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Last week I woke up in the middle of the night nervous that I was not nervous about a speech I had to make.

The thought that I was giving a speech in a few hours floated between my ears and in an instant I fell into a hole of nervousness because I was not nervous.

It was as if I had tried to step over a crack in the sidewalk, but as I stepped, the crack widened and became a hole. And in I went, heart pounding. I had to get out of bed and labor over the speech, beginning to end.

My wife Sharon had the same experience teaching her first class of the semester at a college where she is a new faculty member. She reported that she delivered the class without any of her usual pizzaz and efforts to entertain. The next morning, she mentioned she was concerned about how the class went because she herself had not been hyped up with energy. Essentially, she was nervous that she had not been nervous.

What’s going on?

Could it be calmness and worthiness are staging a coup within us, and toppling the tyrant anxiety? And anxiety is fighting back in order to prolong his reign?

And could anxiety have been doing some good, pushing us to excel.  Could his demanding nature have driven us toward excellence, when we might have otherwise settled for good enough. 

We are getting older. Maybe we are becoming more unflappable, more able to face our challenges  knowing that nothing is as bad as it seems, or as important.

While there may be less going on in my speech and her class than meets the eye,  some anxiety is good before-hand.  Psychologists call it anticipatory anxiety: it’s what drives you to prepare, to rehearse, to think of all the stuff you need to do a good job, to anticipate possible problems and take preventive action.

However, if you have too much anticipatory anxiety, you will not be able to concentrate.  If that happens, you will not be able to prepare well, and that could cause you to have a difficult time in performance.

Once you step onto the stage–whatever it is–a small amount of performance anxiety will fill you with adrenalin and give you an extra shot of energy, but too much and you will not be able to do justice to your own abilities.

So anticipatory anxiety is useful in planning, and performance anxiety is useful in delivering a talk or a class, but only in modest amounts.    If you have too little of either  you may lack the necessary oomph, and with too much, you may crash and burn.

It is wise to wear life like a loose garment, to care–but not too much.

Sims Wyeth & Co. provides public speaking courses, executive speech coaching, presentation skills training, voice and speech training, speech writing, and courses that address stage fright, body language, presentation strategy, and effective use of PowerPoint, all of which contribute to greater executive presence and personal impact.

Take a bunch of old men on a retreat and tell them to act as if they were reliving the 1950s.  Give them the clothes, the music, the food, the posters they had in college, and watch them get younger.

Tell another group of older men just to sit around and talk about old times, and watch the same thing happen.

Test each group’s vital signs before and after each event—heart rate, cholesterol, vision, hearing, reflexes—and guess what?  You see a statistically significant improvement in a large number of tests and individuals.

Why is this?  Because the mind makes it happen.  All the men on the retreat knew they were pretending, but it happened nonetheless.

What if we were to test an actor before and after a scene in a play in which he learns that he has won the lottery?  I suspect the actor in the dressing room before the scene would have a very different series of test results than the man tested off-stage immediately after.

Again, the mind pretends and the body responds.  Perhaps we can only sustain such changes for short periods of time, but that’s perfect for presenters.  We’re only on stage for an hour or so.

So here’s the question for all of us.  How do we take advantage of this naturally occurring magic?

I am currently offering a public program called Presenting for Results ^SM in New Jersey (the next one is October 19^th and 20^th).   In it, we are conducting experiments with the “As If” technique.  If old men can literally improve their eyesight, hearing, and reflexes by pretending to be young, why can’t we improve our speaking skills in the same way?

So  when we plan, write, and deliver presentations—when our reputation for intelligence, reliability, and interpersonal savvy are on the line—why not pretend that we are calm, confident, and full of conviction in ourselves and our ideas?

Can “pretending” lead to “being?”  In the short term, it seems so.  Why not find out?

I’d be happy to have you among the ten lucky people at Presenting for Results ^SM on October 19^th and 20^th in New Jersey (at the beautiful Upper Montclair Country Club.)

To register, or to download the brochure, go to http://www.simswyeth.com/services/pfr/ And if you know people who could benefit from an invigorating educational experience, would you please forward them this post?

Sims Wyeth is an executive speech coach in Montclair, NJ specializing in presentation skills and public speaking training in order to give accomplished people the knowledge and skill they need to become accomplished speakers. Learn more public speaking tips at www.SimsWyeth.com.

Busy executives who want to improve their public speaking skills now have a new opportunity to master  effective speech and public presentation techniques with “Training the Speaking Voice”.

We are judged by how we speak, write, and think-in that order.  That’s why it’s crucial that professionals speak their thoughts in a manner that is easy to understand, and inspires trust and respect in their listeners.   Training the Speaking Voice, is a developmental process customized for each individual and group to achieve targeted outcomes.

We created the program after an increase in demand from executives and professionals seeking ways to improve the clarity and impact of their sound and enunciation, or with those who speak English with a regional or foreign accent.

