following reasons: you need to be trained for various reasons; there is no more suitable person; it is only a field that you are familiar with; etc. Whatever the reason, you must be clear about one thing: no matter how you explain it, this is the best choice, and there is nothing wrong with it whether it is good or bad.

Part 2: How to avoid stage fright.

First: Prepare carefully. If you spend enough time organizing, analyzing, and thinking about your speech, it will greatly increase your confidence.

When preparing, first take a moment to think about a few things: What is the purpose of your speech? Who is listening? What content do they care more about? How to express it in a more understandable and acceptable way? Try to understand these issues as much as possible. This is mainly to help you organize your content. Regardless of whether you are familiar with what you are going to say or not, think about the structure of your speech as if it were completely new each time: How many parts does it have? What logic? for how long? How to start? How to transition? How to end? Of course, the specific structure is related to the work content and occasion, so I won’t go into details. In short, these are not difficult, and you will become more and more familiar with them as you do them more and more times.

What usually takes up the most time is the organization of the language. In addition to consulting senior people, you must carefully prepare every word you are going to say. I have a habit that when I need to explain relatively unfamiliar content, I will write down what I want to say in the notes according to the PPT. Then rethink the logic and key points and revise it.

Second: Make good use of tools. PPT is a very good auxiliary tool for presentations. If used properly, it will greatly help you improve the effectiveness of your presentation.

If you have the opportunity to use PPT, try to use PPT to accompany your speech. In addition to being an outline, visual content helps the audience better understand what you want to say; you can also focus on your key points during your speech.

Regarding PPT-assisted presentations, there are many books you can buy and there are also many related courses online. If you are interested, there are many experts on Zhihu. This will not be expanded here.

A few points to note:

1. You are the focus of the speech, and PPT is a supporting role. Don’t put everything on PowerPoint

2. Don’t read PPT. Unless you need to emphasize. The main content must be said by you.

3. The style of the PPT should be suitable for the occasion.

Third: learn body language. In communication, body language is more important than words themselves.

A psychology professor abroad did a statistics and concluded that there are three factors that influence the audience: body language and image account for 55%, sound accounts for 38%, and the language content itself accounts for 7%. It seems incredible at first glance, but it makes sense if you think about it carefully.

For example. Your boss says "The company achieved 90% of its performance last year" in a very sad tone and in a very happy tone respectively. Think about what the difference is? For the former, I would think “It’s over, the performance is bad and the bonus is denied again?”; for the latter, I would think “It seems not bad, my colleagues are probably worse off.”

Fourth: learn from others. Seize every opportunity to listen to other people's speeches, learn from their strengths and avoid their weaknesses.

Generally speaking, there are often opportunities to listen to other people's speeches around you, such as company training, exchanges in the workplace, etc. If you have the chance, take a look at what others are saying. When you get closer, you can understand how the other person prepares and practices.

In addition, it is now easy to find a large number of videos of professional speeches, such as TED and speech programs. You can learn a lot of useful things from the performance of those professionals.

Fifth: Practice hard. There are indeed methods and techniques for giving public speeches, but they must be based on a lot of practice.

Many of the previous answers have mentioned this. There are two ways to practice: one is to seize every opportunity to speak, prepare carefully, and summarize carefully; the second is to practice on your own.