Stage Fright: Eliminating the Fear of Speaking at a Conference

Public Speaking is one of the most common fears that people experience. But even people who have no difficulty speaking in front of people normally, can experience extreme anxiety at the prospect of talking in front of their peers. 

 "The nervousness wasn't there, something else was in it's place, my own skills and knowledge......I felt very relaxed"

J came to me after she was booked to speak about her specialty subject at an international conference on Physiotherapy. Although she had given many talks previously and found it really easy, the thought of speaking at this conference was filling her with dread. She came to me because, "I thought being nervous would stop me putting across my enthusiasm".

It didn't take long to identify that the fear was specifically about talking to her peers, since she was quite able to give impromptu talks to the general public without any nerves what-so-ever.

We identified the exact fear and used EFT to eliminate it. It was obvious that she was feeling much more confident about giving the talk as she was now able to speak calmly, without rushing her words when she mentioned it and she had noticed how much more relaxed her chest muscles were. Then we identified several beliefs that were holding her back from achieving her true potential. EFT was again used to eliminate these. As normally happens when you eliminate a negative belief, it is naturally replaced by a much more positive belief, without needing any extra work.

Since she now felt excited at the prospect of speaking at the conference, we decided to use some techniques to enhance her performance. 

Anchoring is a very simple NLP technique that enables you to access whatever feeling you want, when you want it. We anchored the feeling of confidence and then we magnified the feeling by stacking another feeling of confidence onto the same trigger we were using to access the first, then we stacked another, until the anchor was very powerful. So all J had to do was touch one of the knuckles on her hand to trigger off a really powerful feeling of confidence. Next, we talked about the structure of the presentation. One of the most simple ways to set out a presentation is the 4 Mat structure. This enables the trainer to set out the training to appeal to the ways that people learn.

Finally, we went over how to use body language. It is estimated that only 7% of the message that you convey to your audience comes from the words that you use. 55% of the message is conveyed by your physiology. Virginia Satir was a well known family therapist who identified certain common body postures that conveyed powerful messages. Using these postures you can greatly improve the impact of your training.

At the conference J used the anchoring to boost her confidence. She also used the Satir categories. "The nervousness wasn't there, something else was in it's place, my own skills and knowledge".

Asked how she would describe the experience, J said, "Pilates is very simple technique, so simple and logical that people think it is not going to work, and it does, and it's very much the same with EFT"

Reproduced with the kind permission and help of the client

Specific EFT, NLP Techniques used in this case

Therapy techniques used in this session include, EFT, NLP -Anchoring, Satir Categories and the 4 - Mat System