The top symptoms of Public speaking fear and why you are really normal if you feel them
How many symptoms of fear do you have when you are thinking about doing a presentation or speaking in public? Don’t panic if you have more than 15 of these, you are very normal. Have a look at the list, I will explain why this happens AND what you can do about it.
The physical symptoms
Increased heart rate
Sweaty palms
Breathing gets tight, shallow breathing, can get rapid
Chest gets tight
Dry mouth
Throat feeling tight
Shaky legs, hands, body - some or all!
Your vision/hearing narrows - in some cases by around 70% if your heart rate soars
You may need the toilet urgently or feel like you do
Your hands feel bigger than normal
Feeling sick
Going red face/chest or fear of going red
Your sleep has been interrupted for months!
The mental symptoms of public speaking fear
A growing feeling of dread (for weeks/months)
Surreal feeling of not being there
Your mind goes blank, (brain freeze)
You feel very self-conscious
You think you know what the audience is thinking and it’s not good
You feel like you have to know everything about your subject
Your inner voice gets harsher
Feeling judged by the audience
Impostor syndrome gets stronger - If they really knew what i was like they wouldn’t have employed or given me this promotion etc
You hate being the centre of attention
Feeling like everyone else can cope but its only you who feels like this
You compare yourself negatively with every other speaker
Feeling that you have to be funny/entertaining/dynamic
Worried about the past and recalling your past disasters
The amount of presentation practice doesn’t help or even makes it worse
You feel anxious about the future and the consequences of messing the presentation up
Feels like there are huge pressures on yourself
Feeling that the audience is hostile
Everyone is looking at me. Laser eyes boring into my soul!
Thoughts such as "The audience will see that I’m weak, and judge me for being weak
Catastrophic thinking - "I’m going to wet myself, the computer won’t work, I’d rather crash the car on the way to the presentation” Not necessarily all of those at once!
If I pause or stop talking, “they” will think I’m stupid
Feeling isolated in front of a hostile audience
You feel vulnerable and exposed
Your inner critic is on full volume. You don’t support yourself, you are criticising yourself. You are analysing what you are doing AS you are doing it
Feeling that you are not good enough, tall enough, together enough, good-looking enough etc
Feeling trapped - wanting to run
Not wanting the audience to see you fail - worried about the risk to your reputation.
If you feel fear then you think that there is something wrong with you.
You see fear as a signal to stop. So you avoid public speaking because it makes you feel uncomfortable.
You feel that it’s only you who feels all/some of these symptoms. Somehow you are broken and others aren’t
And so on...
Plus a bonus extra super symptom of public speaking fear
A bigger symptom is that anxiety distorts your reality. And the more anxious you are, the more it distorts. Anxiety makes us far more “ME” focussed, eg: Everyone is thinking about me (and it’s all negative) , everyone is noticing my hands, people are judging me because I’m going red. A lot of the above list is all about ME.
Anxiety makes us very self-centred. But it’s not egotistical, its inversely egotistical - everyone is thinking bad things about me. They are not but it feels like it.
It’s not just you
Phew, that’s a lot of fears I’ve collected from 7000 people I’ve worked with over 20 years. These same feelings and thoughts come up every time I run a course. One study of communication anxiety indicates that 20 percent of population have moderate anxiety, 30 percent have moderately high anxiety, and 40 percent have high anxiety, So you are normal if you have moderate to high anxiety. 70% of us do.
So not surprisingly, I get asked this question a lot…
Why then do I FEEL like it’sONLY ME who feels this bad about public speaking?
There is a very simple answer to begin with. You judge yourself by your insides (all the hell that is going on) and you judge others by their outsides (you can’t know what other people are thinking). Other people look calmer than you do, other people look more together than you do. So hey presto, you are the only one feeling this. But it’s just not true.
You are going to have believe me when I say this next bit. It’s very hard for others to see the fear on the outside even when your heart is beating very fast. Honestly!
But no one believes me until they sit an audience and watch other people on my course talking about how scared they are. Their reaction to watching other speakers is that the others are making their fear up, they don’t look scared, they are not showing the hell inside.
The thoughts you are probably having are “I”m transparent, everyone can really see all my faults” and that’s a well known cognitive bias of the brain called the transparency illusion. We are not transparent even thought we often think we are...
Trust me.
So the next question is of course…
Why do I feel like this?
Public speaking fear is MOSTLY an inside job. It’s not about how to stand nor how you prepare your presentation, nor how much you practice or how to be an expert. It’s changing how we think about it and how we frame it.
But there is one big aspect of public speaking anxiety that is outside of our heads. Let’s deal with that first because it’s fairly simple but very important.
A. Blank faces in your audience
When we stand in front of an audience we feel judged because we don’t understand how audiences listen. Audiences don’t actively listen. They don’t nod very much, or smile very much or give you many signs of approval. They are passive listeners. And that means they have blank faces when they listen. Of course that’s very different from our normal conversational mode. Audiences faces look bored, they look threatening or judging all because we misunderstand what is happening in the audience.
And if we don’t understand how audiences look, we can get completely thrown by this.
Part of the reason we find presenting so tricky is that we haven’t learned to see blank faces as normal. It takes some practice to see blank faces as just audience listening faces but knowing this will liberate you from the tyranny of the audience. I really want you to love blank faces.
