Just think that they’re all sitting in their underwear! That’ll calm you down!

It’s easy enough. You just stand up and talk to people. Why are you so worried?

Stop overreacting. It’s not that bad. Look at a spot at the back and talk to that if you’re worried about people. You’ll be fine!

For anyone who has had a fear of public speaking, you may have heard the above statements and so many more a lot of times.

People underestimating your fear, downplaying it, or downright dismissing it—these are widespread instances, ones that make your life more difficult than it should be.

Yet, there’s nothing you can do. You’re scared to tears of speaking in public, and unfortunately, you know this fear will take its toll on you, especially if your career depends on you speaking to crowds.

So, what do you do? Here are some ideas that can help.

How To Manage The Fear Of Public Speaking?

Public speaking is a pervasive fear.

And from the information we’ve gathered, we can safely agree that tough love is not the right way of dealing with it.

This fear of public speaking isn’t a personal irritant. It’s a biological response to an increase in anxiety and fear. Your pre-frontal lobes, which store your memories, are also sensitive to body changes. Because you start to stress when you think about speaking in public, your brain starts to freeze up. When that happens, you get more stressed – your fight or flight response activates, and that shuts down your frontal lobe, disconnecting you from your thoughts.

In these moments, your body looks for an immediate response, and anxious thoughts run through your head. You feel like you need to make a call, often considering extreme responses – do you run out, or fight the people in there? Of course, you can’t do either of those since speaking in public isn’t life-threatening – but the anxiety makes you think otherwise.

How Do You Change That?

First, revisiting those bad memories will do you no good. Instead, focus on the future and what you have to do to make yourself stronger.

This early in recovery, you can’t achieve the right results in a flash of genius to speak fluently, and without fault. So, don’t set any unrealistic goals.

Practice breathing exercises to calm your nerves and think of a scenario in which you have to speak in public to acclimatize yourself to the situation. Prepare beforehand – get all the paperwork needed to read and re-read it. Make things simpler by writing down important points in a bullet list – practice speaking them, but don’t memorize. There’s no point when you know you could freeze up.

Think about what you’ll say and how you should recover if you have a brain freeze. You could be very honest and say, you jumbled up. Being honest is a good policy. OR you could stop speaking and look down at your notes.

Remind yourself that these people are not judging you, they’re listening, but they won’t notice if you jumble up. Repeat yourself if needed and speak slowly.

Finding a Concrete Solution

At Blossom Hypnosis, we use treatments to help them learn how to know their feelings.

By providing them with hypnosis, we help them delve into their inner core, so they can learn what triggers their fear. Led by certified hypnotist, Rekha Shrivastava, we use effective treatments to learn how to treat your subconscious for anxiety. Rekha offers Skype sessions to clients not residing in Rochester, NY.

For further details, book an appointment with us!