From time-to-time I get approached with the question, “can I get rid of presentation anxiety?” The answer is, it depends and it really depends on your level of anxiety.

Some level of nervousness is not unusual before a presentation. This kind of nervousness resolves itself quickly as the presentation gets underway. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The nervousness is a reminder that the presentation is important and it gives you a boost of energy right before going on stage.

Now if you have debilitating anxiety before a presentation, you’re going to want to work to dial that down.

The Worst Case of Public Speaking Anxiety I’ve Seen

While in graduate school I met a woman who suffered from some of the worst presentation anxiety I’ve ever seen. In fact she would get so nervous that her normally perfect vision would fail her and she couldn’t read her notes.

She tried to compensate by using notes in huge font, but that didn’t even work and she was in the habit of memorizing every speech, word-for-word before the big day.

She said it was like a black cloud would descend over her mind during the presentation blocking her ability to think clearly and erasing the speech from her memory. So it a race to the finish to give her speech before the black cloud covered up the words in her mind.  Needless to say, she was dreading an upcoming speech that we all had to give.

I offered to work with her to help her overcome her anxiety. She was skeptical, but desperate. We spent one afternoon working through her anxiety. The next day was the presentation.

She was also in the habit of arriving hours early before a presentation and practicing in the exact spot where she would be speaking.  She felt this helped her memorize the last details.

The morning of the presentation, she didn’t show up early. Her friends actually started to get worried about her and were relieved when she arrived about half an hour before the presentations started. She was calm and excited. By the way, excited is a nice substitute for anxious.

Her presentation was brilliant! She was poised and confident. She even made a couple of jokes and ventured “off-script” when appropriate. She then fielded a question and answer session without missing a beat. As an unscripted part of a presentation, this used to be what she dreaded the most.

Afterwards she received lots and praise and accolades. Everyone noticed the difference in her. I was so proud of her!

I asked her later how she felt about the presentation. She said it was exhilarating and that it was amazing to be able to think and see while up in front of a group of people.

The black cloud was gone. She said it was hard to remember what it used to be like before the change. I told her that was perfect and that she shouldn’t give it another thought.

Where Are You on The Presentation Anxiety Spectrum?

So how do you feel about giving presentations?

Are there some pre-speech jitters?

Some anxiety as you prepare and deliver the speech?

Are you in full-blown panic mode, counting the minutes before you have to step on stage and dreading every moment?

No matter where you fall on the presentation anxiety spectrum, there’s hope! Speaking is a skill that you can begin develop right away.

To get started, I’d like you to think about the nervousness and brainstorm how it can be a good thing. I know, you may have to dig deep to find some uses for it, but they exist. Then knowing what it can do for you, start to use it and make it work for you.

Leaders are decisive.  And this is not an easy thing for many people.  Let’s face it, if it were, it wouldn’t be one of those things that sets 7 percenters apart.

And here’s the great thing, you can learn to be more decisive.  You’re not stuck with your current ability to make a decision and take action.  It comes down to something you’ve probably heard from me time and time again, confidence.  Confidence is the key to being decisive.

When you have confidence you tend to focus on the future and not agonize over “mistakes” from the past.  This does something very powerful for you, if you give yourself permission to make mistakes, learn from them and move on, you don’t have to worry that every mis-step is going to lead to hours, days, months or even years of beating yourself up about what you should have done.  Can you imagine how difficult it would be to make a decision if faced with this kind of situation?  This is exactly what many people do to themselves, it’s no wonder they are paralyzed and unable to move in one direction or another.

Here’s an easy way to begin to build up your self-confidence.  Make a list of your strengths and I mean all of your strengths.  This is not a time for brevity.  Get it all down in the list.  When you’re done with that, start listing your successes.  Make this a long list, we’re not looking for just the huge successes, but anything strength or any experience that you are proud of.  You don’t have to document them in detail, a short phrase should be enough to represent each strength and success.

Now that you have this list, I want you to focus your attention on these things, not the should of, would of, could of’s that you may have focused on before completing this exercise.  Look at your list at least once a day and by all means, add to it as you develop more strengths and have more success.

