Part 5: Six Ways to Overcome FEAR of Speaking
- Derek Newton
- Feb 4
- 11 min read
F.E.A.R. - English Learner Version
Fearful expression arouses reactions
Freeing excellence awaits reality
Fear eats all relaxation
Fill ears and read
Fantastic expectations alarming realisations
Fatal execution always robotic
Faceless evil acts relentless
Forgetting English and realising
You got the Fear
Ian Brown wrote a whole song using only the letters of the word FEAR.
And it’s such a big topic, I decided it deserves its own chapter in this guide.
In part 3 we looked at allowing your speech to emerge naturally, which was a language problem.
In part 5 (this one) we will look at the emotional side of speaking.
We’ll attempt to answer questions like:
How can we become more confident speakers?
Are there strategies we can use to stay calm?
How can we use fear to our advantage?
At the end of this chapter, I’ll also list all 6 strategies as quick action points.
The Secret of Experienced Public Speakers
“You're sitting in a new group and suddenly you hear "let’s start by introducing ourselves,” or your boss drops the dreaded ‘I want to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.’
In an instant, your body transforms into hyper-alert jelly.”
This is the first part of The Nervous Cycle according to the public speaking coaches at Ultraspeaking.
For most of us, our nerves climb and then peak right before we have to speak.
But interestingly, instead of continuing to rise, nerves do the opposite and drop once we start speaking.
“The moment you start speaking, your brain shifts from self-consciousness to self-expression…And as we all know, we feel our best right after speaking.
In most cases, speaking nerves look something like this:"
Our first instinct when we feel this fear is to delay speaking, at least until it passes a little.
But instead of passing, nerves actually stay with us for longer and reach a higher peak if we delay.
Ultraspeaking’s solution is to speak as soon as possible.
The advantage of this strategy is that by speaking first you don’t spend the rest of the meeting nervous about your turn.
“Each time you do this, speaking gets a little easier. One meeting at a time, you’re rewriting your nervous system’s response.”
Manage Your Nerves, Manage Your Career
Speaking first not only helps you manage your nerves; it could also be good for your career.
In his book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam Grant shares observations from research he carried out at a health-care company.
Grant tested the employees on how much they knew about strategies for managing emotions in difficult situations.
Those who performed well in the test, also offered more ideas and suggestions during real-life meetings, and their managers rated them as more effective.
Is it possible that these employees had mastered their emotions, in part, by speaking early in meetings?
Prevention is Better than a Cure
So far we’ve learned that the act of speaking helps us to calm our nerves. But is there anything we can do before we speak? Before the fear starts to build?
To do that, let’s first debunk a couple of popular myths.
Myth #1: You should try to relax
In a famous survey from 1973, 41% of people said they feared public speaking compared to only 19% who said they feared death.
As Jerry Seinfeld later joked, “If you have to go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”
If public speaking inspires such fear, what ideas do people have to fight it?
When Alison Wood Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School, asked 300 Americans to give advice to people preparing for a speech, the most common recommendation was “Try to relax and calm down.”
This is favoured by 90% of professionals, but it’s not the best approach.
Test #1: A Speech
Brooks’ question was “Is reframing fear as excitement the best way to cope with nerves?”
In her first experiment, Brooks made college students deliver a persuasive speech with only 2 minutes to prepare.
Brooks randomly assigned the student to say either “I am calm” or “I am excited” seconds before starting the speech.
The excited group’s speeches were rated 17% more persuasive and 15% more confident.
Reframing fear as excitement also motivated the speakers to speak for longer, boosting the average length by 29%. This amounted to an extra 37 seconds on stage.
Test #2: Maths
In this test, students scored 22% better in a maths test if they were told “Try to get excited” instead of “Try to remain calm.”
Test #3: Singing
This time, students had to sing eighties rock music in public.
Brooks split them into 3 groups:
A control group who did and said nothing before singing.
An anxiety group who said, “I am anxious”.
An excited group who said, “I am excited.
Brooks used a Nintendo Wii game to score the singers for accuracy.
The control group scored 69%
The anxiety group scored 59%
The excited group scored 80%
Why does getting excited work better than trying to calm down?
As Brook explains, “Fear is an intense emotion. Your body is saying ‘Go’, so it’s best to channel that energy into another emotion - an equally intense one.”
Recognising anxiety, especially in the seconds before you need to perform, is like trying to say “Stop” to your emotions.
Your emotions have nowhere to go, so instead of feeling calmer, you try to appear calmer. In psychology, this is known as suppression - a type of emotion regulation where you try to appear confident by controlling your facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language.
But with suppression, you can only hide what you are feeling.
Apart from being mentally distracting, it also interferes with your memory of interactions - not ideal for us as language learners.
If you want to change your emotions, reappraisal is a more suitable tool.
Using reappraisal to lower anxiety
We are using reappraisal when we tell ourselves more optimistic or rational stories. If we believe the new story, then psychologically, this becomes our new truth.
