Fear of Public Speaking: Tips from a former magician turned consultant on human connection
The CEO of a family-owned manufacturing company, passed down for generations, sought out my services as a public speaking coach.
Joe was average height and build, who looked more like the guy fixing the giant steel machines in the warehouse than the head of a corporation. But his leadership was immediately apparent. Warm, self-assured, and friendly, Joe led me into a private conference room and closed the door.
The manufacturing economy was tough, Joe explained, and the company had been bought out by a national conglomerate, which would be assuming control in just a few months. His employees, many of whom had worked at the company for decades, didn’t know about it yet. In just six short weeks he had to deliver a speech to the entire company explaining the situation.
Joe pressed upon me his primary objective was to reassure his employees - his family - that they would be taken care of. They would continue to operate as they always had, no one would lose their jobs, and they would maintain the trusting, caring work environment they had come to rely on.
But Joe had a problem: He was a terrible public speaker.
It’s not that he stumbled over words or couldn’t figure out where to put his hands. No, it was much worse. In Joe’s words, he couldn’t make it through a speech without “blacking out.”
“I’m afraid,” he said, leaning in from across the table, “that my employees will mistake my nervous, sweaty, disoriented speaking habits for an uncertainty in the future of this company and our family. I need them to believe me. I need them to trust me.”
We had some work to do.
Of Course You’re Scared
Let’s be clear:
Fear of public speaking is justified. It’s completely reasonable from a historical, biological, and evolutionary standpoint.
But forget the science; we can intuitively understand why public speaking is such a fraughtful endeavor. Imagine you’re a prehistoric human who has somehow ended up with your back to a wall, facing a group of dozens or hundreds of strangers, all staring at you, waiting to see what you’ll do next.
What are the odds you’re getting out of that situation unscathed?
Getting Heard in a Noisy World
Today public speaking is one of the most important skills to building a successful career.
Our world gets more noisy every day. The digital revolution gave us a great gift, the ability for every person with an Internet connection to have a voice as powerful as the largest corporation and most influential people.
But like things, this gift had an equal and opposite reaction.
Anyone can speak up, so anyone is. The Internet doesn’t care if your message is thoughtful, kind, or caring (in fact, algorithms often favor the opposite). That leaves those of us with something to say fighting a cacophony of nonsense, desperately hoping to break through and be heard by others who care.
If you’re reading this article I don’t have to convince you how powerful it is to be a clear and confident speaker. It’s the key to getting the right people to hear your ideas in the right way, and one of the hallmarks of great leaders, be it a boardroom presentation to your managers, a pep-talk to your team, a LinkedIn video on behalf of HR, or even a toast at your best friend’s wedding.
Three Tips for Commanding any Audience
I spent the better part of 10 years as a professional magician, starting with backyard barbeques and local restaurants, then comedy clubs and college campuses, eventually building to national work at corporate and exclusive private events.
When I first started my career as a restaurant magician it was really easy to get people’s attention: walk up to their table and announce I was a magician. Instant engagement!
That is no longer true. Magicians working in similar environments today report a difficult time prying people away from their phones, and even if they do, keeping them away throughout the entire performance.
We are more distracted and disconnected than ever, and if you’re someone who is naturally afraid of public speaking, looking out at an audience of people scrolling their social media feeds isn’t going to assuage your nerves.
I won’t be suggesting you can simply get rid of your fear, for what it’s worth. In the words of Seth Godin,
“Marathon runners don’t stop getting tired. They just figure out where to put the tired. We can’t eliminate fear, but we can learn to dance with it.”
Here are three techniques I developed to dance with public speaking fears.
1. Transform Your Anxiety
To reiterate the science, your nerves are natural and justified. Today, however, they’re mostly misplaced. Your audience is not out to get you. They would much prefer you do a great job.
People are incredibly intuitive and sense immediately when the person on stage (at the front of the room, whatever) is not confident in themselves. Their lack of confidence makes the audience feel uncomfortable, because no one is in control of the situation.
Someone has to be in control of the room, and if it’s not the person speaking, that energy will naturally transfer somewhere else. This is where hecklers come from in comedy clubs. You mostly get hecklers at open mics rather than marquee shows, because when the audience gets uncomfortable with a comic’s lack of confidence, the audience takes control of the room.
So, what can we do about it?
We can transform our anxiety by reframing it as excitement. When you feel that wave of nerves hit you, instead of saying or thinking, “I’m nervous,” simply think, “I’m excited!” You’ll be amazed how fast your body adjusts to the reframe, placing the fear in the shadows while you get a chance to shine.
But you might be thinking, “Why should I be excited?” Here comes the next tip.
