Here are 3 articles on how to overcome the fear of public speaking. You are welcome to reprint these articles in their entirety including the complete bylines at the bottom of each.

The Fear of Public Speaking: Top Myths Exposed and Truths Revealed
Improve Your Presentation Skills and Beat the Fear of Public Speaking
6 Steps to Speaking without Social Anxiety: How to Become a Confident Public Speaker

The Fear of Public Speaking: Top Myths Exposed and Truths Revealed

There are tons of myths and misconceptions about public speaking. Unfortunately these untruths serve to reinforce and increase speaking anxiety. I’d like to share with you here three of the twelve myths that my coauthor and I expose in our New York Times bestselling book The Confident Speaker.

Myth #1: Anxiety will continue to increase over time

Many people fear that if they do not do something to control their distress, it will continue to spiral out of control forever or until something bad happens. This is not true.

When you’re agitated, the sympathetic part of your nervous system kicks in and you experience the adrenaline rush that leads to your heart racing, sweating, and trembling. This response will naturally decrease because the parasympathetic component of your nervous system will kick in and reduces the anxiety. This is called “habituation.” Your body and mind get used to the anxiety and it fades away.

Habituation or getting used to anxiety always occurs and makes the fear decrease over time. It is a biological response system. Your anxiety will decrease. Every living organism habituates. One of my colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania is fond of saying, “even sea slugs habituate.”

Sometimes when we are particularly nervous, it may take longer for habituation to occur. In general, the length of time for habituation is correlated with the severity of the fear. In other words, the more serious your anxiety is, the longer it will take for your nervous system to get used to it.

Myth #2: Anxiety worsens performance

It is very common to think that we performed worse because we were feeling anxious. In fact, this belief is a major cause and maintainer of anxiety. Overcome this belief and you are likely to overcome much of your nervousness.

With fear, it is very common to judge how the situation went based on how you felt. Do you think this is an accurate way to assess the effectiveness or quality of the performance? If you said no, you are starting to understand how fear works! There are a number of reasons why it is not accurate to judge performance based on how we feel:

1. Many of our feelings are not visible to others. People think that things are observable to others that truly are not.

2. Our thinking is distorted when we worry. Since thinking becomes less logical and coherent during periods of high anxiety, many conclusions we make are not valid.

3. We are our own worst critics. While we sit around dwelling on the one thing we forgot to say, our audience is actually excited about the four great points we did make.

I often have my clients with performance anxiety speak in front of others and ask the observers to rate the performances. Time and time again we find that high anxiety was not related to poor performance. Someone could be rated as a 9 on anxiety (with 10 being the highest anxiety) and a 9 on performance (with 10 being the best).

Raters almost always also rated visible anxiety as lower than the speakers rated their anxiety. A speaker would give himself an 8 and the observer would give him a 3. This reinforces the idea that how we feel is not the same as how we look.

Myth #3: You should practice and rehearse so much that you will know everything and not be anxious

While it is true that you should practice any presentation so you are very comfortable not only with your material but also with talking about it, over-preparation can be too much of a good thing. You learn to attribute your speech success to practicing over and over and you may not think that you can speak will without such extensive rehearsal. This actually takes away from any confidence you have when you have to give spontaneous or last-minute talks.

One client, Maria, said that she practiced her speech about 100 times and it went very well until the question and answer phase. People asked her about things she was not ready for and all she could think was, “Oh no, I didn’t prepare for this!” In reality she knew her material very well but when it came to saying things that were not rehearsed, she panicked.

Another problem that comes from practicing too much is that you can sound like you practiced too much. When a talk is over practiced, it can become stiff and mechanical sounding. You may sound like you are reading off a teleprompter rather than speaking naturally.

Keep yourself from falling prey to these myths, get practice, and you will overcome your fear of public speaking and become a confident and compelling speaker.

Larina Kase, PsyD, MBA is a business psychologist and peak performance consultant. This article was adapted from her New York Times bestselling coauthored book The Confident Speaker. Get more articles on overcoming the fear of public speaking at  www.TheConfidentSpeaker.com

KEYWORDS:
The fear of public speaking, speaking anxiety, performance anxiety, overcoming the fear of public speaking, speech success, and peak performance.

Improve Your Presentation Skills and Beat the Fear of Public Speaking with the Right Support

You might think that getting better at public speaking is all up to you. After all, you’re the one who needs to get up there and talk. In reality, however, if you don’t get assistance, it will be difficult to gain confidence in your public speaking abilities and hone your presentation skills.

Others can offer you a great deal of valuable guidance and support as a speaker. I always say, “Why do alone what you can do with more fun and less effort with others?” I believe this idea holds true for professional speaking.

Preparing and practicing are typically not much fun, but with the right support they can be enjoyable and productive. Performing can be highly nerve-wracking. Relying on others can take away some of the anxiety and stress. And finally if you’re prone to post-presentation self-criticism, look to the feedback of others to evaluate your performance, rather than relying on your harsh self analysis.

Here are some more specific tips for how to get help with the three P’s of power presentations:

Preparation

• Ask the meeting planner or whoever coordinates your presentation about the set-up of the room, and who will support you with technology so you don’t need to worry about those things.