In a world of seemingly endless tasks and action-items, the ability to know when something is finally done is extremely important.  Even if you know when something is done, what do you do if someone on your team doesn’t seem to know when a task is complete?

Not knowing when something’s done relates to the problems of the “perfection paradox.”  It is all about a lack of confidence and the fear of being less than perfect.  The unconscious thinking is that if I don’t complete anything, I can’t be judged and found to be imperfect.  Sounds like a great plan, right?

This is a problem that wastes a lot of time and energy.  So, what do you do when you have someone on your team who has this particular issue?  During a one-on-one conversation, talk to the individual about their perception of their ability to make decisions.  While they may be unaware of their issue, it is even more likely that they are unaware about how to resolve it.

Through the discussion, you can simply ask the question, “How do you know when you’re done with ___?”  If they can’t tell you, then it would be a great time to coach them on identifying completion criteria which are simply the observable evidence that a decision is to be made or a task to be called complete.

Of course, another component of the issue could simply be related to confidence.  Through years and years of conditioning, they may have developed unproductive habits that have become deeply ingrained.  Bringing the issue out into the open is the first step towards its resolution.  Once the individual begins to demonstrate positive behaviors relating to completion, reinforce and encourage the individual as soon as possible.

Many companies are looking for qualified job candidates witht he ability to multi-task.  Of course, multi-tasking is another way of saying, “We have more things to do than time alotted, so can you keep up?”  But is multi-tasking truly effective?

Multi-tasking implies that multiple tasks are occurring at the same time.  As if it would be effective to work on this year’s budget while simultaneously designing a magazine advertisement for the marketing department.  The problem with the idea of multi-tasking is that our brain is not set up to switch tasks that way.  According to an article published in the periodical Neuron, by neuroscientists Rene Marois and Paul Dux, the brain’s prefrontal cortex is unable to process two tasks at the same time which contributes to our inability to effectively multi-task.

When describing the problem in seminars, I often use the analogy of a telephone switch.  If you were to place a call from New York to LA, as you speak in the phone, the phone converts your voice into electrical signals that travel across the phone lines until it gets to the receiver and is ultimately re-encoded so that the receiver can hear your voice.  However, your voice isn’t the only signal on the line.  Rather than wait for you to finish your conversation before allowing someone else to use the line, switches are used to send fragments of the signal over the lines at such rapid rates that any delay is virtually unnoticeable.  Digital switches can splice the signal up to 8,000 times per second.

So machines have a very rapid switchover ability.  Some computers have dual processors which literally is the essence of mult-tasking.  We humans, however, have a difficult time switching over.  Have you ever had to say to yourself, “Now, where was I?”  That’s an indication of a switchover problem.  You were interrupted by something, you attended to it and are trying to get back to your previous task.

That’s really not multi-tasking, that’s sequential tasking.  Which is fine, but we shouldn’t confuse trying to do a lot of things on a tight deadline with multi-tasking.  If anything, multi-tasking costs time rather than saves it.  Every second you waste trying to remember where you were is costing time.  While avoiding multi-tasking may not always be possible, keep in mind that it does have its costs.

It seems like we’ve seen it a million times.  That photograph of a soccer goalie diving in the opposite direction of the ball during a penalty kick.  Given the current strategy of kickers, research suggests that the best thing a goal can do is stay center, but that’s not what they do, is it?  So why do they dive left or right instead of following the strategy that is more likely to lead to success?

The answer comes down to guilt.  It turns out that then when things go badly as they often do during penalty kicks, the goalies feel more guilt if they did nothing, stayed center, then if they went for it and dove.  It didn’t matter they they dove in the wrong direction, they felt better because they had done something.

This is the problem with guilt.  It clouds our thinking and it causes us to make bad decisions.  7 percenters get it that guilt serves no purpose.  They know that while it’s important to learn from failures in the past, the best strategy is to keep looking to the present and the future.  How can we learn from the past to improve our success in the future?

I heard somewhere that if a cat jumps up on a hot stove, not only will it avoid hot stoves in the future, it will avoid the stove altogether.  And some people are like this, they get burned once and they will never try again.  They are paralyzed by fear. It is okay to make mistakes.

