Overcome Fear of Public Speaking (Full Training)

Overcome Fear of Public Speaking (Complete Guide)

Read time: 3 minutes

This is normally a $999 document that I used to give to my clients as a checklist of what to do right before stepping on stage.

I’m giving it to you for $0 for being a part of my community!

It works. You just have to follow it.

Critical Mindset to have:

If there is ONE main takeaway I want you to have from this is:

Feeling anxiety and pressure is NORMAL.

When we see something as normal, we no longer start to beat ourselves up over why we’re experiencing it.

Public speaking anxiety comes with pressure. Pressure comes with opportunities that are important.

So if you feel public speaking anxiety, it does not mean you’re not good enough or people are judging you, it just means your body is getting ready for something important.

The problem is, most of us interpret this ‘thought’ as reality. Learning to differentiate between the two takes time so be patient with yourself.

Nervousness and anxiety comes from 3 things:

1) Expectations - If your goal is to speak in a way where everyone loves you, showers you with praise, and sing your praises for every word you speak.

Your expectations are too high. You will be disappointed even if you do exceptionally well.

Expect yourself to prepare, and deliver. That’s it. What comes of it, comes of it.

As strange as it sounds, to perform better, your expectations need to be lower.

Lower expectations = lower pressure = better performance = more praise.

Higher expectations = higher pressure = worse performance = less praise.

Now I don’t mean go into a presentation expecting to be terrible.

But have expectations around your preparation, not your end-result.

Set expectations to practice a number of times, say the words out loud. But have low expectations of expecting compliments or standing ovations.

2) Preparation - If you don’t prepare, you won’t do well, and you’ll underperform, and disappoint yourself. You won’t feel certain in your own abilities and you will feel nervous. This is the only thing you can control, so take advantage of it.

If you go into a presentation without having said the words out loud start to finish 5 times (at least) - there is no ‘mystery’ around why there’s anxiety.

There’s anxiety because there simply is no evidence that you are ready for the occasion. So prepare and rehearse.

3) Perception - How you see the world is based on how you see yourself. There are terrible public speakers who have great confidence in front of people.

Why? Because they see others as being friendly and supportive, not enemies and people out to get them.

No amount of public speaking skills will help you if your mind doesn’t let you see how well you do.

If you are speaking in front of an audience, that by its nature means people trust you enough to see you as an expert.

Think less about how you appear, and what people think of you, think more about how you can help them with what you say.

You can have the worst public speaking skills in the world, but if the audience found what you said useful, that’s all that matters. No one is counting your filler words, judging your gestures etc.

Again, this will take time and patience.

I’m going to divide this into two stages:

A) Before Presentation

You’ve been told you have to present a week from now.

Here’s what you do to maximize your chances of doing well.

1) Put the slide deck together as early as you possible can.
Minutes Leading up to the presentation.

2) Once the slides are put together, I want you not to READ the information in your head. I want you to say the words out loud as if you’re presenting it.

3) Do this start to finish 3 times - you’ll inevitably find areas that you can’t speak to that well, and words or slides that don’t sound quite right. You then make adjustments to your slides or how you say it accordingly.

4) Rule of 10: NEVER go to a presentation without having said it out loud, start to finish, at least 10 times (5 is the minimum). I guarantee you, if you just do this, your nervousness will reduce by 500%.

5) On your slides, have enough information to keep you on track, so you know what you’re talking about, but not so much information that people can read the whole thing themselves and they’re waiting for you to read it.

You can have points up on the screen, and explain them yourself. This is significantly better than using notes because notes create pressure to remember, hit specific details, and not forget.

If something is so important that it must be mentioned, put it on the slide.

6) This is what your ideal practice would look like

Day 1-2: Put slides together
Day 3-4: Say it out loud, find errors, fix
Day 5-7: Rehearse out loud over and over again.

Always remember: Rehearse at least ONE time on the DAY of the presentation. Going into a presentation completely cold without a warm-up is a TERRIBLE idea.

