Public Speaking Anxiety Therapy
Overcome your fears, reduce anticipatory anxiety, and become an effective public speaker.
Public Speaking Anxiety Treatment Overview
Public speaking anxiety is more common than you may think. So is overcoming it. I can help.
Public speaking anxiety therapy is an intensive specialty service designed to help you:
Overcome anticipatory anxiety
You may obsess about the public speaking engagement for days or weeks before it happens. We can work to reduce that anxiety significantly with public speaking anxiety treatment that will lower your obsessive fears.
Improve mental preparation
There are ways to transform your preparation for the event so that your confidence improves and there is a lower chance of anxiety that day.
Nail the speech itself
When the time arrives, be ready to meet it with confidence and much less anxiety than you expected. Yes, we can get to this point with proven public speaking anxiety therapy techniques.
More About Public Speaking Therapy
Contact me about public speaking anxiety therapy.
More about Public Speaking Anxiety Treatment
Public speaking anxiety therapy is specialty service to help you overcome speech anxiety.
What is Public Speaking Fear
What is Fear of Public Speaking?
Fear of public speaking almost always has one of two causes, each of which has several component parts.
1. Self-Consciousness and Public Speaking Fear
The first set of reasons for a fear of public speaking revolves around self-consciousness when being in front of a group. Those who are in this category may not have trouble speaking in front of smaller groups or talking to unfamiliar people in social situations, but when the group size increases fear rises as well.
Some people in this category develop anxiety about their movements, tone of voice, and facial expressions. Others feel an overwhelming sense of being judged, perhaps about the quality of their speech or maybe about whether they are being perceived as “qualified” somehow.
2. Self-Consciousness from a Bad Experience
In some cases, those with self-consciousness etiology to their speech anxiety can remember a specific time when something went wrong or they faced a particular challenge when in front of a group. In other words, for these people, public speaking anxiety comes from an actual event where they were embarrassed in front of a crowd somehow. Now, they have an exaggerated and irrational fear of something like that, or at least something that causes that feeling to happen again.
In other cases, the self-consciousness that causes the fear of public speaking has no clear cause, but the person may be predisposed to feeling self-consciousness. A subgroup of this category is those who are experiencing a transition in life – maybe they are in a new and more important professional position, or maybe they just graduated college and are entering the workforce. These transitions can sometimes magnify self-consciousness and, of course, bring on public speaking anxiety in turn.
3. General Confidence Issues and Public Speaking Anxiety
For some, the fear of public speaking relates to more general issues with confidence. Those in this category may be able to remember real challenges they faced with prior public speaking engagements, or they may report that confidence in social situations has been a challenge for a long time. They are not as focused on how they are coming across as they are focused on whether they are talented enough to keep the audience’s attention.
There is actually a third type of public speaking anxiety, which, although rare, can happen especially in early adulthood or when a person has not had to speak in front of others for a long time.
4. Other Reasons
For some people, the reason for speech anxiety is less clear. Sometimes, the first time they experience anxiety and even panic it is completely unexpected. They feel prepared and ready but still, public speaking anxiety hits. Often a feeling of being unprepared lies just under the surface, or maybe subtle cues (sometimes imagined) about the threat posed by the audience suddenly hit. One way or another the person is baffled by their anxiety response.
How to Overcome the Anxiety
How to Overcome Public Speaking Anxiety through Therapy
So how can you overcome public speaking anxiety? The good news is that many of the public speaking treatment techniques you can use to overcome your public speaking fear are simple and easy to learn. Fear of speaking in public is actually a phobia, meaning that it is at least somewhat irrational. Your public speaking anxiety is out of proportion to the actual threat the event carries.
Most of the public speaking anxiety therapy techniques I use and pass along here have to do with reducing your irrational perceptions and exaggerations of what could go wrong. For example, many people look out at an audience and see a threat, whether they feel that they will be negatively judged, will make a mistake, or will face tough questions or challenges.
Finding Irrational Thoughts
In each case, the expectation is stronger than the actual chance that there will be a problem, but no matter how much you repeat that to yourself the fear still pops up when it is time to speak. In other words, when the chances are only 1 in 100 of a mistake being made the person with a fear of public speaking only hears the “1” and thinks it will be them.