The program is excellent for public speakers or executives looking to enhance their professional opportunities with dynamic speaking capabilities.  The exercises open up new possibilities for self-awareness as well as professional and personal growth. 

Typical voice and speech training issues include:

• speaking too softly
• speaking too quickly
• lack of expression (monotony of pitch, volume, and speed)
• vocal fatigue
• too many “ers” and “uhms”
• an accent that makes the speaker hard to understand

About Training the Speaking Voice

Training the Speaking Voice  is an Executive Education Program, customized for each individual and/or group, to achieve targeted outcomes.

Candidates for the program include those whose clarity or personal impact is impeded by an accent, or by less than optimal voice and speech habits.

The program follows an intuitive path.

1. First, we record & identify the voice or speech challenge.
2. We introduce exercises to address the issues.
3. The candidate receives coaching in person, and practices on her own.
4. We measure the change, report the results, and provide guidance for continuing growth and awareness.

To support the face-to face instruction, we provide easy to use written materials, customized recordings for home (or car) study, and web and phone tutorials.

More information is available online at http://simswyeth.com/services/voice-speech-training.php

I attended my high school reunion over the weekend, where the organizers had asked each returning alumnus (we were an all-boys school) to prepare a short talk on our best and worst moments as students.

I had trouble with the assignment. My life in high school was a blur of memories, and the more I tried to remember, the more trivial my recollections became.

Pressing on, I remembered the times I cried in high school, and thought to myself, “Well that’s an honest approach. I’ll lose points for being serious, but I’ll be real.”

And so that’s what I did. I watched my classmates read prepared texts and generate laughter, until they demanded I take my turn. I spoke about the times I cried in school–tears of joy and sadness– and sat down.

I’ve been re-thinking it ever since, wishing I had done something different, or devising more clever ways I might have presented the same material.

What’s the best way to respond to post-speech remorse? I suggest (to myself and others):
1. Do a quick rewrite after you fantasize about what you might have said.
2. Ask a trusted ally who was in the audience what worked and what could have been better.
3. Make a promise to yourself not to wing it when you have the slightest chance to prepare.

As far as I’m concerned, presentations are never finished, only abandoned, and every effort can be improved and re-purposed for the next talk. 

If I had rehearsed and polished my talk, I would not have apologized for it.  Instead, I would have explained that memories attach to moments of emotion, and then told my stories as vividly as possible.

This morning a woman told me that when she hosted a company radio show, she heard herself on tape and was horrified to hear how often she said “er” and “uhm.”  She resolved to stop.

The next day, while on the air, she heard herself  “ering and uhming” and began to have a dialogue with herself.  One voice was telling her that she was “ering and uhming” and the other voice was trying to talk to the audience through the microphone.  She described it as an impossible situation.

Athletes practice until their bodies know what to do.  Musicians practice until their fingers know what to do.  Why should speakers be any different?  If you have the habit of “ering and uhming” you need to practice speaking until you’ve created a new habit–the habit of flawless speech.

However, if you are obliged to perform during such a “practice period” in your life, you would be better off forgetting about your “ers and uhms” during performance and simply let your talent take over.

If you ride shotgun on your talent, as the radio announcer did, your conscious mind is trying to interfere with what should be a well-grooved habit.  Psychologists call this “conscious override.”  It’s the mind getting in the way of the talent.

Work on your skills in practice, but when it comes time to perform, give it your best shot.  When the performance is over, you can go back to ridding yourself of those “ers and uhms.”

No one likes to be pulled from a warm bed and thrust into a cold shower.  And many people I’ve met feel the same about being plucked from the blanket of everyday life to stand alone on a stage with a thousand pairs of eyes on them.   And so, when they find themselves on stage, they naturally seek refuge.

They seek refuge in two ways.  They disappear emotionally by making themselves small, or they try to dominate by increasing their size.

Disappearing emotionally is a remarkable human art.  Some of us have had an “out-of-body” experience when presenting, which is similar to the experience of passing out when in great pain: It’s a way of avoiding a difficult reality.

When I was very young, I caught a baby rabbit in my bare hands because when he saw me coming, he froze and played dead.  I walked right up to him, picked him up and took him home to show my mother.  I was very proud of myself.

Some of us become adept at disappearing emotionally as children, either because we observe that others are not emotionally present,  or we are taught that we should keep our thoughts and feelings to ourselves.  As adults, we might therefore use words, gestures, and a tone of voice that basically say, “I wish I weren’t here.”

We make ourselves absent or small by using words such as, “I guess,” “I think,” “Sort of,” “like, you know,” “kind of,” and many other common expressions that communicate uncertainty.

We absent ourselves by avoiding eye contact, slouching, hiding our hands, stepping back, and shifting our weight back and forth, as though we felt safer as a moving target.