Minutes Leading Up to the Presentation

1) Warm Up: Early in the day, do one full walkthrough of your presentation out loud.

2) Then, say the first 1-5 minutes of the presentation out loud leading up to the presentation (if you have time.) Then, time to let go.

3) This is critical: Do NOT change anything in your presentation. Do not think of what you’ll say on slide 17. Do not give yourself instructions in anyway.

You’ve done the practice, now you need to trust yourself to be able to deliver what you’ve practiced. The more you interfere, the worse it will be.

This is why we see people practice for days ahead of time, know their presentation inside out, but then last minute they keep reminding themselves not to forget certain details …. sure enough, they forget.

4) You’re 5 minutes from the presentation, you’re feeling nervous - what do you do?

i) Remind yourself that this is not a bad thing, this is the expected response. Do not be surprised by this.

If you think “Oh gosh it’s happening again! Why is this happening!” You will panic and forget everything to focus on the panic.

ii) When you hear thoughts like “What if you forget!” “What if you don’t do well!” -

Note that in your head that this is your inner critic trying to sabotage you. Just recognize this as “Ah, my brain is trying to overprotect me by painting the worst possible situation.”

Don’t fall for its tricks. This will take time with awareness. The more you notice it, the more it will stop bothering you.

iii) Get out of your head, into your body. Remember: You can’t out think your nervousness or anxiety, you will start arguing with yourself in your head, trying to rationalize it, this will only make it worse.

Instead, get out of the mind entirely. This can be done by bringing your attention to:

1) Your breath
2) Your toes moving
3) Your fingers rubbing against each other etc.

This will distract your conscious mind until it’s time to present.

Now, it’s time to start presenting.

I like to anchor myself with a word or a sentence.

I usually anchor myself with the word ‘slow’ because it reminds me to:

Slow my speech
Slow my breathing
Slow my movement.

Presentation Begins:

Just know that there’s a 99.9% chance that you will talk faster, your heart will beat faster, you will have sweaty palms and a shaky voice for the first 60 seconds.

Just accept that it will happen, don’t fight it, don’t try to prevent it. Just allow it. This will reduce all the inner tension and resistance you will feel.

Start speaking and allow yourself to ride through all those emotions until around 60-90 seconds, the emotions will start to calm down, you’ll feel lighter and better, and you’ll get carried away with your presentation that you’ll forget about it.

But then a few minutes later, maybe someone’s on their phone, or they’re not paying attention to you.

Your mind says “Hey, you’re boring them, you suck!”

Become aware that it’s your inner-saboteur again trying to protect you a bit too much. Recognize it, and let it go without fighting it, and go back to focusing on your presentation.

You will notice this will happen 4-5 times depending on the length of your presentation. It’s normal.

Before you know it, you’ve gone through the presentation and you’re done!

After the presentation

If you feel a lot of anxiety, your first thought will most likely be something negative.

“I did terrible.”
“That was awful.”
“People hated me.”

Know that you are not speaking to be liked, you are speaking to be valuable.

If all the thoughts in your head are about yourself, then that was a bigger issue than any mistake you could have made in terms of delivery.

Congratulate yourself, don’t ask anyone how you did. Because most people are terrible at giving feedback either because:

i) They won’t tell you the truth,
ii) They won’t be specific enough and that’ll leave you wondering,
iii) They’ll give you untrained feedback

Allow some time to pass till your emotions are more stable, perhaps the next day.

Then ask for feedback when you are in a more calm state and ready to receive.

Wrap-up:

There really is nothing else you need to know about handling public speaking anxiety.

This is all you will need.

The feeling will never go away, but you will simply change the meaning of the feeling to something more positive over time as you become more and more aware of it.

I’ve used this exact process with 2,500 people, just trust it works and that you can do it.

The best technique in the world won’t work if you believe it somehow won’t work for you.


—Yasir Khan