Do you feel your palms becoming sweaty, your face starting to get hot and a sudden tight feeling in your chest and voice when you’re faced with talking in front of an audience, or even in a team meeting? Those feelings of fear are often rooted at the subconscious level, so no matter how relentlessly you practise your speech or “breathe deeply”, the anxiety will always show up. Until you get your subconscious mind on board.

Of course it’s not unusual to feel a bit nervous before giving a big presentation or pitching your ideas to others.  But when those nerves become overwhelming and hamper or block your performance, that’s when your mind is unhelpfully producing a “fight, flight or freeze” response that’s out of all proportion and stops you enjoying this part of your job.

Here are some of the symptoms when you have a fear of public speaking:

– feelings of dread and overthinking 

– trying to avoid the situation 

– breathlessness, a racing heart, sweating, going red

– fumbling over your words

– a full panic attack.

These unhelpful feelings can often ruin important presentations and really knock your confidence.

Very often what is going on is your body is creating an automatic fear response to being the centre of attention, that was programmed into your mind at a young age.  As children, we can experience difficult situations that are overwhelming when you only have a few years’ life experience.  You might, for example, be asked to read out loud in class and mess it up.  Your classmates laugh and if you’re unlucky, so might your teacher.  A family member insists you dance or play an instrument when you’re not ready, and again everyone sees you mess up. These events create feelings of humiliation and rejection.  And your subconscious mind makes a decision: I’m not going to put myself in that situation again.  So in later life when you stand up to speak in public (become the centre of attention again), the anxiety you experience is your mind warning you – don’t do this! It’s trying to protect you from those painful feelings of humiliation and rejection.

The fear response is our body’s automatic survival mechanism to respond to danger (including the danger of rejection and embarrassment).  But of course, the anxiety that started out as this protection mechanism, has now become an unhelpful hindrance.

The solution is to uncover what first triggered this fear response in you and then retrain your mind to know that you can safely speak in public and to associate confidence, passion and enjoyment (rather than fear) with public speaking.  This process is surprisingly quick and easy to achieve with just one or two sessions of RTT hypnotherapy.  Hypnotherapy helps you access your most resourceful states when you need them, and rewires your automatic response to public speaking so that it’s confidence, not panic. 

Public speaking can be really pleasurable and exciting and can help you achieve more of your professional goals.  RTT hypnotherapy is an empowering and easily accessible way to quickly uproot your fear and replace it with calm and confidence so you can find that enjoyment.

I worked recently with a lawyer, Judith, who had always had intense anxiety around public speaking but needed to give presentations at work and chair meetings.  She described her hypnotherapy session as a “truly transformational experience.” She says “I really thrive now in public speaking and am able to relax into it right from the outset, speak off the cuff and take interruptions and I’ve had some fantastic feedback on my latest presentations.”

Hypnotherapy is an entirely natural and empowering process.  If you too want to overcome your fear of public speaking quickly and easily, please do contact me for a free consultation and start your journey to becoming a relaxed and confident speaker.