I love speaking!
Last week I was really pleased to be invited to speak at Greater Manchester Police, Stockport Division’s Menopause Cafe.
The turnout was fabulous the audience included women at various stages of peri and post menopause, men wanting to support their partners better and high ranking staff wanting to understand more so that they could support their workforce better.
I was in my element. It ticked all my boxes:
✅ I love to see organisations supporting staff wellbeing
✅ I love helping people, and
✅ I love speaking
It was the perfect combination – I love my work!
But, did you know that public speaking is one of the most common fears?
They say people are more afraid of public speaking than of death.
It’s not because they’d rather die, it’s because they feel like if they speak up, speak their truth or speak out, they’ll die.
Throughout history, if you spoke out against your people or the prevailing opinion, you were likely to be ostricised and this would often result in your death.
And still in some countries, if you speak up you risk imprisonment and torture.
Our most deepest, hard-wired desire is to belong, to be part of something, a community.
So it’s no wonder that we fear being visible, fear people disagreeing with our view, fear being challenged.
It’s called being human.
But, what we forget to contextualise is that speaking in front of a group of colleagues is highly unlikely to end in our death.
Even if our primitive brain – the part of our brain that’s responsible for keeping us safe – feels like it might.
And, there was a time when it felt like that for me too.
I’d always done a lot of speaking in my corporate career. I’d enjoyed it and got great feedback.
Then something changed and I stopped enjoying it. I stopped getting good feedback. I got nervous and would avoid doing it at all costs.
The last time I gave a presentation in my corporate career, I stood in front of a room full of men nervously mumbling my way through some slides on a subject I had no real knowledge about, no passion for, and which was outside of my area of expertise.
I had so little knowledge that I didn’t even have a point of view on what recommendation I should make to the group sat in front of me.
They could smell my fear: a challenging audience at the best of times, they asked me question after question I couldn’t answer.
I just wanted the ground to open up and swallow me.
It really did feel like my life was at stake. Like the proverbial lamb to the slaughter.
What had happened?
I thought I’d changed and I was less capable than before.
I felt like I’d lost the skill.
I’d certainly lost all the confidence I used to have.
My mind was full of unhelpful thoughts:
- “Maybe I wasn’t ever any good”
- “Maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought I was”
- “Maybe people had been lying to me previously when they gave me positive feedback”
I thought it was me, that I was less than before.
Wind forward a few years and a new career, and last year I started to feel a pull towards speaking again.
I took some training to refresh my skills.
I learned to speak up, speak out and tell my story.
And I didn’t die.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
I came alive.
I felt in flow.
I rediscovered my passion for speaking.
I realised that I hadn’t changed, I’d had the skills all along.
I’d previously just lost the passion for what I was talking about.
I was working competently, but without passion.
Full of information, but with no opinion.
I didn’t know what I stood for.
And now I feel back where I belong: speaking out, helping people, passionate about what I do, what I know and the knowledge I spread.
When I speak now, my passion for it oozes out my pores. I love my work and it shows.
Sometimes when we feel fear, we think it’s about us. Either something we lack, or something we think we’re not.
But the truth is that sometimes we’re just in the wrong place, doing something we don’t love and putting up with situations that don’t inspire us.
We focus on what we think we’re not because we’ve got out of connection with our brilliance and our innate strengths.
Out of flow.
Like the proverbial square peg in a round hole.
We unconsciously try to shave our square edges off to fit in where we are. But, we don’t need to do that. We just need to find the right shape for us.
Where we naturally fit.
Back into flow.
If you’d like to stop shaking with nerves and shake your fear of public speaking instead, please get in touch to find out how I can help.