If the thought of getting up in front of a crowd or interacting with a live audience chills down your spine, you're not alone. Fear of public speaking 'Glossophobia' is the most pertinent amongst all phobias, with an average person ranking it on a much higher scale, as compared to other phobias. The truth is, this fear has every chance of affecting your professional and personal life. Fear of Public speaking is a form of performance anxiety in which a person becomes conscious and concerned about his/her appearance, gestures, dialogue, and more. Time and again, people try to shelter themselves by avoiding public speaking, leading to a struggle against speech anxiety, and by doing this; they get misled into making this social disease more potent, chronic, and disruptive.
At the professional as well as the social forefront, it is important for you to be able to convey your views/opinions. Whether you are giving a formal presentation to an audience, or simply asking your boss for a promotion, speaking skills are essential to getting ahead in a professional race. Therefore, public speaking should be promoted, instead of being avoided.
Universally, it is estimated that as much as 73% of the population struggles with a fear of public speaking to a certain degree. That means some 238 million people feel nervous about talking to others. There are various types of public speaking that one can opt from. While monologue is there in the form of a speech, a dialogue is a one to one conversation. When it comes to a conference, the listeners can range up to 25, having a single speaker; while in a seminar, the audience doubles up as speakers.
Be prepared! If you want to overcome your fear of public speaking and not being perfect, get yourself organized ahead of time. Carefully review all the essentials you can acquire to be not called Glossophobic. The vital key is knowledge of the subject because, without profound knowledge on the subject, there are chances of the message getting hampered with the usage of unnecessary fillers. So, learn all you can about your topic well in advance. This makes it less likely that you will say something incorrect or go off track. If you do stray slightly, knowing your topic well will increase your odds of recovering quickly.
Vocabulary and Voice clarity - A good orator is always armed with sound vocabulary. The overuse of jargon-centric terms alienates people from what you are trying to convey. And the clarity of voice is needed to convey the objective, laying great emphasis on the keywords, to drive the message across masses.
Body Language & Self Confidence - The correct body language and pace of speech ensures that the message gets disseminated and assimilated, in the ideal frame of mind. Self Confidence is like the salt in a dish. Without self-confidence, all the above ingredients will fail and your dish will be a bland failure and will not induce any flavor to the person consuming it.
You can call self-confidence the glue that keeps the whole setup together. Lack of composure induces a fear that you are not liked by people or you lack a good personality. When you lack belief in yourself, you are not confident about the subject that you are going to speak on and end up hampering your communication. To work on that, one needs to be reminded that self-confidence constitutes of-INNER TRAITS: Self-assurance, motivation, positive stimulus, attitude, perception, value, and beliefs. OUTWARD TRAITS: Posture, dressing, grooming, body language.
So, while it may not be possible to entirely overcome your glossophobia. But, don’t be afraid of the sounds of silence. When you momentarily lose track of what you are saying, you may feel nervous and feel that you have been silent forever. But it’s probably no longer than a few seconds, so simply take a few slow, deep breaths and proceed. Remind yourself that even if the moment of silence was longer than a moment, that’s okay, too. Your audience probably figured that the pause was planned and they won’t mind a bit.
I believe “The route to overcome fear is to become so muffled up in something that you forget to be afraid.”
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