Transcription
When I first trained as an actor, I was petrified of standing in front of an audience, which obviously isn't ideal. Uh, dry mouth, a red face, you could fry eggs on my ears—all very sweaty. Luckily for me, I learned a series of techniques that helped me conquer that fear and land some amazing roles on stage and screen. I now spend all my time sharing that actor's toolkit with audiences around the world to help them communicate with impact.
If you want to feel confident and in control whenever you're in the spotlight, there are five big myths we need to bust and five techniques you need to learn. And no, one of those techniques isn't "imagine your audience naked"—that's just weird. Let's get started.
Myth number one: Everyone is judging me. Which, of course, couldn't be further from the truth. How often have you sat as an audience member in a meeting, watching a presentation, watching someone speak, and thought to yourself, "Do you know what? I really hope the next 20 minutes is a complete waste of my time." Right? Of course you haven't. You're sitting there thinking, "I hope this is useful; I hope this is interesting." Our audiences want us to succeed. Most people are incredibly busy, and they are desperate for you to provide value, so they're not actually thinking about you; they're sitting there with the question in their mind: What's in it for me?
Myth number two: Everyone can see my nerves. Now, I have coached and trained thousands of people, if not tens of thousands of people, over the last 10 years, and often people say to me, "Gosh, um, could you see my knees knocking together? Or could you see my hands shaking? Or did you hear my voice?" And I kind of go, "No." Now, that's not to say that you're not experiencing it and you're not feeling it, but your audience quite often can't see the things that you are experiencing, unless you're holding a piece of paper and we're seeing it kind of wobble around. We don't know that you're nervous. The only time, in fact, that we know that you're nervous is when you tell us, and you go, "Oh, I'm, um, I'm, I'm really sorry; I'm feeling a little bit kind of, uh, anxious about delivering this message." And, of course, in that moment, our confidence in you plummets. So just remember that because you feel it doesn't mean that your audience feels it too.
Myth number three: I have to be word-perfect. No, you don't. Your audience has no idea what is about to come out of your mouth unless you've handed out a script beforehand, which would be really strange. The big mistake that people make is trying to learn lines. Now, I was a professional actor, and that is really, really difficult; it's really difficult to do, and it's even more difficult to speak those words as if you're saying them for the first time. So take those handcuffs away; stop trying to memorize everything and give yourself a framework so that you can play, because your audience has no idea what you're going to say next.
Myth number four: People don't care what I have to say. Now, I hear this often when I'm working with more junior people in an organization, or if people are presenting to an audience that they feel or perceive are really senior and knowledgeable. The reality is that whenever you are asked to present or speak, it is because you have something of value to share. You are an expert in that field; even if you're only one page ahead of people in the textbook, you know more than they do at that particular moment. And if you're presenting in a business context to a senior audience, just because their job titles are more impressive than yours doesn't mean that they know the thing that you're about to talk about inside out and back to front like you do. So we've got to be really careful about assuming that our audience has more knowledge than us. If we're being asked to present, if we're being given the stage, it's because we have something valuable to share.
Myth number five: If I mess up, it's over. Which, of course, is absolute nonsense. Pitching and presenting and speaking in public can be really scary, but it's not life or death. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever, uh, actually died on stage. And the most important thing we can do from any of these types of experiences is learn from them. We're not going to be perfect first time. All of those people that you see who are really excellent and proficient at this are excellent and proficient at it because they put in a lot of reps behind the scenes. So lower those expectations, set yourself some quick wins, and take the pressure off. If you mess it up, you'll live to fight another day.
Now we've busted the myths, let's look at the five techniques you need to learn to boost your confidence whenever you present in front of an audience. And, by the way, if you're finding this useful and you want to go deeper, I have a free scorecard you can use to benchmark your presentation performance. Just look out for a link in the comments; it'll take you less than 5 minutes to complete, and you get a detailed personalized report with recommendations for how you can improve.
Technique number one is ground yourself. So what do I even mean by being grounded? Well, quite often when we're in that space of anxiety and nerves, it's because we're experiencing the fight-or-flight response. So we get this spike in adrenaline; our cortisol levels, our stress hormones, go through the roof, and our testosterone levels, our confidence hormone, starts to plummet. And what you'll see quite often when people are nervous is they're kind of moving, and they're kind of all over the place. But what we want to do is find that place of stillness; get both feet on the floor. So if you're standing, think about your feet being hip-width apart and the knees being nice and soft. If you're sitting, uh, then make sure that you uncross your legs and get both feet on the floor. And this is going to allow you to begin from a space of stillness, and it's going to start to reduce that fight-or-flight anxiety and allow you literally to get out of your head and into your body.
