The Fear of Making a Fool of Yourself When Presenting in Public

The fear of making a fool out of yourself is sort of like buying a new car and then waiting anxiously, vigilantly guarding against that first scratch on the body of the car.  You eventually get so tired of waiting that you almost want to go out and put the first scratch on your new car yourself.  But, that first scratch is inevitable.  It’s going to happen someday.  And it’s happened to everybody.  And most of us have embarrassed ourselves in front of a group, or at least perceived that we’ve done so.

What constitutes making a fool out of yourself in public, anyway?  I’ve humiliated myself in front of groups (students, colleagues) so many times or felt that I’d done so that it doesn’t even faze me anymore.  It doesn’t mean I don’t experience embarrassment, it just means that I recover more quickly than a less seasoned public speaker.  If my fly is down and somebody points that out while I’m speaking, I just zip it up and continue, no matter how beet-red my face is.  I don’t shut down.   What about you?  If you don’t make the team the first time you try out, are you the “little engine that could” and you try again, or do you give up at the first sign of failure, forever?

In public speaking, if you achieve your preset goals for that presentation, then your presentation has been a success, even if you hit a few snags along the way.  For example, you might experience an equipment/ technological problem, or your host might misrepresent your prearranged speech to the audience.  In some cases you might commit a fashion faux pas, experience a heckler in the audience, or you might not have been adequately prepared for your presentation.  My point is that many people perceive an all-around, unmitigated failure with their presentation when that truly isn’t the case. From my philosophical standpoint, true failure only occurs when the cause of the initial “failure” isn’t corrected –  for example, when the heckler isn’t handled better, or the speaker doesn’t ensure that they’re better prepared the next time around.

From my experience with my clients, making a fool of yourself boils down to one thing:  being overly concerned about your audience’s opinion of you.  This concern becomes extreme nervousness and can manifest itself in a variety of ways:  going completely blank, starting to shake and have a tremor in your voice that sounds like you’re crying, and so on.  Brian Tracy once told a story in one of his books on business success where a now seasoned speaker he’d worked with once told him that early in his career before a speech, he had actually wet his pants from nervousness and had to run off of the stage.  That is an incredibly embarrassing experience, but the key words  in that story are “seasoned public speaker.”  After enduring the utter humiliation of wetting your pants in front of a large group of people, he or she actually did not give up, and went on to become a proficient public speaker.  What courage!

At some point you have to ask yourself, “What’s the worst thing that could possibly happen onstage?” and then, “Could I survive that?”  If your answer to your first question doesn’t involve the end of your life, I think the answer for most of us would be a “yes.”  We have to take chances to reach our goals, make our wishes come true, etc. etc., don’t we?

So what are you going to do if the worst thing you can imagine when public speaking happens?  Here are a couple of things to think about to make it easier, and to make those seemingly horrifying scenarios less important.

1)  Are you able to laugh at yourself?  Learning to so do is a good skill to have.

2)  Check-in with your self-confidence.  Do you need to focus on some support in that area?  With regard to giving a presentation, is your message relevant to your audience? Are you providing valuable information that they can easily use to improve some aspect of their lives?

3)  Make the decision, the commitment to correct your mistakes and improve, NOT to quit forever and never take a chance again.

You’ll never get anywhere hiding behind your fears, and conquering them feels great.  So here’s my challenge to all those speakers out there overly afraid of making mistakes:  embrace them!

With more than a decade of experience, Lily Iatridis of Fearless Delivery knows the key elements in effective and engaging presentation, as well as how to support professionals in expressing their message clearly by giving them the “how-to” shortcuts, personalized instruction and even packaging their presentation for them as the need arises. Please visit http://www.FearlessDelivery.com to access free downloads on excellent public speaking, comment on our most recent blog posts and explore our products and services.