14.3 Anxiety-Reducing Techniques

1. Open Yourself Up. As part of the vicious cycle described above, nervous speakers who start obsessing about how foolish they look to their audience tend to also close themselves off from that audience. That’s why they hide behind the podium, or never look up from their papers: they don’t want to see the horrified looks on the faces of the audience. But since they’re not looking at the audience, they don’t realize that the audience members don’t actually have horrified looks on their faces after all, and are more likely to be showing signs of enjoying the speech.So the first thing to do is to look up from the page — as long as you can find your place again (see the section below on Delivery Mode). Try to consciously counteract the instinct to close up; instead, use wide gestures and step out from behind the podium. I once saw a judge give a speech in which the first thing he did was throw his arms up as high as he could, spread out wide with his fingers extended. Maybe he did it just to get the audience’s attention, but I bet it also sent the message to his body that he was embracing the audience, not hiding from them.
2. Find the Friendly Faces. Speaking of looking up at the crowd, what if there are a few audience members who aren’t smiling, and are just sitting there stony-faced? Don’t waste your energy on them. Look around for the people who are smiling, nodding, and showing signs of support. No matter what the context or how hostile the audience (see Chapter 5), there are bound to be a few of those naturally encouraging people in the room, and it won’t take you more than a few seconds to spot them. Give your speech to them — as long as you don’t go too far and make it obvious that you’re only talking to those two or three people (hopefully the friendly faces are spread out, unlike the divided audience described at the beginning of Chapter 5). If you need a quick boost of confidence, they are there to give it to you.
3. Fake It Till You Make It. Keeping in mind that the symptoms of nervousness are mostly invisible, you can get away with acting more confident than you feel. One concrete way to do this is to picture a confident speaker (like a newscaster, actor, or teacher), keep their image forefront in your mind, and act like them as much as you can. If you take this route, you’ll need to fight the instinct to tell your audience how nervous you feel, which can be a powerful urge. A professor of mine said, “Don’t start ducking until they start throwing things at you.” Unless your audience is actually exhibiting Level 4-type annoyance, keep your nervousness to yourself and channel a confident speaker.
4. Be Prepared. If you know you have a well-crafted message, it will give you confidence, and you can keep repeating “I have something valuable to say” to yourself. If you’ve rehearsed your speech, you can add “and I know how to say it.” Be careful, though; overpreparation can make things worse, not better. It’s very much related to the different delivery modes I’ll describe later (writing out every word, making it up on the spot, or something in between). “Be prepared” doesn’t just mean knowing exactly what you want to say; it also means being prepared for things to go wrong, like losing your place or being interrupted.Think of it like the difference between a train and a car. A train is fully prepared for its journey, since the tracks are all laid out in front of it, and as long as nothing goes wrong it gets exactly where it intends to go. Trains aren’t, however, good at dealing with the unexpected, and can’t just swerve around a boulder that’s fallen on the tracks. A “trainwreck” of a speech might not mean a total derailment (e.g. ,having to abandon the speech in the middle and move on to the next speaker, or the equivalent of “cut to commercial”), but it might mean having to go back a few pages, wasting time trying to relocate your place, or ignoring something that just arose. Cars, in contrast, are good at swerving and sudden braking (within limits), and if they have to go “off road” for a minute, they can usually find their way back. So try to prepare in a “car-like” way — know where you’re going and where the turning points are, but be able to adapt on the fly. Also remember to prepare for your anxiety symptoms, which might include a “brain freeze;” if your mind shuts down for a second, do you know how to boot it up again?
5. Memorize the Introduction and Conclusion. One of my favorite pieces of public speaking advice is to “Start with a dynamite intro, end with a dynamite conclusion, and put them as close together as possible.”^[1] This doesn’t mean you can’t give speeches more than a few minutes long, but it does emphasize the value of a “dynamite” beginning and ending. Depending on what delivery style you choose, you may want to write out the intro and conclusion word for word so you know exactly how to say it. The downside of that method is that it will make you start and end the speech by looking down at the page instead of connecting with your audience, which is why memorization is better. But the most important principle is to prepare those pieces in advance, so you don’t start off by fumbling for words, or approach the end of the speech without knowing exactly how you’re going to wrap it up. Remember that the two most important parts of a flight are the take-off and the landing; no pilot gets 90% of the way through a flight and then says “Okay, I’m done; no need to think about how to get the plane on the ground again.”

Time to turn to the question of “serving up that meal”: how to deliver your speech, in terms of your voice, your body, and visual aids. But first, let’s tackle the most basic question of all: are you going to read your speech or not, and if so, from what?