Why is public speaking so hard?
Public speaking is often listed as one of human beings’ biggest fears. It sits on lists alongside phobias of heights, flying, poisonous snakes and drowning.
What’s so fascinating about these common fears is that public speaking is the only one that doesn’t pose any real physical threat to our survival.
So why is it so high up and why does it provoke the exact same fear response in us?
Our evolution is partly responsible. Human’s survival over thousands of years was largely dependant on collaboration and sticking together. We evolved in tribes and were dependant on those tribes for safety, food and reproduction. So the need for acceptance is hardwired into us.
When we speak in public, we’re exposing ourselves to a perceived risk of acceptance, and because our primal evolution has not caught up to our social evolution, we feel fear.
Another reason why public speaking is so hard is down to our level of self-esteem. How we feel about ourselves dictates how we think other people feel about us too. This means if we feel we’re not good enough, we then assume other people will think that too. We view the world through a biased lens where we constantly look for external cues (facial expressions of audiences etc) that confirm what we believe about ourselves to be true.
This makes standing up in front of a group of people really challenging because our mind is predicting and anticipating negative judgement where in reality, people typically feel either neutral or positive.
Lastly, a very simple reason is that we don’t have enough experience speaking in public.
Someone might get asked to deliver a big speech once or twice a year and have very little practice talking to large groups. We forget that all new challenges make us nervous on some level. When we learn to drive, our first lessons are typically anxiety-inducing and uncomfortable but after a while, we get used to being on the road. When we speak in public we often want to jump to “expert” straight away and feel no fear, overlooking the requirement for practice in similar environments. Simply put, If you’re scared of something, you just haven’t done it enough times.
So what can we do to make public speaking not so hard?
Here are the three tips that will help:
1. Hack your evolutionary hard-wiring by breathing
If fear of public speaking is something that is hard-wired in us, then we can also use part of biology to combat physical symptoms of anxiety through breathing. Breathing is a vital part of our training, so much so that we dedicate an entire class to it. Deep breathing and diaphragmatic breathing work to activate your parasympathetic nervous system, calming down your flight or fight response. Making your exhalation longer than your inhalation really speeds this process up too, so try techniques such as 7-11 breathing or simply doubling the time of your inhalation when you exhale. Creating a routine in your day where you can deeply breathe for 20 mins (or longer) will generally add some balance to your life, and trying to carve out the time to breathe before you speak will give your nervous system a healthy dose of calm.
2. Start to re-wire your core beliefs
If you’ve identified that low self-esteem might be driving your anxiety when speaking in front of others, then start doing what you can to re-wire your unhelpful core beliefs.
To get you started, try these quick self-esteem sentence stem exercises.
Underneath each sentence stem below, write down five endings to the sentence quickly as possible and see what comes out. Try not to overthink and just let your writing flow. Do this every day for a week and see if you can feel the way you think about yourself changing.
If I bring a higher level of self-esteem to my activities today…
If I bring a higher level of self-esteem to my dealings with people today…
If I am 5 percent more self-accepting today…
If I am self-accepting even when I make mistakes…
If I am self-accepting even when I feel confused and overwhelmed…
3. Practice, practice, practice
Look for as many opportunities to practice speaking in front of others as possible. The closer you can get to replicating a “real-life” environment the better. There really is no greater lesson than standing up and speaking to a group of people. The more you do it, the more your brain starts to build muscle memory around being in that situation. Remember that’s ok to make mistakes (especially when you are practising!) and try to adopt a “done is better than perfect” mentality. Every opportunity to speak is like doing reps at the gym, the more you do, the stronger you get.
Our courses offer the opportunity to practice with like-minded people in a friendly and supportive environment, head to our courses page to read more.