Fear public speaking? Tips to overcome stage fright...

Pulsing heart, sweaty palms, dry mouth, frequent visits to the rest-room and sick feeling in the stomach. If these sound familiar to you whenever you are on stage, welcome to the club … You share company with the likes of Warren Buffet, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Julia Roberts, Winston Churchill. ALL of these greats feared the stage at some point in their life.

Surveys have shown that our fear of presenting in front of a group outweighs our fear of death. Why do we fear public speaking as much as death ? Let’s understand the background before we attempt to overcome this fear...

Why do we universally fear the stage?

Tens of thousands of years ago, our ancestors were jungle dwellers, sharing space and resources with wild animals and predators. Not gifted as the strongest, fastest, fiercest or the stealthiest, humans survived by operating in groups. Such group support multiplied the team strength, apart from helping to pass on valuable information on predators and danger.  

“NOW this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky,

And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.

As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back;

For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.”

• Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

So valuable were such groups that being a deviant or a pariah meant isolation and exposure to predators. Over time, the message that ‘damage to social position or prestige translates into  unpredictability, loneliness and perhaps even death’ got encoded into our genes and became part of our very being.. A part of our brain called amygdala is at the core of most of these genetically encoded fears and worries.

Millenia  later, everything has changed: In our civilized life today, we lead a safe and secure life and almost never face predators. Unfortunately, what’s in our genes has stayed on. Among others, stage presentations and social gatherings  are perceived as events where we can damage our social image.. This association kicks our genes into sub-conscious action – and fuels our biggest fears.

So the next time you are afraid of being on stage and feel disturbed, DON’T. Stage fear is as natural as breathing air.

What happens when we are thrust into the spotlight?

The reactions vary from person to person but in general, the amygdala - our doorkeeper to fears - kicks in without our conscious awareness, senses danger of losing social prestige and a cascade of events leads to a release of chemicals in the body that collectively have the following effects:

1.       Feeling of anxiety – triggered by release of adrenaline into the system.

2.       Increased heart and breathing rate  – resulting in increased oxygen to prepare you to run if necessary

3.       Parched-mouth and stomach-butterflies due to a near shut-down of digestive system – why do you need digestion if you are going to die soon?

4.       Sweaty palms, frequent urination and loss of bladder control – the body eliminates all the unnecessary water instantly – why stock it when facing death?

5.       Stiff muscles prepped up to run.

These symptoms are ideal if you are facing a lion and need to run, not so when we are about to face an audience to make a presentation – although our brain red-flags both situations with the same danger intensity.

How to manage stage fear?

Using the philosophy “Use a thorn to draw a thorn”, the causes of the challenges – our genes - also contain the seeds of the solutions.

You cannot eliminate the fears and emotional reactions resulting from genes: you can, however, bring their intensity down with increased predictability and preparation.

In short, if you can bring down the unpredictability of the situation, you will be a lot less anxious.

Predictability:

There are three unpredictable areas in stage presentations: Audience, setting, topic.  

 1.       Audience: Your stage fear will go down in direct proportion to your familiarity and relatability to the audience.

This is fairly obvious: Imagine that you are asked to present to an audience filled with your closest relatives (parents, siblings and others you are most at ease with). Doesn’t the fear go down significantly? After all, you don’t worry about losing social prestige with people that you find familiar and relatable to you.

Since your audience is unlikely to be limited to your relatives, make an effort to understand as much as possible about your audience: their background, their interests, their expectations from you, prominent members, demographics. Insist on meeting a few of them prior if possible. Knowing them helps you anticipate questions apart from improving your relatability to them.       

Tip: If you are absolutely new to stage presentations, have one or two of your friends stationed at fixed spots in the audience. They can serve as your cheerleaders and most importantly, you know the only two spots in the audience to focus  your fearful eyes – this dose of familiarity will boost your confidence a lot.

2.    Setting: Your stage fear will reduce in proportion to the degree and closeness of practice to reality.

Observe the setting where you will be presenting carefully. Practise in the same room and if that isn’t possible, try to set up a replica of the actual setting elsewhere mirroring size, acoustics, tools, accessories, etc . For your practice, dress in the same clothes you would on the D-day. In short, your setting should be 100% rehearsed on all counts : this way there will be as few surprises as possible on the D-day.

3.    Topic: Your anxieties will reduce in proportion to your interest in and prior subject matter expertise of the topic.

This one is obvious. The last you want to do is to be on stage talking about a topic boring and unfamiliar to you. An uninterested panicky brain is the perfect recipe for disaster. Follow Abraham Lincoln and politely stay away.   

Tip: If new to stage presentations, avoid topics that would need a huge amount of rote learning: those clearly aren’t second nature to you.

Practice:

With an interesting topic, perfect setting, and an understanding of audience, do the one thing that counts the most:  Practice , practice and more practice. There is NO upper limit to practice. Steve Jobs was known to practice for hundreds – apparently  thousands  of hours and for months for his keynote presentations.

Tip:  Leverage the sub-conscious brain. Only the conscious brain experiences panic: the subconscious brain that controls involuntary processes doesn’t. That’s why you don’t forget your deep learnings like running, walking or cycling in panic. One way to activate your subconscious brain is practice: If you practice long and hard enough (hundreds of hours), your entire performance will be delivered by your subconscious brain even if your conscious brain  blanks out. Practise makes perfect.

During the actual stage performance:

Despite your best practice, you will be under some panic on the D-day. Because despite your best preparation, the audience reactions continue to be unpredictable. You can overcome this too with some efforts:

a.       Take deep breaths just before and during the presentation. This provides the much needed oxygen to the brain and relaxes your body.

b.       Prefer to stand behind a full length-podium. This covers your body, preventing nervousness, one area less to worry about.

c.       Don’t carry notes. During panic, your pupils dilate making it difficult to see closer objects.  Instead, make points/images on chart papers that you can see and paste them on the walls behind the audience. You have additional area to look at instead of the faces in the audience.

d.       If you have to, maintain eye-contact with the farthest sections of audience. You won’t be able to see facial expressions there anyway, thus eliminating distractions.  If you wear glasses, you are in luck. Take them off during the presentation; you can eliminate audience distractions altogether.

e.       Choose to take questions at the end. Too much questioning confuses your mind and throws you off-track.

f.        Humor is the enemy of anxiety and is quickest way to lighten the mood; yours and audience’s. Memorize a few jokes related to the topic and throw a few in. Don’t worry if the humor feels  artificial: an artificial humor is far better than natural panic.

g. Visualize a positive outcomes in your conscious mind. Your sub-conscious mind will move heaven and earth to achieve what your conscious mind visualizes vividly.

There are lots of areas over which genes exert influence: from routine activities like cycling to ageing and health. With preparation and ingenuity, man can conquer many of these areas. As the saying goes, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional. Likewise, genes are inevitable, but panic and stress is optional.

?Raja Jamalamadaka is a thought-leader in the field of neurosciences and organzation culture. His primary area of research is the functioning of the brain and its links to leadership attributes like productivity, confidence, positivity, decision making and organization culture. He is a technology veteran, entrepreneur, mentor to startup founders, coach to senior industry executives and a board director. If you liked this article, you might like some of his earlier articles here:

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