• Rehearse in front of some colleagues and friends and ask them for feedback, including what you did well.

• If you feel do better with two people presenting, ask if you can get a co-presenter.

• Collect information about your audience. The more that you know and can help them, the more they will help you during your talk by giving you supportive, positive energy

•  Let the key people in your life know that you are embarking on something challenging, and let them know how they can help you reduce stress in other areas of life.

Performance

Make sure your audience is with you by asking questions and getting them involved.

Assign someone in the audience to help out in case of technical failure or to let you know when you need to wrap up.

Use other people’s humor. If you’re not great at telling jokes and using humor, tell stories or use cartoons or images that other people have developed. Just make sure it fits your style.

Post-Presentation

• Collect detailed feedback, and build your confidence by focusing on what you did well.

• Meet your audience members by announcing that you will stay around after your presentation.

• If you start doing a post-mortem (telling yourself everything you did wrong- this is not helpful) get engaged in a conversation.

• Go out to celebrate with someone you enjoy spending time with. You did something difficult and you deserve a reward!

Getting support can be challenging. It’s often hard to ask for help and rely on others. When, however, you do, you’ll see that it’s definitely worth it. With the right support from friends, coaches, colleagues, or others, you will find a dramatic increase in your speaking abilities and confidence. Enjoy!

Larina Kase, PsyD, MBA is a business psychologist expert in peak performance and the coauthor of The New York Times bestselling book The Confident Speaker. Get articles and take a charisma quotient quiz at www.TheConfidentSpeaker.com

KEYWORDS:
presentation skills, the fear of public speaking, public speaking, self-criticism, power presentations, speaking abilities

6 Steps to Speaking without Social Anxiety: How to Become a Confident Public Speaker

By Dr. Larina Kase

Would you rather scrub your bathroom floor than get up and speak in front of people?
If so, you’re not alone. The fear of public speaking is the #1 fear in Americans, and affects people across the globe.

I’ve helped hundreds of people build presentation skills and I’d like to help you too. Here are six crucial steps to take the stress out of public speaking.

Step #1: Know Your Audience
When you know your audience you can tailor the presentation to benefit them. Learn about your audience by conducting a brief email survey, interviewing audience members beforehand, and asking the meeting planner questions.

Knowing your audience will reduce performance anxiety because you’ll feel a connection with them. You’ll know that you are talking about interesting topics, which eliminates the fear of boring them. They will participate and become more engaged.

Step #2: Select the Right Topic
You also need to choose the right topic for YOU. Research shows that the top three professional speaker characteristics are the topic, speaker's enthusiasm, and knowledge. You’ll achieve all three when you discuss something you know, love, and can easily talk about.

If you’re assigned a topic, you can:

1. Tie the assigned topic to what you want to discuss.

2. Engage your curiosity and become interested. If you are not interested in the topic, no one else will be.

3. Smile and gesture during your talk to convey interest.

4. Partner up with someone and discuss only the parts you enjoy.

Step #3: Become Less Self-Conscious
Have you noticed yourself mentally inventorying your hair, posture, voice, outfit, and word choices?

These things make you more self conscious and cause social anxiety. Instead focus on something external and get your attention off of yourself.

Some ways to focus externally include: Pay attention to what others are saying; Observe how the room looks; Get into the feeling and passion behind what you’re saying.

Practice focusing externally in other conversations and situations so you can get good at it before your presentation.

Step #4: Get Physically and Mentally Ready Beforehand

If you are someone who gets anxiety symptoms such as racing heart, sweating, or shaking, get your body relaxed through exercise.

To burn off nervous energy and release muscle tension, get 30-45 minutes of cardiovascular exercise three hours before your talk. Do some calming exercises like stretching, deep breathing, and muscle relaxation 20-30 minutes beforehand.

Get mentally ready by imagining yourself delivering the presentation exactly as you want. Picture yourself feeling great and the audience reacting very well. A few minutes before you start, focus your energy on the powerful image you’ve created.

Step #5: Conquer Your Fearful Thoughts
Figure out exactly what you’re afraid of and then evaluate the likelihood of the fear happening. If you’re afraid of tripping, calculate how many times you’ve tripped in the past or consider how you handled it if you did. It’s probably not nearly as bad as you think.

A common mistake is thinking that because you felt nervous, the performance was horrible. How you felt is not the best measure of how things actually went. Most people say their talk went worse than audience members report.

Step #6: Connect with Your Audience
We all know what it is like to have someone speak at us. Think of yourself as having a conversation with the audience, just as you would during a one on one conversation. Allow your personality to shine through.

Remember to look at individuals for at least three seconds but not longer than five or ten seconds or they’ll feel stared down. Use animated facial expressions and do not hide behind a lectern or other prop.

Practice Your Way to Success
Now you have the 6 steps: knowing your audience, picking your topic, reducing self-consciousness, preparing effectively, handling fearful thoughts, and connecting with the audience. Put them to practice with as much public speaking as possible and you’ll gain poise, polish, and confidence.

Larina Kase, PsyD, MBA is a business psychologist, peak performance expert and coauthor of The New York Times bestselling book, The Confident Speaker (McGraw-Hill, 2007). Get free resources including a charisma quiz at www.TheConfidentSpeaker.com