Dear Anxious Organisation Person

You might think that other managers, leaders and corporate people don't feel uncomfortable when they present. Everyone else looks calm and cool, and it just feels like you are the only one.

It's often hinted at, or maybe it's just an inner feeling, that fear is a weak thing and successful people eat PowerPoint for lunch. So it becomes a taboo conversation, an admission of weakness. Which makes for an anxious time just thinking about anxiety and what it might do to your career.

So you become fearful about fear. You spend weeks prepping the presentation to make sure you don't freeze, and in doing that you keep running films of catastrophes and remembering previous close shaves. Sometimes you dream of a job in a quiet tucked-away forest with an audience of squirrels, but you know you couldn't afford it. And the Sunday Scaries that two thirds of us have?* The week ahead arrives before Monday does.

You've read hundreds of tips and none of them seem to understand how tough this is. Imagine the audience naked. Learn it so well it's just part of you, but don't sound like you've memorised it. Have a power pose. Only speak to the people who are smiling. Crack a joke at the beginning to get them on your side. And the most common one of all, practice, practice, practice, which mostly means you are practising being scared. It hasn't worked. None of it.

And you lie awake feeling your job is on the line, taunting yourself with "it's only a presentation", knowing that the more you worry about messing it up the more likely it becomes.

( All the quotes below are from people who came on the course).

The anxiety radar is always on. As Alex puts it: "I'm always alert and ready to avoid situations and opportunities."

Helen wrote: "Today at work I found an elaborate excuse to avoid talking to a group of over 100 people. I even considered resigning over it today."

And Scott, who had been managing the problem for over two decades: "tiring, depressing, and life limiting." And one anxious CEO, running a successful business, who said simply: "I just want my life back."

First time managers

Maybe you're thirty and you've just become a boss for the first time. Now you're running the Monday morning meeting and your reports are looking at you, expecting to be inspired. You haven't done any proper talking since university, and even then you did the presentation with classmates. Now it's just you.

Always got away with it until now

Or you've kept your head low for years. You ducked the presentations, took the supporting role, watched junior people pass you by because they could stand up and speak and you couldn't. And now you've been promoted anyway, because the alternative was possibly losing your job. It felt like no real choice. The thing you spent twenty years avoiding is suddenly the thing you're paid to do. No escape, apart from maybe breaking your leg the day before.

Joe wrote: "In early 2020 I was promoted at work to executive position. There is a requirement to host management meetings and also perform after dinner speeches. I want to be able to deliver my speeches to large groups of senior management without it crippling me for weeks before the event."

The mid or late career wobble

For some, the strangest part is that this fear wasn't always there.

You used to be fine. Confident, even flipping enjoyed it sometimes. You did presentations, ran meetings, talked at the Christmas gathering. Then something happened.

Maybe a panic attack mid-talk. Maybe a presentation that went badly in front of senior people, or worse, your juniors. Maybe the years of working from home, and now everyone is back in the room and your body has forgotten what it used to do. Maybe nothing in particular happened at all, and the feeling just grew until you feel sick coming into work. They will see me being nervous. Either way you're left puzzled, ashamed, quietly hating it. You used to be able to do this. Why can't you do this now?

Paul wrote: "I used to be a relatively good public speaker but after a panic attack during a talk a couple of years ago, I really lost my confidence."

Andy had years of confidence. Then one wobble during a presentation, needed medication, and lost a job promotion.

The career wobble isn't just you either. I've taught a retired nuclear submarine captain. Very senior army officers. A judge. Vicars. Successful business owners. All of them had lost their confidence after a presentation or work event that went wrong. A retired Concorde pilot told me he had come to hate using the tannoy, and only came on the course because he was getting married again at seventy-five.

I'm quoting the big jobs because they're memorable, but plenty of middle managers come too. People at every level.

I want to leave but I can't

Then there are people who can see opportunities they can't reach. A new role, a different industry, going freelance, starting something of their own. They don't quite know yet. They just know the current life isn't it. But every visible step forward requires the very thing they can't do. Speaking up. Putting themselves out there. Being seen.

Henry wrote: "My phobia of public speaking is holding me back from fulfilling my true potential and accessing opportunities I would otherwise like to."

Keeping it quiet

Work might not feel like the place to sort this out. Talking to HR flags the problem. They'll know your vulnerability. And if you're the boss, you may not want your team to see that you're scared.

So there's a lot of quiet suffering, at every level, because we are ashamed of our vulnerabilities.

That's why I don't do in-house courses now. It doesn't feel safe to talk about fear, anxiety and shame in front of your colleagues.

There is an alternative

I've had hundreds of people "sneak" onto my courses without their boss or their juniors knowing, paying for it themselves.

Most people arrive wanting to say: I hate this anxiety, I don't want it, it's horrid, John can you throw it away for me?

The honest answer is far more of a no than a yes. It doesn't work like that. If there were a magic solution you would all know it already, and I'd be out of a job.

So the bad news is still no. Anxiety is here to stay in some ways. We simply forget that we're evolutionary beings, with language being the last upgrade to our brains a hundred thousand years ago. We are literally by-products of the stone age wearing ties, but not on Fridays. That's why there isn't a universal easy tip.

Our nervous systems exist to fight a mountain lion,** or to make us alert in a multi-storey car park late at night, or to warn us away from a cliff edge. And to do presentations. But we only have one fight, flight and freeze system for all threats, and there's no instant mute button. Fear and anxiety are central to our biology. That's not going away. It kept our ancestors alive, being a warrior and a worrier.

So what does work

We have to learn new skills for an old brain, and that's what the course is created for.

Not techniques for looking confident. The real fundamentals: being present rather than somewhere else in your own head, slowing down, being comfortable with pauses and with being looked at, speaking rather than performing. I call it public being.

Confidence is about trusting yourself more even when we are having problematic thoughts and feelings. On the course we learn new effective ways to be with ourselves so we can do what we need to do in the boardroom or the Monday meeting.

If you're reading that thinking those are precisely the things you can't do, that's the point. Nobody arrives able to do them. They're built in very small steps, over two days, with six to ten other people who all understand exactly why you're there.

If you want to know what that actually looks like for people who've done it, there's five years of written feedback here.

If any of this sounds like you

You can look at the upcoming courses in Bristol, London and Manchester without talking to anybody. If you'd rather ask something first, you can have a free ten-minute chat with me, or email me, or WhatsApp me on 07730 550842.

And every course comes with a no quibble money-back guarantee.

all the best John

* Research reported in the Guardian in 2022 found around two thirds of Britons experience anxiety before returning to work.

** In 2019 a jogger in Colorado was attacked by a young mountain lion and killed it by strangling it with his foot. He survived.