Are You Ready to Take Up The Challenge?

Is Speaking in Public a Problem for You?

You heart’s pumping fast, you’ve got sweaty palms and your mind is racing. All of these are symptoms of problems associated with public speaking.

Today, I want to talk about six problems associated with public speaking: These are serious mental problems; these are serious issues and should be taken seriously, if you do have them.

Let’s talk about the symptoms and you can see if you have any of these problems yourself and you can seek out how to fix your specific problem. One problem is not the same as the other and the methods of improving your public speaking ability and removing fear are going to be different for every single person.

PROBLEM 1: FEAR

Fear, stress and nervousness. This is the problem the most of us have when it comes to public speaking.This is not severe anxiety, this is not severe stress. This is just a natural nervousness that we get and natural fear that we have when we are going to speak in public.

Symptoms like sweaty palms, a racing mind, your heart beating little bit faster or sometimes your legs get a little bit shaky. These are natural signs of you being nervous before a big presentation.It is not bad to be nervous to give a presentation, especially if it is going to be an important one.

When I was a rep for a pharmaceutical company and I knew I had to role play with the MD of a company I was naturally very nervous. Who wouldn’t be as a young sales rep role playing with the MD of a multi-billion dollar corporation? I had sweaty palms, I had a racing mind and I was very stressed leading up it. But when it happened I flew into it and it went fine.The stress went away when it was done obviously and things were fine. It was not stress or nervousness that I could not deal with. It was just uncomfortable so that is number one.

PROBLEM 2: ANXIETY

This is more severe than that natural stress and nervousness and you know it is anxiety when you got symptoms like hot and cold flushes, tightening of the chest or sometimes even you feel a tightening around the throat area. Also your mind does not just race, it snowballs the worries, things get worse and worse in your mind and you get this obsessive thinking that this is going on. That is a sign of anxiety about public speaking.

Anxiety when it comes to public speaking is very common. Anxiety is very different to that natural nervousness and stress. With nervousness and stress sometimes we can just do some breathing techniques or some relaxation techniques. However, anxiety is more serious so we need to treat it differently.

PROBLEM 3: PANIC ATTACKS

This I believe is more worse that anxiety. They say that anywhere from 15-35% of people will experience a panic attack sometime in life. A panic attack is like intense anxiety – shortness of breath and nausea are common symptoms.You have probably heard about people vomiting before they need to give a speech, that can be from a panic attack.

A panic attack is sometimes described as anxiety with immense fear. Sometimes with panic attacks people become afraid of their anxiety and so they have these panic attacks about the anxiety that they are going to be having in the future, or the anxiety that they are having in the moment.Panic attacks can be very debilitating and so the people will avoid situations where they are afraid they are going to have a panic attack or afraid they are going to have anxiety. This is why some people who have panic attacks never leave their house.

They are scared to be put in a situation where they are going to have an attack so this is something that’s very serious.Again, it is very common when it comes to public speaking but we are obviously looking at this very differently that we would look at the natural stress or just the fluttering of the heart caused by nervousness.

PROBLEM 4: INSOMNIA

Generally, it’s the night before you need to give a presentation and what happens is your mind is racing thinking about you speech. Thinking about what might happen what might go wrong because your mind is going 1,000,000 miles an hour, you can’t get a sleep. This is very common problem associated with public speaking.

PROBLEM 5: POST TRAUMATIC STRESS

This happens when you have has a past experience (probably related to public speaking) where it went terrible and for some reason you have these horrible feelings associated with public speaking.So whenever you think a public speaking maybe can be doing it or just thinking about it in the future, you keep going back to this moment in time where it was traumatic for you.You need to deal with that differently to anxiety and the other problems associated with public speaking because we are not dealing with stress in the moment, we are dealing with a past experience.

PROBLEM 6: DEPRESSION

This is not as common but still does happen with public speaking.

This happens when you get so stressed that it actually leads to depression and you start feeling very down and you don’t want to get out the bed. You don’t want to talk to anyone you obviously don’t give your presentation.

I haven’t had depression around public speaking specifically but I know what depression is. I know what it feels like. It’s very hard to get out of that mental downward spiral.There you have six problems associated with public speaking.Did any of those resonate with you? Do you have any of those problems that are associated with public speaking?

I believe that it’s very important to put a name to your problem. Being able to understand your problem better and understand the issues you have allows you to look at solutions to your problems.But if you are having anxiety and you are treating it like a small amount of nervousness, or you having panic attacks and you are just treating it like you are a little bit stressed you probably aren’t going to overcome that situation.

If you are just dealing with a panic attack in the way that I deal with a little bit nervousness when I get up to speak then it’s probably not going to work for you.It is very important to understand your problem, what’s going on with you so that you can then begin to learn more about it and begin to overcome it.

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