How to Solve Public Speaking Anxiety

Science-backed principles to form positive associations with public speaking.

We have innumerable opportunities to be seen and heard by others. The settings may be informal social events, structured work meetings, or high-stakes public appearances. My book Be Seen Now! Inspiring Insights into Being a Fearless Speaker is about how to transform these opportunities into a natural connection with groups of any size, assemblies of any composition, and even one-on-one. You might be an activist inspiring the troops, a guest giving a toast at a wedding, or an entrepreneur making a pitch at a networking meeting. Perhaps you’re a teacher welcoming an assortment of parents to Back-to-School Night, or a parent consoling your kid after a difficult setback.

Although different in purpose and level of audience engagement, all these encounters have something in common: the tone that the speaker sets. “Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see,” writes Christian Nestell Bovee. Perhaps in initiating connection with a group, it is the essential kindness that the speaker brings to the interaction that sets that all-important tone.

Over decades of facilitating authentic speaking, I have come to call this type of interactional kindness “relational presence.” As this approach developed over time, it became clear to me that I have two main objectives. The first is to create a safe external environment in which speakers and their listeners can enjoy a deep sense of personal connection. My second goal is to guide leaders to develop the internal environment they need to discover how to be seen and heard for who they truly are—which is the key to becoming comfortable, fearless, and effective in front of any audience.

If you have been a student of public speaking, you’ve already been exposed to a whole host of tips, tricks, and performance techniques for engaging audiences. You’ve been advised to open with a provocative statement or an intriguing question. You’ve been shown how to gesture with your hands, vary your voice, and walk the stage. Although these measures can sometimes be useful in aiding speakers to “get through” a presentation, the relative success can often come at the expense of the speaker’s emotional well-being and can leave the audience cold, having deprived them of true connection.

The practice of relational presence as a method of mastering public speaking is fundamentally different. In fact, it is precisely the deliberate absence of technique that uplifts the energy of the speaker and leads to an easeful and effective connection between the speaker and the listeners.

Whatever degree of anxiety you may have around fully accessing your voice, the cure is positive corrective experiences in an enriched listening environment. This experience of connection literally rewires the brain. My brain had essentially been wired in early childhood to trigger panic, and its byproduct, contraction, when all eyes were upon me. But the practice of relational presence builds powerful neuropathways that associate being seen with pleasure and expansion.

The turning point in solving my own crippling stage fright came with the epiphany that the problem was not a block in speaking, but rather a block in receiving the “available listening.” As a speaker, one must allow room to receive the audience’s listening. Although it takes practice to do this, when you can do so, the audience’s attention comes to you as if magnetized.

We have discussed how for those of us who were not seen nearly enough in our essential magnificence in early childhood, the challenges facing us in listening and speaking can linger for decades. It is difficult to let in the listening when you imagine it’s not there—or worse, that those listening are judging you. But corrective emotional experiences of ideal listening can turn this around.

In my company Speaking Circles International, using relational presence, these experiences take place in a group composed of warm, intelligent humans who know what it means to “hold stillness” for another. Participants in these groups are willing to become luminous listeners for others in their cohort, one individual at a time.

Quality attention by such a group creates a field of belonging that each person can explore in their turn. It is a safe place where one can discover, preach, inspire, inquire, try something new, tell a courageous story—or simply stand in silence and appreciate the luxurious stillness that others are happy to hold for you.