You won’t be perfect, and that’s ok!
Your heart starts thumping hard, you suddenly feel thirsty, your hands are cold or maybe sweating, and you just have this urge to go to the toilet. If you have ever had to speak to an audience, you probably went through all of this. And it’s normal! It has been estimated that 75 percent of people suffer from fear of public speaking. Some studies suggest - I’m not kidding - that after dying, this is our second biggest fear.
If you think that good public speakers don’t feel some anxiety just before walking on the stage or to the microphone, you’re wrong. Everybody does. I do, too. And you know what? Having some anxiety is actually better. Without it, there’s the risk of becoming too confident and making mistakes for which you are not prepared. The trick is: you need to manage this anxiety, and make it become the engine behind your talk.
Of course, there are a few techniques that you can use to reduce this anxiety and transform it into positive energy, but I will cover them in another post. Here, I’ll just mention three facts that can already mitigate this widespread fear.
No matter how prepared you are, let me break it to you: you are not going to be perfect. Nobody is! At the end of your presentation or speech, you will definitely notice that you could have done better in some parts. But most likely, you are the only one that knows that. The audience won’t have noticed it.
You are not going to look as nervous as you feel. The audience can’t feel your heart thumping, nor can they touch your sweaty hands. Yes, your voice might sound hesitant, and you might stutter a few words, but overall only a tiny part of the storm inside you is actually visible. Which links to …
The audience doesn’t want you to be perfect. They want to see a human speaking, not a machine, and humans are imperfect. The people listening to you want to see a real person doing their best. As long as you put all of yourself in it, they will like it.
