Is Your Fear of Public Speaking Really a Fear of Speaking in Public?

Have you ever considered that your fear of public speaking might not actually be a fear of speaking in public?

Recently I had a client who told me he lacked confidence when it came to public speaking. As we spoke, I dug a little deeper to find out:

Examples of situations he’d be speaking in
How his nervousness presented itself
What he thought might be causing it

And as part of that conversation, we discovered that he doesn't get nervous when taking the lead or speaking up at meetings. Which suggested it wasn’t the public speaking itself that he was fearful about.

To tackle your public speaking fear, get specific

We moved on to discuss the topic of presentations, and I realised that’s where the challenges arise for him. So much so that he’d been avoiding presentations by handing them over to other team members.

I have a lot of resources to help you put together an effective presentation, and if this is something you’d like to learn more about, the blog links below are an excellent place to start:

Your 5-Step Guide to Planning Powerful Powerful Presentations

4 Key Things to Focus on When Practising Your Presentation or Speech

How to Get the Feedback You Need to Boost Your Speaking Confidence

If you prefer to watch rather than read, you’ll find these topics and so many more resources to improve your communication skills over on my YouTube channel in my Unlock Speaking Confidence collection.

In this case, it turned out the real issue wasn’t about creating the presentations, or at least, not in the way you might think. My client was being asked to deliver presentations that someone else had put together, and that was affecting his speaking confidence.

The problem with delivering content that isn’t “yours”

It’s a situation that comes up quite often, where you have to use a standard “corporate slide deck,” or another team member prepares your slides. My client didn’t feel he had ownership of what he was saying because he was effectively delivering someone else’s work. As you can imagine, that can cause stress and anxiety. We need to be comfortable and familiar with our content so that we sound (and feel) genuine and authentic when we speak.

He knew that if the situation continued, it would impact his career. Because if he wasn’t standing up, being seen, and being confident in those types of situations, it would affect how others perceived him. And that was the real challenge we needed to address.

How to make someone else’s content your own

A corporate slide deck often has very little room for manoeuvre. There may not be much scope to edit or personalise the slides. But that’s not the case for the delivery of the presentation and the words you choose. That’s entirely down to you. You can personalise that and make it your own - and I really recommend that you do.

Set aside plenty of time to thoroughly review the set of slides you’ve got to work with.

Perhaps there's a huge amount of information on them, but you can extract the key points and focus on those.
Maybe they include lots of graphs, data and stats, so you can zone in only on what’s important and relevant.
Or maybe you can tell the story behind the information and share the journey of how you got to that particular point?

Taking the time to make the presentation your own will help you feel much more confident when it’s time to deliver it. Because when you make the effort to connect with your audience and put them at the heart of your presentation, it’s much more likely they’ll listen to what you have to say.

The audience is there for you, not the slide deck

Nobody wants to hear a presenter reading off reams of information from a PowerPoint slide. It just doesn’t work. And don’t feel that your slides have to be on show for the entire time. In fact, it makes your presentation far more engaging if they’re not!

Pressing “B” on your laptop will blank out the screen behind you, so your audience can focus solely on what you’re saying. Or, if you’re on a Zoom or Teams call, you can move out of the slide presentation to break the link.

Always remember that you are the main event, not the slide deck. That’s just there to support your presentation.

Change your mindset to challenge your public speaking anxiety

Even if you don’t have much wiggle room when it comes to editing your slides, you can use your preparation time wisely by thinking about how you can personalise that corporate content. What can you do to create a strong connection with your audience and deliver a powerful and impactful presentation?

This will also help you create a significant mindset shift because you may not be dealing with public speaking anxiety at all. Perhaps it’s really a fear of delivering someone else’s work that you’re unfamiliar with.

And who wouldn’t be nervous about that?