2. Adopt a Giving Mindset
You’ve been asked to give a presentation, which means there’s something worth saying and you are the one who has been trusted to say it. Yes, that responsibility is scary. But it’s also an incredible opportunity to make things better, for the right people, at the right moment.
For the first few years of my magic career I struggled to get the reaction I wanted from many of my tricks, jokes, and routines. They weren’t clapping when I did something amazing, or laughing when I said something funny. But I’d seen heroes of mine kill with similar material.
What was I doing wrong?
A veteran entertainer took me aside after one of my shows and suggested something so simple I almost dismissed it:
“Instead of desperately trying to get a certain reaction from the audience, focus on giving them a certain experience instead.”
This piece of advice changed my life, personally and professionally, on and off stage. Many people don’t have a voice or a platform. If you’re so lucky to be given even 5 minutes in front of senior management to pitch an idea, or asked to deliver a toast at your daughter’s college graduation party, you’ve been given a gift. And the best thing you can do with that gift?
Pass it on.
Our fears are often selfish, i.e., “What if I forget what I’m going to say? What if I embarrass myself in front of my peers? What if I trip on a microphone cable and fall flat on my face?”
Rather, the most important question to ask yourself is, “What can I give the audience that will transform them for the better?” Instead of trying to get through it, or get your idea selected, or get a grant, or get applause, or get your daughter’s friends to laugh, focus all your energy on giving something valuable.
Shifting the focus from yourself to the audience is one of the best ways to place the fear off to the side while you do the important work.
3. Master Your Material
This is going to sound incredibly obvious, and yet if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll realize how often you get this wrong; I got it wrong all the time in the beginning of my career as a magician.
Do you really know your speech, pitch, or toast? I don’t just mean having it memorized (you’d be surprised how often people don’t even bother doing that), but have you internalized it? Could you take questions about it and answer on the spot, with additional anecdotes, examples, facts, or statistics to take the audience deeper?
This is simple, but certainly not easy.
You’ll find that when you do the hard work of mastering your content, speaking becomes a whole lot easier and much less scary, because you actually know what you’re talking about.
Most of my stage nerves as a magician were at their worst when I hadn’t mastered my own show. I didn’t really know the transition lines, had to think about which trick came next, and had no idea what I would do if something went wrong.
One of my recent podcast guests, prominent public intellectual Matt Dillahunty, is also a magician, and described a similar experience:
“There was a time when I was completely comfortable on stage as long as I was giving a talk... but I would still get nervous before magic shows. And then I realized why I was getting nervous before those shows. And it only happened when I was introducing a for the first time, or if I, in the back of my head was like, “You haven’t rehearsed this enough. You haven’t planned for what happens when something goes wrong.”
So that little anxiety sits in there. And it turns out as soon as I actually started making sure that I prepped and was comfortable, and nothing got introduced into the show until I was confident in it, that went away too. And now I just- I love it.”
Once you master your presentation you’ll still get nervous, but you can set those nerves aside because you know precisely what you’re up there to say and do. And you won’t be so worried about something going wrong, because if it does, you’ll have the confidence to respond and recover.
Flight Time
So there you have it, three ways to shift your mindset and dance with the (totally reasonable) fear of public speaking. Transform your anxiety to excitement, show up to give instead of take, and master your material.
Lastly, it bears noting that there is simply no substitute for experience. The way you get better at public speaking is the way you get better at everything. If you only give one boardroom pitch a year, or one speech at the company holiday party each December, or one toast every couple of years at a friend or family member’s special occasion, you’re not going to get good at it.
Practicing in front of a mirror or filming yourself is great, but it’s just not the same as standing in front of a room full of strangers, let alone your peers or family, and giving it everything you’ve got.
Plenty of local groups exist for those who’d like to practice. Toastmasters is great for getting lots of flight time in short bursts, and they’ll help you get rid of vocal tics such as “like” and “um,” and help you learn how to stand, where to put your arms, etc.
For what it’s worth, that’s what a lot of my coaching clients, particularly the folks I coach on their upcoming TEDx talks, think we’re going to focus on - the ‘ahs’ and ‘ums’ - and I always tell them the same thing: Vocal tics, where to stand, how to move around the stage, etc mostly work themselves out when you’ve done the tips in this article, particularly mastering your content.
The National Speakers Association is a bit more geared for those who want to speak professionally, even part-time, but their local groups are another good place to practice.
Finally, if you want to dive in the deep end and really learn to dance with fear, try your hand at stand-up comedy on open mic nights. Everything else will seem much, much less scary after that.
Oh, and Joe’s company? It made a smooth transition and is currently thriving, their culture of trust in tact.
Do you have tips for dancing with the fear of public speaking? What’s worked for you? I’d love to hear! Send me a message at contact@brianmillerspeaks.com and I may include your story in a future article, video, or podcast (with your permission).
