Nobody Was Born To Be A Powerful Speaker

5 minute read.

In what situations are you nervous? Do you have any stories where you were too nervous to talk? Maybe you were nervous on a first date or talking to your team? How do you feel about communication training in our educational system? Is your employer making your training and development a priority?

Everyone you know who is an effective powerful speaker has worked on it — a lot! Anyone you know who’s an impressive public speaker has worked on their presentation skills. They most likely still have a coach to help them as well.

What about your favorite Ted Talk speakers? They’ve been working on that speech for many, many years. They most probably started out in the church basement or classroom practicing debate. They also probably haven’t been working on their interpersonal communication skills as much and still feel a bit nervous when meeting new people or making introductions.

It’s just expected that you can do it, which only helps to make us feel worse about ourselves and perpetuates our nervousness when we talk! You went to school, and you focused on grades and academic achievement. You learned science, math, history, geography, and maybe even music, but probably very little on communication skills. Show and tell began and ended in kindergarten.

Did you learn how to introduce yourself in 3rd grade? Was it focused on that you should communicate effectively when you were 8 years old? Did someone teach you how to make small talk? Did anyone prepare you for speaking in groups? We are literally taught in school to be petrified of public speaking!

You get your degree, and then you get a job. You practice your skill set for many years. As an adult, you don’t get mad at yourself if you don’t know something. You go out and learn it! Imagine if you put one fraction of that energy into your communication skills?

The great news is that it’s not your fault. You are absolutely not to blame. Why we get nervous when we talk has to do with education and evolution. The other great news is that you’re not alone. Anyone who has never felt nervous when they speak is probably a psychopath.

Once every couple of years in school, we are supposed to give an oral report in front of the class. How terrifying is that situation? How many of you absolutely dreaded it? I know I did! We are literally taught in school to be petrified of public speaking because it is not being trained on a regular basis.

By not reinforcing courage and confidence in speaking, all of us over time are trained to be nervous or even terrified when we talk, whether the school system wants to admit it or not. I remember doing a book report in 9th grade, where after a week of practicing all the wrong things, I got up there and froze.

I also remember a very embarrassing incident in Public Speaking class in college that I’ll tell you about if you ask. When we face a group of strangers, our primitive brain shuts down the prefrontal cortex and gives us two choices: Fight or Flight.

Do your knees and hands shake? Are you actually breathing? Do you sweat? How about walking away from the speech not remembering what you said, but then everyone said you did a great job, so it must be okay, right? Or were they just trying to be nice and telling us what we wanted to hear?

Shaking hands and knees, heart beating rapidly, hyperventilated breathing, and drawing a blank are all normal reactions to speaking anxiety and stress. For 2 million years plus, we’ve been going into fight or flight mode because we are hard-wired for that behavior. This has caused us to survive as a species. When we face a group of strangers, our primitive brain shuts down our modern prefrontal cortex and gives us 2 choices, of which we take one and do it fast.

People who are great communicators have made it a priority to develop their communication skills. Today our bodies do the same thing as our ancestors. Only now, we can’t do one of those two options that are provided for us by our primitive brains. We must stay precisely where we are, and we can’t fight. That’s when our bodies react in fear and we feel like fleeing from the painful situation.

It gets worse folks. I’m sorry to report it. Now, you have all of these negative speaking experiences that are clearly a result of you not knowing how to communicate over the years, even though people said you were supposed to be “born with fantastic communication skills”. So now you can add the additional fear of knowing how bad it’s going to get because of all the hogwash you’ve been told. This further compounds your nervousness!

Some people are great at making small talk or introductions. They’ve worked on and practiced those skills. On the other hand, most folks don’t like introducing themselves because they never know what to say. People who are great communicators have made it a priority to develop their interpersonal communication skills.

To top it off, there’s nothing else in the world we were born knowing how to do impeccably–not one thing. We take golf lessons, tennis lessons, music lessons, even acting lessons to get better at something we were not previously good at. There really is no reason why we should still not focus on speaking and communication lessons. We must start by asking ourselves how to change our nervousness into power.

Let me know if there’s anything you want to learn about more specifically from this list of four things.

1. Awareness

Any time you want to make a change, you need first to become aware of the specific problem. In the case of nervousness, it’s the tension in your body. We humans carry around tension that we don’t even know about until we become injured. Drop your chin down to your chest, let it hang there, and roll your shoulders back in circles. Do this about 10 or 15 times.

2. Find Your Relaxed Mode

Bring your shoulders up to your ears and tighten all the surrounding muscles. Hold it for 20 seconds and let go. Do your shoulders feel more relaxed? Do that with the muscles of your face and your mouth too. This will not only help you to be more relaxed but also help you become aware of the tension that you didn’t know existed.

3. Focus on One Situation at a Time

Take note of the communicative situations you’re most concerned about and focus on only one at a time. Start with the easiest ones first. Do you need to speak in meetings but your message gets jumbled? Are you going on job interviews or first dates? Rank your situations in order from easy to challenging and start with the easy ones first.

4. Open Your Stage Presence

When you are communicating with people, make sure your body is open. Don’t cross your arms or legs. You can even open your arms when you’re greeting people or speaking. It gives you control over yourself, your speech and whoever you are speaking with.

Try these techniques for a week or two and let me know how you feel.

I’d love for you to make changes in our school system. If you have kids in school, make demands that teachers help children design their presentations and practice them in a systematic, comfortable way. Not just assign them an oral report with directions. Teachers are supposed to teach kids! That’s actually their job!

Teachers, help your students to stand up and talk. Go little by little. But help them do the actual speaking and accomplish every part with success. Have your students practice introducing themselves to each other and exchange information back and forth. Make it part of the curriculum.

Practice making small talk every change you get. Also, learn some relaxation exercises and do them daily with the kids. There is no reason why we can’t train children to be powerful speakers and express themselves in the best possible way!

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Always keep leaping forward, my friend.

NJ

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