Public Speaking & Presentation Skills

In fact, you must do this to live!  Breathe!

We’ve covered 8 of our 10 tips for reducing anxiety about public speaking, and hopefully, you’ve had a chance to practice a few. Here are two more for your toolkit, and they both have do with breathing.

9.  Control Your Breathing.

When we feel nervous before we speak, our body reacts with shallow breathing.  This makes us sound breathless, and when we hear ourselves sound this way, we think that everyone knows we’re nervous.  That, of course, makes us feel more nervous!

To interrupt the shallow breathing cycle, try controlled breathing.

Put your shoulders back and inhale deeply. Try to inhale down into your abdomen.  You’ll know you’re doing this if you place your hand lightly on your abdomen and it rises slightly as you inhale.

Exhale for a few seconds longer than you inhale.  This empties your lungs so you can draw a deep satisfying breath the next time. When we can fill our lungs and inhale deeply, we start to feel more relaxed.

Do this three times before you speak to break the anxiety cycle.

10.  Plan your breathing.

Sometimes we start well, but forget to breathe regularly during the speech.  When that happens we run out of breath in the middle of a sentence, or push to the end and sound breathless.

Try this: look over a copy of your remarks, and plan when to breathe.  Read your script and insert slash marks where it feel natural to breathe.

If you don’t have a script, then look over your notes or PowerPoint, and enter frequent reminders to breathe on your personal copy.  If you give yourself permission to pause and breathe, you will break the shallow breathing cycle and look and feel more confident.

That’s completes the stategies for becoming more confident about public speaking.  Our next topic is getting more focused when you speak, and our first post on that topic is a Focus Formula that you can use immediately in any speaking situation! 

It’s time for Strategies 7 and 8 as we approach our goal of 10 tools for reducing anxiety about public speaking.   Remember last time that I promised you a tip you could start using right away.  Here it is!

 Strategy 7:  Reduce your caffeine intake

If you are sensitive to caffeine—and many people are—this is very important.  Caffeine makes your heart beat faster.  So does feeling nervous.  The end result is that a big dose of caffeine can make you feel more nervous than you really are. 

A good guideline is to reduce your caffeine by 50 percent in the four to six hours before you speak.  You can either have fewer cups of coffee, tea or cola, or you can cut your regular coffee with decaf or alternate regular and caffeine-free cola.

Another effect of high caffeine levels is shaky hands.  If you feel your hands—-or your knees— shake–you will probably be convinced that everyone else can see it too, which is probably not the case.  But your body will respond to your belief, and you will become more nervous.Because caffeine is a stimulant, it also revs us up to talk faster.  This makes you sound like you’re racing through your remarks because you’re uncomfortable.

Use caffeine in moderation and aim for the middle ground—a speaker in a state of pleasant alertness and positive energy, not a jittery, heart- pounding, speed-talking presenter.

Strategy 8:  Practice Frequently!

The reason athletes and musicians practice frequently is that it improves their performance.  It’s no different with speaking.  You can revise the old saying that “Practice makes perfect” to say “Practice makes improvement”  because we’re not striving for perfection, but we are aiming for improvement! 

A formula suggested by some speaking experts is to apply the 7:1 ratio.  After your material is completely prepared, practice at least seven times for one delivery. You can practice once a day during the week before your presentation. 

If you are speaking at a team meeting and your remarks are brief, speak them seven times in the few days before the meeting.  If that sounds like a lot, remember what we said earlier:  many experts believe that anxiety about speaking can be reduced as much as 70 percent with thorough preparation! 

As you grow more confident, you will need less practice except for entirely new material.

That’s it for now.  Next time we’ll wrap up the list of ways to reduce anxiety with two final strategies.  In the meantime, pick one of the first 8 and start to put it into practice!

I hope you had a chance to try some of the  first four strategies to help manage anxiety about public speaking.  Remember that you have a lot of company if you feel nervous when you speak in front of a group!

Here are two more strategies to try: 

5. Memorize three parts of your speech.If you know exactly how you will start, how you will end, and how to get from one chunk of your presentation to the next, your anxiety will go down.  So if your speaking is scheduled in advance, you will want to memorize your opening, closing, and transitions. This provides a built-in comfort level for the critical points in your remarks.

You;ll want to memorize several sentences at the beginning and again at the end.  And memorize smooth ways to transition from one segment of your presentation to the next.  Remember: you don’t want to memorize all your remarks.  It will only increase your anxiety, and won’t sound natural

6.  Practice smart.  Always practice out loud. You don’t want the first time you hear the remarks coming out of your mouth to be the time it counts.  You do want the sound of your voice speaking your remarks to sound familiar.  If you’ve practiced out loud, you’ll have that feeling of, “I know this.”

Another important reason to practice out loud is timing.  It takes at least 25 percent more time to speak your remarks than it does to say them in your head.  Practicing out loud avoids the uncomfortable position of running out of time before you reach your conclusion.  If you work with a public speaking coach, you can expect to do a timed practice.

There are many more ways to reduce anxiety, but these two additional strategies should get you well on your way to being more confident about public speaking.

Next time:  Tips 7 and 8 for reducing anxiety about speaking—and one of them is so easy to implement you can start immediately! 

For more information about presentaton skills training and coaching, visit www.maureenmurrayassociates.com

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