13 Ways To Manage Your Nerves Before You Speak

If you feel nervous about speaking in public or presenting at work, you know how unpleasant it can be. Shortness of breath, sweaty palms, a dry mouth, a queasy stomach and legs that will not quite behave are only a few of them, and they are the same symptoms we get before a job interview, a driving test, or asking somebody out on a date. If the presentation matters enough, you can start collecting them weeks or even months in advance.

The truth is that our thoughts dictate how we feel, and they shape a presentation long before anybody stands up to give it.

The Power Of Thought

Imagine this. Your partner has gone out for a quick celebratory drink and is late coming home. As the hour grows later your anxiety builds, and before long you are imagining the worst: an accident, perhaps, or an affair.

How did you get from mild concern to genuine dread in the space of an hour? Nothing in the outside world changed. You replayed the scenarios often enough that they began to feel like information rather than imagination, and your body responded to them exactly as though they were real.

Nervous speaking works the same way. What is the narrative you construct when an important presentation lands in your diary? Is it the one that dries your mouth and sets the butterflies going? Far more of this comes from the pictures we build in advance than from anything that ever happens in the room.

Common Fears

Panic and dread almost always grow out of a small number of thoughts:

I will make a fool of myself. They will not like me. I will forget my words. What if somebody asks me a question I cannot answer?

Those feelings will not vanish simply because you have instructed them to. It is like telling somebody terrified of flying to relax at forty thousand feet in the middle of heavy turbulence. The advice is perfectly sound and completely useless.

Effective Techniques To Manage Nervousness

1. Be prepared

Practise thoroughly, but do not simply memorise. People who memorise have exactly one route through their material, and the moment they lose it they have nothing at all. Internalise the message instead and rehearse it out loud, in front of a mirror, a friend, or anybody who will sit still long enough. Before any of that, be clear about what you want to be different in that room by the time you sit down, because there are four questions worth answering before you build a single slide.

2. Arrive early

Give yourself time to arrive properly rather than at a run. Find the building, the room and the facilities, see where the light falls and where people will be sitting, and check that the clicker works. Each of those is a small unknown, and nerves feed on unknowns far more readily than they ever feed on audiences.

3. Breathe

Five in, two held, eight out. This is not about improving the flow of oxygen to your brain, which is a myth worth abandoning, since your blood is already carrying very nearly as much as it can hold. It works because a long, slow out-breath is one of the very few signals your nervous system accepts without arguing. Do not rush to start speaking. Connect with yourself before you try to connect with anybody else.

4. Focus on your audience

Shift your attention off your nerves and onto what the people in front of you actually need. How will their work be easier, better or clearer because they sat through this? Fear of speaking is very largely fear of being judged, and being judged is what happens when a presentation is about the presenter.

5. Play to your strengths

Work out what you are genuinely good at, whether that is telling a story, holding somebody’s eye or using your voice well, and build the thing around it. You do not have to present like anybody else, and a borrowed personality is both less convincing and a great deal more tiring to keep up for twenty minutes.

6. Visualise confidence

Picture your confidence on a scale of one to ten. Close your eyes, breathe, and work out what a seven or an eight actually looks, sounds and feels like for you: how you are standing, how you are speaking, what your hands are doing. Rehearsing the ordinary mechanics is far more useful than imagining the applause at the end.

7. Watch your language

Replace “I don’t know how to present” with “this is an opportunity to learn something new”. The words you use about yourself do real work. “I’m terrified” and “I’m excited” describe very nearly the same sensation, and researchers at Harvard found that people who said the second one out loud were rated more persuasive and more confident than those who tried to talk themselves into calm.

8. Maintain perspective

You almost certainly know more about your subject than anybody else in the room, and you were asked for a reason. Nobody there is hoping you will fail, most of them are quietly relieved it is not them, and not one of them will remember the sentence you stumbled over by Friday.

9. Practice kindness to yourself

Acknowledge what went well instead of cataloguing what did not. You would never speak to a colleague the way most presenters speak to themselves on the drive home, and that habit does considerably more damage over a career than any single presentation ever could.

10. Learn from the best

Watch TED talks and the presenters you admire, but watch for what they do rather than who they are. Copying somebody’s personality will not work and will leave you feeling worse about your own. Noticing that they pause, or talk to one person at a time, or stop the moment they have finished, absolutely will.

11. Move

Standing rigidly takes real effort, and it reads as effort. Adrenaline is an instruction to move, so walk about before you go in and take the stairs rather than the lift. Once you are up there, let your hands do what they do when you are telling a friend something that matters to you.

12. Dress for confidence

Choose something that makes you feel like yourself on a good day, and, just as importantly, something you have worn before and know behaves itself. Anything you find yourself checking, adjusting or pulling straight is a small tax on your attention every few minutes.

13. Smile

The first few seconds tell a room how to feel about you, and a presenter who looks glad to be there will always get a warmer audience than one who looks like they are being processed.

Final Thoughts

Nervousness is not the enemy. Misinterpreting it is, and I have written about why in how to speak in public confidently.

Not one of those thirteen asks you to stop being nervous first, which is just as well, because that is not how any of this works. If the dread arrives weeks ahead and then settles in and stays, the techniques will only take you so far, and it becomes worth understanding what is actually happening in your mind before you speak.

“All the great speakers were bad speakers at first,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in The Conduct of Life. He was right, and it is worth remembering that he was describing every speaker you currently admire.

– Booking yourself onto a powerful public speaking course.

– Investing in some really good one to one public speaking coaching.

– Getting yourself some excellent presentation training

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