Mind Your Fear Reprogramming Your Mind for Confident Public Speaking by Bill Cashell You know the feeling. You prepared your speech well in advance. You practiced until your family said "Enough!" You were all ready to deliver a dynamite presentation. And then it happened. As the meeting started, you began to think about getting up to give your speech. Your hands became cold and sweaty. Your mouth became dry. Then, that awful feeling started to grow in the pit of your stomach. When they called your name, you felt the panic run through your entire body. You thought to yourself, "I could really be a good speaker if I could just get over this fear of public speaking". Why do we have such a fear? To this date, no recorded deaths have ever occurred from speaking. We know that it is not logical. The reason we feel fear is: we are not driven by logic, we are driven by emotion. It is the result of our programming. We all have the power to replace the fear with a feeling of excitement about speaking by using simple self-hypnosis NLP techniques. Here are 5 steps to eliminating your fear: 1. Understand Where Your Fear Came From. You've heard it said over and over again - "Public speaking is the number one fear, even greater than death". The source quoted in The Book of Lists leads back to a tiny blurb in The Sunday Times of London from October 7, 1973. It refers to "American market researchers," but nowhere does it say who these researchers were, what they were marketing, where the results were published, how the information was gathered, who the respondents were, what sampling methods were used—nothing! When a young impressionable person hears this they think, "Wow! I didn’t know that. That must be something really scary", and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And we add to that when we hear people say, "No one ever loses that fear, they just get the butterflies to fly in formation". We were not born with a fear of speaking. In fact, it is just the opposite. Most of us loved to get up in front of the kindergarten class for Show and Tell because we loved the attention. Public speaking can be a fun and exciting vehicle for expressing yourself and helping others. Don’t let this worn-out, unfounded myth hold you back. Ask yourself if this fear is really yours. Ask yourself if it serves any purpose. Then allow yourself to let it go. 2. Use the Power of Focus. We are drawn toward whatever we focus on. The reason people fail on diets is because they focus on food. That creates a desire, which draws them toward exactly what they don't want. If we focus on our fear, we will magnify the problem. Focus on what you want, which is a successful presentation with a positive outcome. Also, change your focus from performance-centered to audience-centered. Most speakers feel that they must put on a great performance to be successful. When we shift our focus to filling the audience's needs instead of how well we are doing, a miracle happens and the fear starts to fade away. 3. Let Go of the Past. Often we are driven by the memories of past events. If you felt fear the last time you spoke, you have conditioned yourself for the future. To remove those old feelings associated with past experiences, imagine watching yourself on a movie screen giving that speech. Then run the movie backward in your mind very quickly. Now, imagine that you are in the movie and relive the event backward very quickly. Notice how reliving the event backward very quickly removes the emotion associated with the event. Do this until the past feelings of fear are gone. 4. Anchor Good Feelings to Speaking. Advertisers do this to us all of the time. Have you ever noticed how many advertisers use famous celebrities to sell their products when they could get one of us for a fraction of the price? The reason is because we associate good feelings to that person. Then when we see the product, we associate those same good feelings to that product. We can do the same thing ourselves. Think of something that makes you feel good. It may be a song or a person or maybe a place you enjoy being. Then allow that feeling to grow and imagine yourself speaking. This will associate those good feelings to speaking. Just before you give your speech, mentally go back to that place or song and feel those feelings again. Before long you will associate a feeling of pleasure to speaking. 5. Future pacing. We have often been told to visualize ourselves giving a speech and seeing everything just as we want it. This is a great technique. You can make that even more powerful by using a technique called "Future Pacing". Imagine that it is the day after your speech. You are thinking back to how well your speech went. You remember how calm and comfortable you were. You remember how excited the audience was to hear your speech. Then remember how great it felt to hear the applause, knowing that you had given such a fantastic speech. With this method, you are creating new memories in your subconscious. Since your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between a real and imagined event, you are reprogramming yourself for success. It's All In Your Head. When you change your internal feelings, you change your results. Practice these techniques, and watch your fears change to excitement. You can be a fearless speaker.