Getting over
Speech Anxiety - Part 2 - Overcoming fear of Public Speaking

So I started working on overcoming fear of public speaking and implementing this new skill everywhere. As I met more people and started being more comfortable with new friends in general, my speech anxiety in situations such as class just disappeared. The same went with the anxiety that came when sharing a story and such.

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Trust came with practice: lots of it. Once I started meeting people on a regular basis, getting more involved with new people and speaking more in general - being comfortable speaking in groups was a natural consequence.

Overcoming fear of Public Speaking:

I also started working with this non-profit charity organization. As a volunteer at first, this was when I first was working on other areas of my life such as: girls, social skills, making friends, etc.

It was an excellent place to meet new people and help others; my kind of thing. This charity organization became an important part of my life and also the best place to work on speech anxiety.

The work I had to do involved working with volunteers, motivating them and leading them. Obviously I didn’t start doing that kind of job right away. At first I started by being led and being motivated. I quickly took a more leading job in it; leader guys saw my commitment rather than my social skills.

Still I was growing in both areas. Later that year I was invited to join another group where I was supposed to be an assistant to the leader of that group. Even though I didn’t have to do any sort of public speaking yet, I was supposed to assist the leader.

The idea of me having to do some sort of public speaking in case I had to replace him sometime was scary. This of course reduced my leadership within the group because I was scared to discuss ideas and have attention drawn to me.

Six months passed and I started knowing the people in that group better, comfort helped me greatly in taking on the role I was supposed to take. I had great ideas and the problem had always been expressing them.

Soon the time had come when my friend who was leading the group had to leave, which left me in charge of a group of people I already knew. It was still scary having to do public speaking but a lot easier because I knew the people involved.

This extended to all other areas of my life where my lack of speech anxiety was clear. Presentations at school were easy as pie, speaking at congresses for my charity organization were way less nerve-wracking!

So I’ll give out a small list of things to do to reduce anxiety when speaking:

Know your content: There’s nothing easier than speaking about a topic you know well, a reason why public speaking at my charity is easy.
If you’re not sure of what you’re talking about pretend you are!
Don’t get too stressed, talk as if you’re talking to your best friend: I see a lot of people get very uptight and technical, which is terrible. What has worked for me is just easily explaining so that my audience understands, helps a lot with your comfort and helps your audience understand way better.

That’s my story, on overcoming fear of public speaking and reducing my speech anxiety. All it really took was baby steps and practice. Look it into it, start small, and try it out. Go out and Get Social.

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