Transcripts

Dr. Larina Kase:
The fear is the fear of negative evaluation. This means that we want to be seen and perceived as smart and nice by other people so we worry about being seen negatively.

Dr. Larina Kase, author of the book The Confident Speaker, says you'll never eliminate that fear so you shouldn't try. But don't focus on it either.

The key is to focus externally get your attention outside of your head and into the situation - outside of your mind and into the audience. In a conversation what you want to do is really get lost in the conversation, focus on the content, just allow yourself to spontaneously respond and focus on what the other person is saying. In a large speaking engagement what you want to do is focus on your message rather than focus on yourself and exactly how you're delivering that point. And you want to focus on connecting with the audience through eye contact.

The audience typically is on your side and wants you to do well even if they don't show it.

Something that we have found in research is that when people are anxious about speaking in public, what they do is they look at their audience and they interpret any neutral signals from the audience as negative. So this means if you have somebody in your audience who just has a neutral facial expression,(which most people will have), nervous speakers think that that means something negative. And then they get thrown off by it because they start thinking, "Oh no, no one's interested in what I'm saying, I must be boring them." So what you want to do is just know that people are going to have a neutral expression.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net, I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.