Tip: try noticing audience members when YOU are in the audience, they don’t do much and you do even less! (you may think you are intently listening but you look like those people in the picture. Trust me!)
b. Understand the fight and flight adrenaline response
Most of us know the adrenaline feeling really well. If we understand more about it then we can reduce the chances of it being triggered.
The fight and flight system (flight, fight, and don’t forget freeze) evolved 400 million years ago and hasn't changed that much since. It’s job is to look for patterns of threat, warn you of the threat and trigger a BIG response so you can fight a sabre tooth tiger in milliseconds. Would you fit a burglar alarm that was 400 million years old in your house? Probably not, that would be a fairly crude alarm system.
Our threat detection system is unfortunately fairly crude too. It hasn’t been adjusted for modern life.
The system is looking out for threat always. That’s good in a way, but the trouble is that the threats can be created internally as well as externally. Over millions of years, the human brain evolved, we have got far better at worrying and catastrophising so we don’t need a tiger any more to set it off. The trigger of “You have a presentation coming up next week” can be enough of a threat to cause an adrenaline squeeze and you start getting all/most/some of those symptoms listed above.
Here is the important bit. The pressures we put on ourselves are also seen as a threat by our brain. Your thinking can trigger an adrenaline response. The more pressures we put on ourselves, the more adrenaline you get. A lot of the cause of the adrenaline is about how we think about public speaking.
What kind of pressures trigger adrenaline? I divide them into two, performance and shame.
Performances pressures
When I present I’ve got to be…. professional, perfect (can’t make a mistake/got to look perfect), funny, together, confident, eloquent, an expert ( i have to know everything about the subject), interesting, relatable, likeable, sound intelligent, confident or at least look confident (even when I’m feeling terrible). This is not the full list, there are many others, for instance, one participant on my course thought that she had to be profound every time she presented. It’s no wonder she found it difficult to speak with that pressure. When we put performance pressures on ourselves, what we are really saying to ourselves is that “I am not good enough, I have to perform in some way. I have to be better than my normal self”. We are pressuring ourselves to be someone we aren’t. Too much pressure does NOT help. It creates threat and then our adrenaline systems kicks in big time. Seeing public speaking as a performance doesn’t help anxious people conquer public speaking fear. It makes it worse.
And on top of those pressures, we can add…
Shaming pressures
I don’t want people to see me….fail, go red, be sick, shake, sweat, be boring, mess up, make a mistake, being stupid, making a fool of myself, crying, freeze, pause, wet myself, fall over, die (yes, that has been listed in a couple of my courses). This is not the full list. Another example is that a participant thought that everyone was thinking how ugly she was all the time
Shame is saying to us we are not good enough. There is a part of me I don’t want people to see. There is a sense of lack here. I feel vulnerable.
Both sets of pressures contribute to the adrenaline squeeze.
The next reason we feel like we do is that…
C. Our brain evolved in the stone age
evolution plays a strong part in creating public speaking fear!
This picture, typical of how we depict evolution, actually misses a heck of a lot out (women for instance!).
We’ve been mammals for 300 million years but we’ve been primates where the picture starts for 60 million years. The next figure is a great ape which emerged 40 million years later . The picture makes major evolutionary changes look equally spread out. But that is far from the truth.
We’ve only been homo sapiens for 300,000 years but our brain has been evolving for hundreds of millions of years. We got more complex language 70,000 years ago when 99% of our brain had evolved. So all of those stages in the pictures are quite new as far as brain is concerned. We got our flight, fight and freeze system 400 million years ago and older before we were mammals. When we were reptiles!
So we have a brain that has evolved to cope with the conditions of pre-civilisation (civilisations emerge only 12,000 years ago*). And that is all about threat. Will we survive? What’s around the corner? Is that a snake or a stick?
Why is evolution that important for public speaking
In order to survive our brain had to evolve to help us cope with threat. Otherwise we would have died out.
We remember negative things in .6 seconds and positive things takes ten times longer - 6 seconds because that threat bias helps us survive. The human brain gives priority to strong negative experiences because that keeps us safe (so in modern days we remember our presentation disasters far more strongly than our successes). We evolved colour vision to help us see snakes better. We evolved emotions like shame as a social control emotion way before we got language so we could control each other in primate troupes.
So when we go to speak publicly we bring our stone age threat brain with us. We look at those blank faces and what do we see. Threat and more threat! We also self-shame using our inner critic. All because our inner world is using a very old brain to tackle a modern world. We forget that we are animals with a skewed brain.
By the way our threat brain influences a lot more than public speaking, it has a profound influence on how we do life. We get drawn to problems rather than solutions, we watch murders as entertainment (on TV!), most news is negative.
the story so far…
We think its just us who feels all these things
We massively over-think public speaking and audiences
We don’t understand audiences with their blank faces
We put huge pressures on ourselves to perform and not be ourselves
We don’t think we are good enough
We go to war on ourselves with a loud inner critic and undermine our own confidence
We have a brain that has evolved to notice threat more than positive things.
It’s no wonder lots of us don’t want to be public speaking. It’s way too much stuff going on.
We need to make public speaking a whole lot simpler. .
*Australian Aborigines were cremating their dead 40,000 years ago which could be seen as the start of civilisation but it’s not that long ago either!