This more optimistic truth helps to reduce our feelings of nervousness
Saying “I am excited” before a performance is one way of using reappraisal.
Since fear and excitement are both ‘high-arousal’ states with similar physiological responses, you can ‘trick’ your brain into reinterpreting the signals relatively easily.
Dealing with Extreme Fear and Phobias
When you feel completely overrun by anxiety, as a first step, it may be better to let the intensity of your emotions reduce before using the ‘excitement’ strategy above.
Matthew D. Lieberman, in his book Social: Why Our Brains are Wired to Connect relates the results of a study comparing 3 different strategies for dealing with a phobia of spiders.
Exposure Therapy - participants repeatedly saw a real spider at a 50cm distance.
Reappraisal Treatment - participants told themselves things like “The little spider isn’t actually dangerous for me.” while looking at a photo of a spider.
Affect Labelling - participants generated affect-label statements such as “I feel anxious that the disgusting spider will jump on me.”
Which one do you think worked best?
The winner was affect labelling.
In fact, the more negative the labels the participants created, the less anxiety they felt.
In contrast to the other two strategies, affect labelling involves naming your fear or describing it in detail.
High school students suffering from anxiety before a maths exam also achieved better results when they wrote down their feelings this way.
Affect labelling may work in a similar way to reappraisal by reducing activity in the amygdala - the area of the brain responsible for emotional responses, especially in situations involving anxiety, fear, or rage.
It seems counterintuitive at first, but if you think about it, it’s exactly the same as how we can reduce our negative emotions by talking with a friend, a loved one, or a psychologist.
Myth #2: Optimism is Always Best
With just a pair of Speedos, a swim hat, and goggles to shield him from the ice-cold water, Lewis Pugh, a world record-breaking cold water swimmer known as The Human Polar Bear, was attempting to become the first person to survive a long-distance swim across the North Pole.
A British explorer once fell into that same freezing water. Three minutes were enough for him to lose several fingers to frostbite. Pugh’s swim would require twenty.
Two days before the attempt Pugh went for a 5-minute practice swim.
As he pulled himself out of the water onto the sea ice, his entire left hand had lost all sensation, and he couldn’t feel the fingers of his right. Two days later his condition still hadn’t improved.
It wasn’t until four months later that he finally made a full recovery.
In the long months that followed, Pugh had plenty of time to reflect as he recovered from his injuries.
And for the first time, he started to imagine failure.
His usual optimism had taken him this far in life.
But blind optimism would kill him.
No, this time he needed a completely different strategy.
Strategic Optimism vs Defensive Pessimism
Psychologist Julie Norem studies two different strategies for dealing with challenges:
Strategic Optimism - anticipate the best, stay calm, and set high expectations
Defensive Pessimism - expect the worst, feel anxious, and imagine all the things that can go wrong
Strategic Optimism is commonly used by people with nonanxious personalities.
Defensive Pessimism is often used by naturally anxious people.
To be considered a true defensive pessimist, your anxiety has to be future-oriented (in contrast to past-oriented), and you can usually tolerate your anxiety enough to accomplish your goals.
Less successful pessimistic tendencies include:
Self-Handicapping - future-oriented pessimists who are overwhelmed by their anxiety. They either avoid tasks, procrastinate, or self-medicate.
Dispositional Pessimism - past-oriented pessimists.
Norem has found that defensive pessimists perform just as well as strategic optimists, despite feeling more anxious and less confident in most tasks.
However, It wasn’t until performing some experiments that she realised defensive pessimists were doing well because of their pessimism.
The Darts Experiment
In this experiment, Norem asked 49 defensive pessimists and 48 strategic optimists to throw darts at a board. The participants were randomly assigned one of three preparation methods:
Method 1: Imagine a perfect performance.
Method 2: Imagine a bad performance.
Method 3: Relax.
Throwing Accuracy
Defensive Pessimists ☹️ | Strategic Optimists 🙂 | |
Best | 2: Imagine a bad performance: 30% more accurate than method 1 | 3: Relax |
Median | 1: Imagine a perfect performance | 1: Imagine a perfect performance |
Worst | 3: Relax | 2: Imagine a bad performance |
The Tracing Experiment
In a tracing task, which required focus and accuracy, the defensive pessimists were 29% more accurate when not encouraged than when encouraged.
Words of encouragement, however, boosted the performance of strategic optimists by 14%.
Norem found that approximately 25-30% of people in the USA consistently use defensive pessimism as a strategy (outside the USA defensive pessimists are often more numerous, due to less cultural bias towards optimism).
Strategic optimism is used by 30%, with the remaining 40-45% inconsistent in their strategy, have no strategy, procrastinate, avoid tasks, etc.
This last 40-45% is important because it’s possible to be more than one ‘type’. As contexts change and situations evolve, it’s common for the strategies we use to change too.
In Norem’s case, she describes her ‘work self’ as a “recovering self-handicapper” (an unproductive pessimist), trying hard to use defensive pessimism consistently. At home, she was a strategic optimist, until babies introduced chaos and worst-case-scenario-thinking into her daily life.
