5 ways to conquer public speaking anxiety

Public speaking is an opportunity to improve your life and grow your stress tolerance.

Post summary

• Anxiety over public speaking impacts three-quarters of people (and there are good evolutionary reasons for that).

• But learning to do it well improves your life and career, and can increase your overall stress tolerance.

• You’ll learn 5 ways to improve at public speaking.

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The post

I used to hate public speaking. If I had to speak publicly, my heart rate would rise like I was at the end of a Burn the Ships workout.

Then I’d start thinking about my high heart rate. My thoughts would scatter to how I was going to look like a complete idiot, and surely the world would end sometime soon after. It got so bad that I used to avoid public speaking.

But today, public speaking is part of my career. I’m writing this while traveling to the Northeast to talk to a corporation. I frequently speak to pro sports teams, companies, universities, and more.

And I love it. I’m like an arachnophobe who now has a collection of beloved spiders.

Public speaking has led me to meet amazing people, sharpen my ideas for different audiences, and get questions that improved my thinking.

Roughly three-quarters of people experience severe anxiety around public speaking. Mark Twain once said¹, “There are two types of speakers: those that are nervous and those that are liars.” Public speaking is so good at reliably provoking nerves that scientists use it as a standard test to raise stress levels.

There are good evolutionary reasons why we get nervous speaking publicly: It leaves us more open to public judgement. In the past, if people judged us negatively, it could get us kicked out of the tribe, where we’d die alone at the hands of nature².

But learning to communicate well in front of other people is an insanely practical skill that improves our lives, which is why we’re covering it.

• We all have to speak publicly at some point. For example, at work, weddings, job interviews, etc.

• Learning to speak in public shifts you out of an avoidance mindset, which improves your stress tolerance and well-being.

• Communication is the top skill employers across industries look for, and between 1980 and 2012, jobs involving person-to-person and person-to-group communication grew the most.

• Group communication is the trait most desired in leaders. (Interestingly, research suggests that naturally extroverted people don’t have an edge in public speaking).

I’m not a perfect speaker, but I no longer get inordinately nervous before talks. That’s improved my life and made me much better—and even led me to have fun on stage.

Here’s what’s helped me and what research says about getting better at speaking to groups both big and small.

1. Expose yourself slowly

The best way to get over any anxiety is to slowly expose yourself to whatever is making you anxious. It works if you’re arachnophobic, trypanophobic, acrophobic, or glossophobic, a person who fears public speaking.

The first lab-based testing of exposure therapy occurred in the 1920s. The research has been building ever since, and it shows that exposure therapy often beats prolonged psychiatry sessions and medications.

In it, you slowly expose yourself to the anxiety, but not so much of it that you freak out. A little at a time shows you that your worst predictions don’t come true, and that expands your tolerance until the event isn’t a big deal.

Think of it like training for a marathon. You don’t go from the couch to trying to run the marathon—you’ll get injured. Rather, you start by running, say, 5 miles a week. Then 8 miles a week. Then 12 and so on until you’re fit enough to be running well over 26.2 miles a week and are physically ready for the race.

On Saturday, I spoke to a large corporation. After my talk, I sat on a panel, and an audience member asked about public speaking anxiety. The head of the company was on stage with me and echoed this:

“When I first started running these events and had to talk on stage, I was nervous,” he said. “But in the early days, there weren’t so many people in the crowd. So it was manageable. Over time, the crowds got bigger, and I adapted.”

Practical advice

Practice in front of friends or family. Start by talking to small groups or even just speaking up more often in meetings. Then move on to larger groups and speak in even bigger meetings. You could even join a group like Toastmasters.

The key is to do a little more than is comfortable, let the wave crest and fall, then level up.

2. Reframe it

Before speaking in public, most people try to manage their anxiety by telling themselves to “calm down.”

This is silly. You’re not going to be calm before a talk. And research shows that trying to remain calm doesn’t decrease signs of anxiety, like a high heart rate.

In fact, you probably shouldn’t be calm before a talk—some amount of anxiety is useful because it puts you on alert and shows you care.

What works better is reframing your lack of calmness. Researchers at Harvard Business School found³ that excitement and anxiety are very similar—they’re both high arousal events. The only difference is that excitement is positive, and anxiety is negative.

A lot of magic can happen when we reframe a public talk from being a death sentence to an opportunity for growth. The Harvard researcher wrote:

Compared with those who attempt to calm down, individuals who reappraise their anxious arousal as excitement feel more excited and perform better. Individuals can reappraise anxiety as excitement using minimal strategies such as self-talk (e.g., saying “I am excited” out loud) or simple messages (e.g., “get excited”), which lead them to feel more excited, adopt an opportunity mind-set (as opposed to a threat mind-set), and improve their subsequent performance.

Practical advice

Develop a mantra that gets you excited to talk. The researchers used as examples telling yourself, “I am excited,” and “get excited.” But surely you can be more creative than that. I won’t share my pre-talk mantra because it’s laced with profanity. I’ve found that it helps.

