I am almost too embarrassed to share what I’m about to share because I am a professional speaker and a speaker trainer and I should know better!
But because I know this story will help someone, I feel compelled to share it anyway!
As you probably know by now, I am a member of Toastmasters, which is basically a public speaking club with leveled assignments that take you from brand new hopeful speaker all the way to a great speaker!
I visited another Toastmasters club on Tuesday because I was going to give my speaker friend a coaching session on how to break his awesome keynote presentation down into 2 20 minute speaking slots. Since he is IN this other Toastmasters club, I went 90 minutes early for the fun of seeing how other clubs run their Toastmasters meetings.
Well, because they were short one evaluator, they asked if I would be willing to evaluate the one professional speaker in their club who was speaking that day. I said of course because I love to evaluate speeches!
Now I don’t know if you would be nervous to evaluate a speaker who has shared a stage with Donald Trump, or spoken to audiences of 30,000 people, but I wasn’t - I was excited for the opportunity to really stretch my speaker coaching muscles with a high level speech evaluation.
However, much to my horror, when I stood up to give him his evaluation, I was hit with a wave of stage fright! I haven’t had almost debilitating nerves when I was on stage for years so I was shocked! What happened to send me into full on stage fright?
I’m guessing it’s because I didn’t know the speaker personally but knew he was a professional, so I wasn’t sure how he would take my critique or how the audience would take it either! What if I offended him and he were to get really mad and remember who I was forever and secretly (or even not so secretly) hate my guts until he died? Or what if he thought I was an idiot with no right to call myself a speaking coach? I don’t remember consciously thinking any of those thoughts, but my hands were shaking and my voice was trembling so there was definitely a lot of fear and adrenaline running through my veins!
It reminds me that stage fright is almost 100% caused by you pre-living the consequences of having done terribly on stage - while you are actually on the stage! Let me repeat that! Stage fright is almost 100% caused by you pre-living the consequences of having done terribly on stage while you are actually on the stage! There’s probably a little bit of ‘who do I think I am’ and ‘what was I thinking exposing myself like this!’ too, but I think it’s mostly feeling the fear of how bad we’re going to feel when we totally ruin our speech and everyone is disappointed at best, incensed or outraged at the worst!
Which leads me to remember my favorite law of the universe, which is whatever you focus on grows. If you focus on failing terribly on stage, even if you don’t fail, you’re going to have to deal with the emotional response your body is having to the very THOUGHT of failing! Remember your subconscious can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality, so your fear of falling flat on your face is causing your body to pump out all the fight or flight chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol, and all the other unpleasant things our body feels when we experience a big embarrassing failure in public! With stage fright, we are feeling all that trauma even though we haven’t actually experienced it yet!!!
Which means I forgot all of my mindset training in that moment when I stood up and started critiquing this high level professional speaker. I felt nervous to the point that my body was in full on fight or flight mode, causing me and my voice to shake like a leaf.
What do I wish I had done? I wish I had had the sense of mind to stop for a second and make a joke about my shaking and take a deep breath and imagine my energetic connection grounding me to the earth and letting all my nerves calm down. I would have energetically let go of the fear and let it sink down into the earth, leaving me calm and grounded.
Now it’s important to remember that a speech evaluation at Toastmasters is timed, so I wouldn’t have wanted to spend more than about 10 seconds doing that, but in hindsight, that 10 seconds would have been worth it to regain my center and stop shaking like a brand new speaker!
If you know you have a message to share but you still haven’t figured out what it is yet, download my workbook 10 Steps to Find the Message in Your Mess! It walks you through the process, focusing on finding the best stories from your life to create a powerful, transformational signature presentation so you can get out there and start changing lives from the!
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