Overcoming Social Anxiety and the Fear of Public Speaking
- debbiejeremiah
- Apr 23
- 4 min read
Many professionals struggle with the fear of public speaking, which can significantly impact workplace performance, career development and wellbeing. Ask someone with such a fear how they’ve slept in the run up to a presentation and you’ll get a sense of the true impact.
Many of my clients seek inner mind or subconscious change support for their fear of presenting or public speaking. Whilst some simply didn’t present enough when younger, for many the fear is underpinned and worsened by a strong social anxiety. This social anxiety manifests as a fear of being observed, being the center of attention, speaking up to authority, hearing the sound of their own voice, of being judged and of course, of being rejected.
Understanding Social Anxiety and the Fear of Public Speaking
In any fearful situation, the fight/flight response causes the executive functioning part of your brain to go off-line. Instantly you are unable to think, plan, remember, find the right words, be clever or control your emotions. This is perfectly normal and although it helped your stone age ancestors to avoid danger, it’s not ideal in the workplace.
If you also have social anxiety, then that pressured situation may cause your awareness to rapidly switch from external to internal; from what’s around you to what’s happening within you. This extreme self-consciousness causes you to be hyper aware of your racing heart, sweating, shallow breathing, weak legs or the sudden need for the bathroom. You become hyper aware of your hand movements or your faltering voice. You might also notice an urge to protect the vulnerable parts of the body with your hands, arms or by crossing your legs. And all of this creates a vicious circle. The more aware you become of the internal signals, the louder they seem to be. It’s easy to see how these loud inner sensations can easily tip someone into a panic attack.
Your imagination is an amazing but often underused classroom or rehearsal room when it comes to learning.
But knowing that this downward spiral of anxiety and safety seeking symptoms involves self-focused attention or extreme self-consciousness, gives us part of the solution; your imagination.
The Power of Your Imagination
A scary movie or a good book is only so, because your imagination makes it so. Your imagination creates your reality and it’s an amazing but often underused classroom or rehearsal room when it comes to learning, allowing you to try out different versions of an event. Think training role plays or VR simulations, but with your eyes closed.
People with a fear of presenting have created a mental image or association that presenting is life threatening. Inner mind change experts like myself, help to effortlessly change those internal images to create different, more positive associations. One way to do this for fear of presenting and social anxiety is to use vivid mental imagery to notice the rapid shifts in the direction of attention that occurs, as you become increasingly self-conscious. The aim is then to practice consciously shifting that attention back outwards, away from yourself and onto your audience or environment.
Resolving Social Anxiety Through Outward Focused Attention
So within a state of calm relaxation, the client may be asked to vividly imagine a conference room, gradually filling up with people and to notice the direction of their attention (outwards or inwards?). By having them look hard at an audience (that is perhaps safely frozen in time), they can practice switching from a position of ‘everyone is looking at me’ to ‘I am looking at everyone’, so maintaining that outward looking direction. By essentially distracting themselves and keeping their attention outwards, self-consciousness or social anxiety remains low.
In this moment how much of your attention is outward and external, versus inward and internally on yourself?
The sense of safety is enhanced by the releasing of any neuromuscular tension together with the holding and releasing of the breath (progressive muscle relaxation) and positive suggestions to do with the comfort and ease around presenting that are ‘heard’ by the subconscious within that calm, relaxed state.
The outcome of this mental rehearsal is a growing sense of comfort and ease with presenting, together with strategies to use in the moment. Weeks of dread beforehand can be transformed into a few normal last minute nerves.
Quick Mind Hacks to Manage Social Anxiety
Here are some practical techniques to manage social anxiety during presentations or social events:
It’s Your Movie: Imagine you are the director of a movie and everyone else is in your film. Focus on observing others rather than worrying about being observed. This shift in perspective can reduce self-consciousness.
Make Eye Contact: If you lose your train of thought in a presentation, pause, smile and then make some sustained eye contact with the audience. Eye contact helps reorient you and brings your attention back to the present moment, helping bring your mind come back on-line.
Squeeze and Release: Use progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) techniques to calm your entire nervous system. Scrunch your toes and squeeze your feet, ankles, knees and thighs tightly together. Hold your breath and then slowly release both. This can quickly reduce anxiety without drawing attention to yourself.
You do all of the looking because everyone is in your movie.
Conclusion
Addressing social anxiety and fear of presenting is essential for the development of leaders. Social anxiety and self-consciousness are to some extent automatic reactions and patterns of thought and as such, there is much that we can do to improve them. By reducing social anxiety we can help leaders to overcome their fears of presenting and thrive in their roles, making meetings and presentations easier and more effective - and even weddings, parties and BBQs more enjoyable too.
What do you think? Please share your thoughts, experiences or questions!
Debbie Jeremiah is a regressionist and hypnotherapist, with a background in executive education. She helps leaders to change their outer world, by changing the beliefs within their inner world. Debbie offers Presenting for the Petrified 1:1 sessions and small group workshops, to help individuals overcome the fear of public speaking in a gentle, brain-friendly way.
These are her own thoughts and opinions and as such, may contain inaccuracies and biases.
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