Public Speaking: A Deeply Rooted Fear That Affects Most Of Us
Perhaps the fear slowly begins to build days or even weeks before your scheduled presentation. That uneasy feeling grows bigger and bigger as the big day approaches. Right before you are about to get up, as you are announced, you can feel your heart pounding in your chest. Almost as if all of your biggest fears come forward to the forefront of your mind all at once. Like an emotional wave building up and then crashing down upon your desired composure. Sound familiar? Public speaking is widely known to be one of the biggest fears people encounter. Yet it’s something that most of us wish we can be better at or even master. The good news is that with practice, preparation, and mindfulness exercises, it is possible. How can hypnotherapy help you along with this goal?
There are many benefits to becoming a better public speaker. It can help you along in your personal life as well as your career. It will help you with your confidence, help share ideas, motivate and inspire others around you which can help make you into a more effective leader. It also helps develop your writing skills, vocabulary and speech fluency. Which in turn develops you into a more effective communicator. There are many benefits, yet all the deeply rooted personal fears people have surrounding public speaking make it difficult for them to do or even have them avoid speaking publicly altogether. If you have a strong conscious desire to be a better public speaker, the only thing holding you back currently are your present fears. Real or imagined, you can change your thoughts on the matter to help you move forward. By practicing public speaking as well as self-hypnosis, it will greatly improve your effectiveness. Through hard work and practice, you can significantly reduce your fears or even possibly eliminate them.
The Fear Of Public Speaking, How You Can Overcome It The subconscious part of your mind can be looked at as a vast memory store. It holds all your memories, beliefs, past traumas and fears. There may be many different reasons why you have these fears. Far too many to be discussed in this article. Regardless, there are proven methods to help you overcome your fears and help you become a far more confident and effective public speaker. If you’ve got a presentation coming up, you can start by researching and learning your topic inside and out. The more you know about what you will be speaking about will help you to recover from any mishaps quicker. It will also prepare you to handle any questions you might get as well as make you more confident when you are speaking to your target audience.
Once you’ve adequately researched and educated yourself on your topic, prepare your talk well in advance. This will give you adequate time to refine and relearn anything you may need to know for the big day. It also gives you the opportunity to practice your presentation multiple times. This is a key point: practice … practice … practice. It makes perfect. The more you practice, the more “automatic”, confident and natural sounding you’ll be for presentation day.
Joining a local group or toastmasters club can help you along with getting practice among a group of like minded people. It’s a worry-free, nonjudgmental way of getting all the right feedback you need in order to improve on yourself and your public speaking skills.
Deep breathing exercises, right before your presentation, are also a very effective tool that can be used to recenter and refocus your attention on the present task. By refocusing your thoughts you are able to calm your mind and stop it from spinning out of control by letting your fears get the better of you. By using hypnotherapy, and practicing self-hypnosis, you can create specific “calming anchors” that can help you along with this process.
Hypnotherapy & Self-Hypnosis Can Help You Along: To Becoming a Better Public Speaker Hypnotherapy can be an effective way of releasing and managing specific fears you may have surrounding public speaking. It gives you a way in which you can confront your subconscious fears and view them with a different perspective.
In addition, visualizing your success while in hypnosis by practicing various guided imagery techniques and exercises can greatly increase your confidence and self-esteem. By reinforcing these exercises and practicing them at home, you can train your subconscious mind to significantly reduce anxiety, subconscious fears and triggers that may be holding you back from being a very effective public speaker. Self-hypnosis exercises are excellent mindfulness techniques that can further accelerate your success.
If you have any questions, interested in trying out a session, or getting a personalized self-hypnosis tape made, please reach out and feel free to send me an e-mail.
Written By: Sebastian Di Cesare PhD, CHt - a research scientist & practicing Certified Hypnotherapist based in Vancouver, Canada.