Technique number two is take a deep breath. Now, it might sound almost too obvious, but I can promise you, while I was training to be an actor, getting my breath under control was the thing that helped me reduce my nerves the most. When we're nervous and anxious, we start to breathe up into the chest; it's called thoracic breathing. But what we want to do in order to increase our levels of confidence is get the breath low into the diaphragm. If you've ever done any meditation or mindfulness, that's what happens when we start to allow the breath really to drop into the body. So, uh, before you step out on stage, or before you stand up, or, um, you know, open the laptop to present, it's worth just really getting into a much slower, deeper breathing pattern. Now, I, I could create a whole 20-minute video on this, and if you'd like me to share some content around how to breathe for presentations and public speaking, let me know in the comments. But at the very least, what I'd love you to do before your next moment in the spotlight is to breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth three times: in through the nose and out through the mouth, and in through the nose and out through the mouth. And as I do that, I can literally feel my shoulders drop; I can feel that relaxation come into my body. So if you notice that the breath is starting to get quicker and higher and into the chest, then just slow yourself down. Do what you do if you were working with someone who was having a panic attack; what would we say? We say, "Take a deep breath." The great thing about working with the breath in this way is that the results are really fast, and I'd encourage you not to wait until you need this one. Do, uh, a couple of minutes of deep breathing before you have to get up to speak and whilst you're listening to the person that's presenting before you, so that when your moment comes, you're already prepared and ready to go.
Technique number three is expand your bubble. Now, what do I mean by this? Well, I'd like you to imagine that you're standing in the middle of a sphere. If you've seen one of those zorb things, that's exactly what I'm talking about. And we take this space with us everywhere we go. Now, when we get nervous or when we're anxious, we tend to start to contract; we tend to start to make things small, and that gives a signal to our audience that we are lower status. Take it into the animal kingdom; the silverback gorilla does not sit there like this; the silverback gorilla is, uh, is large; it's expansive; it's taking up space, and all of the, uh, you know, lesser gorillas are sitting around picking off fleas. So what we need to think about, especially, is what we do with these shoulders; it's a couple of millimeters; this is an open, relaxed body position; the shoulders are free and wide. We want to avoid anything that allows us to contract and make ourselves small, and of course, we don't want to get into that kind of slightly aggressive space either. So think about expanding into your bubble, um, using open hand gestures—so nothing that's clasped or controlled or tight. Instead, we want to be working in width and expanding through that gesture plane. So anything from the top of the head, uh, down to the navel is fine; anything below the belly button starts to look a little bit dodgy; anything above the head starts to look a little bit mad. So when we're thinking about expansion and taking up space, we're going to help ourselves feel more confident, and we're also going to be sending signals to our audience that we're confident and in control too. And if you want to dig a little bit deeper into this, then check out the research from Professor Amy Cuddy.
Technique number four: Pack a parachute. You want to make sure that you are prepared for the worst, in case of an emergency; pull this cord. What is going to keep you safe if things don't quite go to plan? And to be honest, they rarely go exactly as you think they will; there's normally some sort of variance or deviation. So the more that you can think through the worst-case scenario and then put steps in place to mitigate it, the better. Really simple things: have a glass of water nearby. You don't think I've forgotten what I'm about to say; you think that I'm taking a sip of water because I'm thirsty, right? So something like that can just buy you 30 seconds of thinking time if you can't remember what's coming next. Could you do a recap? Could you ask the audience a question? Um, have you got someone, uh, on your team that can fill in and, uh, engage if things start to get a little bit rocky? There are so many things that you can do to get yourself out of jail free, but you've got to do the planning in advance. So before you step into that room, make sure that you know what you're going to do in case of emergency.
Technique number five: Hum a tune. Yes, seriously. This is something that actors do in order to get their voice ready for performance, and it's a brilliant way to get yourself in the zone, but also add a level of relaxation and calm. So literally just pick your, your favorite tune and, uh, hum along. See if you can guess what this is in the comments [Music]. I mean, you can literally pick anything; it could be "Baa, baa, black sheep"; doesn't really matter. But if you do that, what you'll feel in the vocal folds here is that everything starts to vibrate, and when you hit the high notes, everything stretches up, and when you hit the low notes, everything comes together. So it's a real vocal warm-up and stretch, and it's also going to just get you focused and ready to perform.
So there we have it: five myths busted, five techniques taught. Now, if you practice these—and this is really important, you've got to practice; you can't just watch this video once and then expect it to work—you've got to go away and put in the reps. But if you do, I promise you, you will start to delete your fear of presenting and speaking in public. It worked for me; it can work for you too.