3. Breathe through it

Maybe you’ve seen Andrew Huberman talk about the physiological sigh. It’s a specific type of breathing that he says lowers stress levels.

It works. Huberman conducted a study⁴ with colleagues at Stanford Medicine and found the “cyclic sigh” or “physiologic sigh” reduces anxiety. The study noted, “Cyclic sighing is most effective at improving mood and reducing respiratory rate.”

One review⁵ of the research looked at breathing practices for stress and anxiety and concluded:

The evidence suggests that diaphragmatic breathing may decrease stress as measured by physiologic biomarkers, as well as psychological self-reported tools.

It’s also free and easy to do anywhere, anytime.

Practical advice

When you’re anxious over an event, take a few moments to perform a few cyclic sighs. Huberman’s collaborator on the study, Dr. David Spiegel, explained that it works like this:

• Breathe in through your nose.

• When your lungs are full, pause, then take a second, deeper sip of air to expand your lungs as much as possible.

• Then you slowly exhale.

Do it a few times in a row.

4. Practice, practice, practice

The military reminds soldiers, “You don’t rise to expectations, you fall to the level of your training.” So it is for public speaking.

The more you know exactly what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it, the better you’ll do. If you start to get nervous, you can fall back on your training. If you wing it, you’ll start blurting nonsense.

Eva Daniel, a speech coach, told me, “Public speaking is a skill like any other that requires practice. But not all practice is created equal. Contrary to popular belief, giving it to your bathroom mirror the morning you’re giving a speech is not the same as giving it to a handful of people the week before.”

The best talks were all practiced obsessively. For example, the book Creative Selection explains how Steve Jobs practiced for his Apple product release talks:

Three weeks or a month before the keynote itself, Steve would start rehearsing with portions of his slide deck in some venue at Apple, often in Town Hall, the auditorium on the Infinite Loop campus. Slowly, day by day, he would build the show by stepping through it as he wanted to present it at the keynote. This was one of Steve’s great secrets of success as a presenter. He practiced. A lot. He went over and over the material until he had the presentation honed, and he knew it cold.

Practical takeaway

Practice until you not only have your talk memorized, but can deliver it as if it isn’t memorized. Once you have it memorized, you’ll be more comfortable going off-script.

Which brings me to my next point …

5. Get expert feedback

Once I’d dealt with my public speaking anxiety, I realized I should get expert feedback.

I started working with Eva, the speech coach mentioned above. She’s fantastic (and she writes a weekly newsletter about public speaking that’s worth reading).

She’s a good gut check on my content and also watches video when it’s available, giving me brutally good feedback.

Eva explained, “What people think of as a delivery problem (nerves, filler words, rabbit trails, what do I do with my hands, etc) are often directly tied to their content. If you haven’t structured your content to have a point, layered in stories and humor, and have a clear flow and understanding of your content it’s going to be hard to deliver. Content is king/queen to confident delivery.”

Practical takeaway:

You could be the most animated, non-nervous public speaker in the world, but if your content—the information in your actual talk—doesn’t say anything interesting, it’s not going to land.

If you speak often or have an important event, consider hiring a coach like Eva to help with your content. At minimum, run your talk past someone discerning who’ll be honest with you.

If you speak often, try to get video of your talk so you can watch game tape and see where you could improve.

In closing, some great news: Most audiences rate speakers far better than the speaker rated themself⁶, and most audiences also don’t notice if a speaker is nervous⁷.

Have fun, don’t die, talk,

Michael

1. Like many quotes attributed to Mark Twain, it’s probably bullshit, but roll with me here …

2. Like most anxieties, it works via the “smoke detector principle.” Our anxiety system is over-sensitive. It generates a ton of false alarms (particularly today) because the danger of not responding to a real alarm is far greater than the cost of an unnecessary alarm. For more info, read this paper.

3. Brooks, A. W. (2014). Get excited: Reappraising pre-performance anxiety as excitement. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(3), 1144-1158.

4. Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal; Balban, Melis Yilmaz et al; Cell Reports Medicine, Volume 4, Issue 1, 100895

5. Hopper SI, Murray SL, Ferrara LR, Singleton JK. Effectiveness of diaphragmatic breathing for reducing physiological and psychological stress in adults: a quantitative systematic review. JBI Database System Rev Implement Rep. 2019 Sep;17(9):1855-1876. doi: 10.11124/JBISRIR-2017-003848. PMID: 31436595.

6. Gallego A, McHugh L, Penttonen M, Lappalainen R. Measuring Public Speaking Anxiety: Self-report, behavioral, and physiological. Behav Modif. 2022 Jul;46(4):782-798. doi: 10.1177/0145445521994308. Epub 2021 Feb 16. PMID: 33593107; PMCID: PMC9158251.

7. Savitsky, K., & Gilovich, T. (2003). The illusion of transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39(6), 618-625.