Telling a stressed-out and exhausted mother to “stop worrying”, as Norem learned, helps neither the mother nor defensive pessimists to solve problems.
From Optimist to Defensive Pessimist
Pugh’s anxiety about his swim began to grow so much that he had to bring it under control.
This is where defensive pessimism showed its strengths.
Instead of becoming overwhelmed by his emotions and scared into inactivity, Pugh imagined every possible thing that could go wrong.
For the human mind, neuroscience shows us that the unknown is more terrifying than the negative.
With a clear mental picture of the worst-case scenario, Pugh’s fear started to reduce, and he was motivated to work extra hard to eliminate the risks.
This gave Pugh a sense of control again.
Even negative comments from critics only served to fuel the fire inside him.
Defensive pessimism worked to control Pugh’s anxiety in the long months of preparation and recovery after his failed test swim.
In the days before attempt number two, Pugh felt ready to switch back to his usual optimism.
And now, instead of being motivated by his doubters, he focused on those who believed in him and inspired him.
In -1.7C water, Pugh finally became the first man in history to swim 1km at the North Pole, finishing in 18 minutes and 50 seconds.
What exactly is Defensive Pessimism?
Defensive pessimism involves setting unrealistically low expectations to prepare for potential failure, which motivates hard work to avoid that failure.
Who should use it?
If you tend towards anxiety, especially when faced with challenges, defensive pessimism may be a better approach for you.
Myth #3: Listen to your ‘inner voice’
Why England’s terrible penalty record is great for English learners!
Aside from being quite amusing for the rest of the UK, the England football team’s terrible record in international penalty shootouts offers a valuable psychology lesson.
Until 2018, when they started to take sports psychology (and penalties in particular) more seriously, England had only won 1 penalty shootout in their first 7 attempts.
Since 2018, they have won 3 out of 4.
Here are some of the steps they took:
Consistent penalty practice during training.
Don’t turn your back on the goalkeeper as you walk to your starting position.
Choose a target and commit to it.
Focus on your target, not the goalkeeper.
Pause briefly after the referee’s whistle - don’t rush.
If you study the steps carefully, you may notice that none of them focus on mentality. All the steps give the player something to focus on outside of his own 'inner voice'.
I’ve found many parallels over the years for this deceptively simple advice:
In other sports
In W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, the number one piece of advice for tennis players is NOT to focus on body shape, the racket, or detailed analysis of physical movement. Instead, players must distract their conscious minds by focusing on something external.
External ‘cues’ include things like keeping your eyes on the seam of the ball as it moves through the air, or listening to the sound the ball makes as you strike it.
The idea is that your subconscious mind knows how to move correctly, especially when you see the movement performed by an expert and practise it yourself many times.
Conscious thinking interferes with your natural movement, so you have to distract your conscious mind with an external focus.
If you drive a car you have probably experienced something similar:
Instead of focusing on your hands, or looking at the steering wheel when you turn a corner, you look 20-30 metres ahead in the direction you want the car to travel and your hands effortlessly turn the wheel the perfect amount.
For Actors
In order to avoid bad, result-focused acting with an instruction like “I want you to be angry with David”, Judith Weston, in Directing Actors, encourages actors and directors to choose verbs, facts, images, and physical tasks to inspire performances.
In other words, actors don’t focus on the emotion they want to express. They focus on the action and intention of the character - an eternal focus - which leads to a more natural expression of the emotion.
E.g. “I want to you punish David.”
In Public Speaking
The other day I was listening to Russell Brunson’s podcast.
Brunson is an extremely successful businessman, marketer, and writer who regularly speaks on stage and on social media.
The thing that surprised me during the episode was that he still suffers from nervousness before speaking on stage. The advice which helps him with nervousness is not to focus on himself, but to focus on the audience.
This reminds me of the advice I often give learners during classes:
Focus on the message, not the words.
Focussing on the message means focussing on the listener’s understanding - not on your own internal battle with the grammar and vocabulary monsters.
Conclusion
If you suffer from nerves before speaking in English, or even in your first language, then I hope you find these tips useful the next time you have to speak.
And to make them extra easy to put into practice, here they are as a list of key action points.
Strategic Optimism
If you are a natural optimist, use strategic optimism to avoid becoming anxious during your preparation.
Defensive Pessimism
If you are a natural pessimist, use defensive pessimism to give yourself a sense of control.
Affect Labelling
When you feel completely overwhelmed by anxiety (and if you have time before your interaction) practise affect labelling to reduce the intensity of your emotions.
Excitement Reframe
Reframe your anxiety as excitement in the moments before your interaction.
External Focus
While waiting to speak, occupy your conscious mind by focusing on the other speakers (read parts 3 and 4 of this guide to learn more about listening during conversations).
While speaking, instead of thinking about how you feel, focus on something external like your audience’s comprehension, or your message. Make it about them, not you.
Speak Early
Speak as early as you can during interactions to reduce anxiety quickly. Make this a habit until it becomes second nature.
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