Reducing the fear of public speaking, quite simply, often involves looking at the underlying thoughts that occur before and during the performance to look for exaggerations and irrationality. Some tips for overcoming public speaking anxiety are available from the Mayo Clinic and the University of Pittsburgh.
How I Can Help
How Public Speaking Anxiety Treatment Works
For some people, the tips above plus other advice you can find on your own is enough. This is usually the case when the fear and anxiety are relatively mild or specific to one event that will pass. It may also be true if you know exactly why you are anxious and if there is something specific you can do to overcome that.
If your anxiety is enough to cause you significant fear that is bothering you a lot (intensity or frequency), you find yourself avoiding doing things that are required or that you would otherwise really want to do, or you feel that the upcoming speech is so important to your work or family life that you have to make sure it goes well, give me or another therapist a call. You may also want to come in for public speaking anxiety therapy if the symptoms are severe and the cause is a mystery.
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Public Speaking Anxiety Example
The following is a fictional example of public speaking anxiety therapy. Of course, all clients are different, and this example is designed to give a general idea of what public speaking anxiety would be like, even though your own therapy might be different.
Jim came looking for public speaking anxiety treatment because he had to give a weekly seminar at his work in front of anywhere from 5-20 people. He knows he is well-regarded at work, and is confident in his job performance, but he still has been experiencing public speaking anxiety for some time. His anxiety manifests in both physical symptoms, such as shortness of breath and rapid heartbeat, plus psychological symptoms, such as anticipatory anxiety and extreme self-consciousness.
Public Speaking Anxiety Therapy Initial Steps
We start by working to identify the specific aspects of public speaking that make Jim anxious. For him, it is a fear of being judged or making mistakes. We start to challenge those fears with reality – does he have any evidence that people are actually judging him harshly or unfairly, or that he’s prone to making mistakes? These types of challenges to his irrational and exaggerated thoughts will become a cornerstone of our work together.
We also instituted a plan by which he will practice a little more when speaking in front of others. Practice is key to building confidence. He had realized that, as opposed to when he was in college and could basically talk off the cuff, the high-level professional atmosphere puts more pressure in place, and he might do well to become more familiar with his material.
Finally, we worked on having him imagine himself giving a successful and well-received speech. Visualization helped reframe his mindset and created positive associations with public speaking.
Public Speaking Anxiety Treatment in the Moment
While we worked on all of the above to try to reduce the intensity of Jim’s anticipatory anxiety and make sure he was well-prepared and more confident, we also worked on ways he could make the actual experience better. Jim worked to learn effective deep breathing exercises that can help calm his nerves, focusing on slow, deep breaths to regulate his anxiety.
He also followed on the CBT techniques noted above by challenging negative thoughts he had right before and even during his public speaking. Looking for irrational and exaggerated thoughts that are the cornerstone of public speaking anxiety and labeling them as such was key. He reminded himself of his strengths and past successes. He replaced thoughts like “I’ll mess up” with “I am well-prepared, and I can do this.”
Finally, he learned that instead of worrying about how he is perceived, he would shift his focus to the message he wanted to convey. Concentrating on providing value to his audience took his mind off of his own performance.
Advanced Steps
As Jim started to experience success with these techniques, he wanted to speed the process and get even more comfortable with public speaking. He found ways to work his way up to larger audiences and found that each successful experience built his confidence for more challenging situations. Joining a public speaking group helped him gain confidence by knowing that he was presenting well. He started to mix in humor and visual aids that helped him bring even more value to his audience, which, in turn, gave him more confidence.
Public speaking anxiety treatment produces small steps, and this worked well for Jim, continually giving him confidence along the way. With persistence and practice, he built the confidence he needed to become a more effective and comfortable public speaker.
Contact Me
To learn more about my public speaking anxiety therapy services and to chat about your needs and hopes to see if I may be a fit, please use my contact page.
A consultation is always free and completely confidential!
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dralanjacobson@yahoo.com
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In person: Westwood, MA & Lee, NH
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