Stop Thinking About Yourself: Mastering the Art of Public Speaking

First my mouth dries up, I don’t know how to begin and my heart beats fast. All I have to do is say a few prepared lines yet it wasn’t that simple.

Since the dawn of humanity, humans perceived eyes watching us as threat. And when our fight-or-flight response gets triggered, we feel intense stress and anxiety. But what does this have to do with public speaking? Everything.

Here’s the bad news: Our brains have transferred this fear onto public speaking. In other words, public speaking anxiety is in our DNA. So today when we speak in front of a group and feel the eyes watching us, we feel like cavemen exposed in daylight. We are afraid of being put under the spotlight, of having eyes fixed on us. We construct walls between ourselves and the audience. What do these walls look like? We look down. We retreat into our notes. In the process, we disregard the people in front of us, wishing them into invisibility.

Speakers naturally find ways to distance themselves from their audience. The key to disarming our organic panic button is to turn the focus away from ourselves — away from whether we will mess up or the audience will like us — and toward the audience.

When we show generosity, we feel less stressed. The same principle applies in speaking. When we approach speaking with a spirit of generosity, we counteract the sensation of being under attack and we feel less nervous. The question is: Well, how do we do that?

Tell yourself: “This presentation is not about me. It is about helping my audience.” Identify the audience’s needs and craft a message that speaks directly to those needs. We know generosity to give us a sense of fulfillment, purpose, and meaning and it is just as powerful in speaking. It turns a nerve-wracking experience into one of giving and helping others.

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.

In the words of Mandela, words go to someone’s heart not because they are the most familiar words to the listener, but because of the attitude of the person who uses them. Words go to the heart because they come from the heart.

Even if your instincts are telling you you’re making a huge mistake, grab every opportunity that comes up to speak publicly. To master the art of public speaking, stop thinking about yourself, start connecting with your audience.