In fact, being afraid of making mistakes is perhaps the biggest mistake of all, because the logical conclusion is that the only way not to make a mistake is to not do anything.  To not get in the game at all.  But there is no victory in that.  Victory only tastes so sweet because of the risk of the bitterness of defeat.  Have the courage to take action and stay the course, even it means staying in the center of the goal, if that’s what it takes to be successful.

Have you noticed that despite its powerful effect on culture the news media is not always the best source of information.  In fact, the same news program can demonstrate the definition of contradiction, sometimes even in the same breath.

Recently, I saw a promo clip from one of my local television news stations about a segment they were doing at 11pm on the dangers of internet-based slot machines.  Apparently, instead of putting coins in the slots, there are computer terminals that have credit card readers attached, along with the pull-down lever on the side to simulate the feeling of the real thing.

Well, the promo segment was a few minutes in length, discussing the dangers of gambling and the nature of addiction.  Then, in the same breath, the news anchor literally said, “…and after that, stay tuned for tonight’s powerball numbers!”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the contradicting elements presented in just a few short minutes.  While this may verify the suspicion that news professionals just read the teleprompter without thinking, I think it also reflects the importance of thinking about the perception of one’s actions by employees.

While you can’t always think about what your employees will think when making decisions, it is important to remember that they are watching you and taking cues from you about acceptable behavior.

If you want them to come in early, stay late, or work on weekends, it can help if you do the same.  While it may not be practical to demonstrate every desired behavior, when an employee knows that you aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty, that goes a long way in building trust and it makes it easier for them to act this way themselves.

One of the banks that I use recently re-paved their parking lot. And it couldn’t have been a moment too soon.  I’ve been using the bank for a few years now and they’ve been great…service-wise.  However, when you went to their drive-thru ATM, at the exact spot you would stop in order to use the ATM, there was a huge pothole. And I mean huge. It was so deep, it felt you were going to bottom out your car if you weren’t careful. Sometimes, if you didn’t position your car correctly, it would make it difficult to reach the ATM to push the buttons. It was not a fun experience as you could imagine.

And the truth is that I hadn’t really paid attention to it that much until last week when I went to make a deposit. They fixed it!  They repaved the entire parking lot and fixed the pothole.  As I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed that it was paved and then it hit me that I had actually stopped using their ATM unless it was after business hours.  Without making this decision consciously, I realized that I had started going into the bank to make deposits, just so I wouldn’t have to deal with their pothole.

Now the bank still got my money, eventually, but they inadvertently put a barrier between us.  The job of a company is to make it as easy as possible for your customers to give you money.  Because each little hoop they have to jump through, each little speed bump they have to overcome makes it that much more likely that they are going to look for someone else to fill their needs.

Take a look at your customer experience, from start to finish, and begin to identify if there are any potholes or speed bumps. Take an inventory of these trouble spots and start getting rid of them when possible.  If you can’t get rid of them, do what you can to minimize them.

Have you ever watched a child learn to walk?

They don’t start with walking do they? First they crawl. I’ve seen some little buggers who can only go in reverse at first, but even then, they’re still mobile, and this is quite an achievement.

It’s not long before they’re standing with support from any object they can use to pull themselves up and any person who’s willing to hold them up. And they bounce and sometimes they fall down.

Actually, they fall down a lot, don’t they?

I’ve heard it said that that’s why diapers give some extra cushion, we expect them to fall. And then they take some assisted steps and they fall down some more, but finally they get it. And it is a huge achievement!

We expect them to fall, it’s part of the process of learning. If we didn’t let them fall, they wouldn’t grow, they wouldn’t learn to walk.

Why do we deny ourselves the same opportunity to grow?  

Mistakes, mis-steps, failures, trial-and-error these are part of the process of learning and growing.

Embrace them.

You will make mistakes and this means that you are growing and learning new ways to look at the situation. You are becoming a better decision maker with each decision you make, whether you get the result you want or not.

Own the mistakes, learn from them, and keep building to success.