Set aside snakes, forget flying and disregard the dark – the top fear for many professionals is public speaking. For some, glossophobia (as the condition is officially known) is even more terrifying than dying. It may sound far-fetched, but not to those whose careers force them to fight through the phobia.
“I still am terrified before I go onstage. My heart’s pounding. I’m sweating so I always have clinical-strength deodorant on,” quips Narges Nirumvala, CEO of Vancouver-based ExecutiveSpeak Coaching International. “I think public speaking, for anyone, takes a tremendous amount of courage. So don’t expect to not experience fear.”
Nirumvala faced her own “do or die” situation about seven years ago. After being fired from a menial job, she spent months in “complete obscurity and unemployment,” unable to secure even a minimum-wage position. As she turned toward social assistance, her husband suggested she leverage her talent as a communicator and venture out on her own. Today, she has hundreds of conferences and group presentations under her belt as one of Canada’s leading executive speech coaches and a paid motivational speaker.
“I didn’t have an option. And often for my leaders, it’s the same situation. They’ve been promoted, they are going to be CEO in a year, maybe they’ve just become executive director, maybe they’re going to be running for election,” says Nirumvala. “All of a sudden it’s absolutely vital that they can speak well in public.”
If you’ve ever been to a conference or listened to your boss give a speech before you and your colleagues, chances are you’ve witnessed someone fearful of public speaking. Many who appear confident on the outside are scared to death on the inside. Through training, practice and learning from others, they’ve overcome it.
Learn what to do (and what not to) by watching others ■ A turning point in Nirumvala’s career was after watching a technology CEO give a very dull talk at a human resources conference a few years back. “He was boring people to death. It was awful,” she says. “One woman had fallen asleep next to me; the other woman was on her phone the whole time.”
Putting pen to napkin, she documented 67 mistakes made by the speaker – insights later shared in her Amazon.com bestseller Capture the Spotlight. Among them: reading off a PowerPoint, speaking to a PowerPoint and failing to share stories. “That’s how it started,” she says. “I went to hear someone speak. He was terrible. I learned so much.”
Reading, listening and taking notes are simple yet powerful ways to collect insights and ideas to improve your public speaking skills. There’s a plethora of content available on websites such as YouTube or TED Talks, giving professionals front-row access to the best presenters, performers and speakers in the world. It will also help you pick up on any new trends and see what works – and doesn’t work.
“There’s no doubt that the expectations for an entertaining speaker today is very different than it was,” says Debby Carreau, founder and CEO of Vancouver-based Inspired HR and chair of the Young Presidents’ Organization Canada’s women’s network. “It really has shifted and it’s also upped the game.”
Carreau’s advice for beginners is to start small and work within your comfort zone. Then, start slowly pushing the envelope by making and posting videos on channels such as Facebook or Instagram and ask for feedback. She also recommends people practise by reading their speech out loud before delivering it live. “You have to rehearse,” she says, noting that writing and reading a speech is a lot different from saying it out loud. When you verbalize, words may sound different, breathing becomes an issue and the flow changes.
Focus on content as much as delivery ■ “Every time that I get behind the podium, my legs still shake,” Anna Tudela, vice-president of diversity and regulatory affairs at Vancouver-based Goldcorp, says of her experience public speaking. “But it shakes for about half a second, and then you look at the audience and then you feel comfortable. And then you just do it.”
One of the best ways to get better at public speaking is to just do it, and keep doing it, to boost confidence and help lessen the fear over time. That means working on both the content and the delivery.
Tudela stresses the importance of fully understanding and mastering the contents of your speech to help improve the delivery. “If you know the subject matter that you’re going to be discussing, then you feel more comfortable,” she says.
Remembering the five p’s her husband taught her,“Proper preparation prevents poor performance,” also helps. For Tudela, preparation also includes working on posture and choosing clothing that helps her feel more comfortable when speaking in front of an audience.
Injecting personal stories into your speech is another way to help you feel more comfortable and to engage the crowd, says Kristy White, director of operations at Dale Carnegie Training of British Columbia. White says the magic formula for storytelling is to share a vivid personal experience relevant to the point, use facts and evidence to bolster a statement or case, illustrate the action audience members should take and then explain what they stand to benefit.
“If you follow that format in a concise and clear way, you’ll very quickly be able to get people on board with what you need them to do,” White says. “What we teach people is to speak about something that you know. Earn the right to get up in front of a group of people. Feel confident in what you’re talking about. And if you’re telling a story, if you’re talking about your own experience and using it as an example of how to make your point, no one’s going to tell you you’re wrong.”
Get out of your head and into the audience ■ As a professional facilitator, Carol Carter would deal with her “crazy fear” of public speaking by getting up to speak for two to three minutes before diving into her seat and encouraging participants to speak up and interact with each other instead. Then she joined Toastmasters.
She lasted 38 seconds up at the front of the room during her first meeting in 2010. The shaking stopped after her third speech. By her eighth, she felt confident enough to ditch her notes. And within eight and a half months of starting, she came third in B.C. in Toastmasters’ Humorous Speech Contest. “I watch a lot of speeches and I’m always looking for good role models, and people that are doing comedy really well because I’m terrible at it,” says Carter, who this year is serving as director of District 21 Toastmasters, which encompasses clubs in the Lower Mainland, on Vancouver Island, and from south of the Fraser up to the Interior.
“Forcing yourself to speak as much as you can is the hard way of doing things. The easy way is to get into a group that causes you to practise every week. That gives you feedback, and mentoring, and helps you put one foot in front of the other until the fear disappears,” says Carter, who is also the founder of GetThrival! Training & Consulting.
Good public speaking requires that kind of conquering, can-do-better attitude – and a shift in mindset. You need to get comfortable with sharing thoughts, feelings, stories and opinions. It starts with delivering the contents out loud to yourself, then sharing it with others.
“We all have three speeches,” White says, quoting the famed leadership trainer Dale Carnegie, “the one we practise, the one we give, the one we wish we’d given. That’s just to say that it’s not going to be perfect every time. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Look for an opportunity to have fun when you’re presenting. Enjoy it. Get passionate about it. Be enthusiastic about sharing your message.”
If you don’t find it interesting, others won’t either ■ Vancity president and CEO Tamara Vrooman started public speaking in university by giving speeches to students, peers and professors. “My breakthrough came when I realized that if it wasn’t interesting to me, it probably wasn’t interesting to the audience,” says Vrooman.
Her secret? Don’t use notes or try to memorize speeches. “That really changed the experience for me because I realized that if I was engaged, then probably I would be engaging,” she says. “And all of the other stuff that I worried about would go away.”
Admitting she still gets nervous, Vrooman uses the adrenaline to bring energy to her presentations. She sinks into the moment, taking cues from her audience by watching body language, and adjusting where needed. She also looks inward, reflecting on the message she wants to convey, and how she wants to convey it. She adapts, using tips and tricks from other speakers whose style resonates with hers.
“The message can be conveyed in a host of other ways,” Vrooman says of public speaking. “Why do we choose public speaking? Well, we must use public speaking because the person conveying it adds value to the message. So think about the message less and yourself more.”
At the end of the day though, it’s about good content and not letting a poor performance set you back. “I would rather listen to an interesting speech poorly delivered than an uninteresting speech perfectly delivered,” Vrooman says.
