How I Overcame My Fear of Public Speaking (and Many Other Fears)
I used to always be afraid.
I was afraid of needles, the dark, germs, initiative-taking, and public speaking. My anxiety disorders spanned most of my lifetime, rendering me constantly anxious and tense.
Nowadays, I often receive praise from peers and teachers for my public speaking abilities. Indeed, people have noticed a change in the way that I deal with my fears. And this change has come from a decade of learning and testing.
Throughout numerous sessions of exposure therapy and participation in a clinical course about fear unlearning, I have gathered the tools necessary to beat the irrational fears that have kept me down for so long.
You can do so too. The procedure has been boiled down to only two steps.
But first, you must learn a truth that very few people know.
This article pertains to the treatment of irrational or common fears (like public speaking); not clinical fears or obsessions. I advice you to seek professional help if your thoughts and feelings are detrimental or harmful to your daily health and lifestyle. Furthermore, if your fears refer to an actually life-threatening situation (like an abusive relationship), you must seek aid elsewhere. I am not a therapist.
Step 0: Know the true source of your problem
Your fear is not the problem. You cannot control this emotion — nor any other.
It is your response to your emotions that is the problem. It is (on the one extreme) your suppression of the fear or (on the other end) your choice to allow yourself to be overwhelmed by this fear, that serves to perpetuate it.
Let us take an example.
Say you are afraid public speaking. Whenever you get up on the stage to face your audience, your heart starts beating, your hands become sweaty, your voice fails you, and you feel like crying.
None of these are responses you can control. They are all part of your body’s natural defense system, which is activated in situations that it thinks dangerous. In other words, the fear itself is not the target to be altered.
The problem starts when you choose to run off the stage. When you choose to read the entire speech off a card instead of speaking confidently. When you choose to convince yourself that you are safe, whilst acting like you are not.
It is your choice to act in accordance with your fear that allows it to grow. In these cases, you are signaling to your body that the situation — which you only perceive and feel to be dangerous — warrants this fear response.
By acting the way your irrational fear wants you to (that is, by trying to avoid and suppress your feelings), you are giving your fear the power to control you.
Therefore, you must cast aside your habits of suppression and overwhelm. You must acknowledge that it is your behavior — not your fear — that serves to worsen the problem.
From this baseline, comes two principles of fear unlearning:
- Exposure
- Unafraid actions despite fear reactions
In combination, these tools provide the solution to your problem.
Step 1: Expose yourself to the situation of discomfort
Exposure is the imperative groundwork of fear unlearning.
In order to recode your response to a specific situation, you must allow yourself to be in proximity to that situation. You cannot overcome your fear of public speaking without ever speaking in front of a crowd. There is no getting around it; avoidance only confirms the legitimacy of your fear.
Therefore, you must first be in a situation that activates your fear response.
Step 2: Act as if the situation is undangerous
Your behavior is the key to changing everything.
When you find yourself in a situation that scares you (provided that it is not an actually dangerous situation, like a person attacking you on the streets), you must behave differently than your fear wants you to. You must act as if the situation is entirely safe and undangerous. Which it probably is!
Remember that suppression is bad. Thus, if you feel your body becoming afraid, do not try to quench it. Acknowledge your natural bodily reactions and allow them to be — just remember that you must not allow these automatic reactions to steer the behavior that you do have control over.
You cannot control how your heart or mind responds, but you can always choose what you say or do in a scary situation.
Here are some examples:
- During a public presentation, stand firmly on the ground and maintain eye contact with your audience. Your hands might be shaking, and your face might be flushing, but persist nonetheless.
- When taking a blood drive, sink down into the chair and smile. Do not pull back your arm or start rambling about how afraid you are. Feel the way your body naturally tenses, and allow your muscles to relax.
- Before taking initiative with someone, acknowledge the doubt and fear clouding your decision making. Allow them to be present without these feelings taking hold of your ability to act. Just go for it!
With each such victory, you will prove to yourself that you are capable — and that nothing in the situations that scare you can hurt you.
Finally, try to reduce your soothing behaviors. (Here, I am not referring to stimming or clinically advised stress-reducing exercises.) Some soothing strategies maintain your fear, because they act as suppressive protections against fear-inducing situations. For instance, using verbal reassurance to convince yourself that a situation is safe, will not change your body’s long-term fear response if your actions confirm it as being so.
In other words, to overcome your fear, approach the situation like any apt and courageous person would.
As with anything, change takes time.
Some days are harder, and others are easier. Your body will inevitably cling to your fear response for quite some time. It might even show up suddenly, when you thought you had overcome it completely.
But as I have maintained again and again, this is not the issue. As long as you focus on your behavior — the aspects of your body that you actually can control — you will be able to master any situation that brings you irrational feelings of fear.
The important thing is to know that you are the one in control.