And finally, we communicate absence or smallness by speaking too quietly, speaking too quickly, or using a rising intonation at the ends of our sentences, as though we were asking a question or seeking approval for our thoughts.

How do we make ourselves appear to be bigger than we actually are?

We use words that make us sound important, such as, “We anticipate experiencing considerable weather,” when we actually mean, “The plane ride will be bumpy.”

We might say, “We need to precipitate brand loyalty before the advent of competitive intrusion,” when we really mean, “Let’s get ‘em hooked on our stuff before the other guys come out with theirs.”

In other words, we try to sound like an institution instead of a person.

We make ourselves bigger with our bodies too.  We wear suits with padded shoulders.  We wear shoes with high heels.  We expand our gestures to occupy more space, like peacocks spreading their tails to frighten other males away.  And we practice a look of stern intention, focusing our eyes on one person at a time, as if to say, “I am a force to be reckoned with.  I will brook no dissent.”

Finally, we make ourselves bigger with our voices, by projecting more forcefully, be elongating vowels, by actually speaking in a sing-song cadence that echoes from the early 19th century but still lives in some of our political candidates.

We make ourselves smaller and bigger because we are scared.  We are scared because we are afraid of the audience.  We are afraid of the audience because we don’t know them, or we know them too well, or we simply have no experience speaking to groups.

We make ourselves small in the hope that we will not be noticed.  We make ourselves bigger hoping that the audience will not notice that we are small.  We change into something we’re not because we are afraid that, as we are, we are not all that impressive.

It’s a cop-out to be smaller than you are.  It’s a put-on to be bigger than you are.  The sweet spot is to trust that you’re big enough.

In the Jobs section of the New York Times, on Sunday March 30th, Phyllis Korkki has written an article entitled The Adroit Speaker Doesn’t Wing It.

That’s true and not true. I believe wholeheartedly in preparing, rehearsing, getting feedback, even scripting a speech or presentation. But then, once I have internalized the content, I boil my talk down into bullets and let myself wing it.

Rehearsal enables spontaneity. Jazz musicians work on their riffs, (their chops) in rehearsal so that they can improvise in performance. But much of that improvisation has been grooved into their muscles during hours of practice.

I don’t want to be married to a script, and I don’t think audiences want us to be married to scripts. They appreciate the fact that scripts can keep us on point, but they do not like the fact that scripts force us to read to them.

Ms. Korkki quotes Linda Blackman, founder of Executive Image in Chicago on the causes of stage fright. She says we get stage fright because:

1. We’re afraid we will look foolish
2. We’ll make a mistake (?)
3. We will disappoint the boss
4. Our expertise will be questioned
5. We may not have prepared properly

There are other reasons as well. We may have had a traumatic experience in childhood associated with humiliation, such as answering a question in class and hearing the entire room erupt in derisive laughter. Such an experience opens a pathway in the brain that makes it more likely we will experience the flight or fight syndrome.

The ancient Greeks called this dreadful sensation glossophobia. Glossa is Greek for tongue, and phobos means fear.

The Greeks also had another word that could describe stage fright: agoraphobia, which is the fear of crowds. Agora is the Greek word for marketplace.

According to some surveys, public speaking is the number one fear in America, followed by the fear of illness, heights, deep water, snakes and bugs, financial problems, and death.

Death is number seven, which means that most people would rather die than give a talk. Seinfeld once quoted this fact on his show and quipped, “That’s why, when you go to a funeral, you’d rather be in the box than deliver the eulogy.”

It has been shown that the blood chemistry of a soldier about to go into battle is the same as that of a speaker about to go on stage.

Overcoming stage fright is a multi-channel enterprise. Ms. Korkki’s article stresses the importance of preparing your script, but there are tens of thousands of well-prepared speakers who are terrified and ineffective.

Preparing your script is a brain function, but good speaking is not entirely cognitive. It also requires the heart and the body–in other words, your emotions and your spirit.

Dr. Charles Strobel of Yale University offered a more wholistic approach. His research indicated that there are two ways to alter a distressing inner state. One is to include positive self-talk and mental imagery as you prepare. The other is to use your body to impact your inner feelings.

For instance, Strobel proved that smiling blocks the enzyme in the brain that causes us to experience fear. He encouraged deep breathing, which can have the same effect, and showed that the best way to get a deep breath is to yawn–although not in front of the audience.

He also demonstrated that by simply manipulating your posture–by standing up straight and acting as if you were feeling comfortable, you change your blood chemistry.

The power of visualizing the results you hope to achieve is an established psychological technique. The power of using gesture and movement to alter inner states is less widely known, but it is another example of how emotion influences the body, and how the body can influence our emotions.

Glossophobia is the fear of public speaking. It comes, like all the other phobias, from the ancient Greeks, more specifically the Athenians, who spent time thinking about speech communication.

The word itself comes from the Greek word for tongue (glossa) combined, of course, with the more familiar root word for fear (phobos.)

For those of you who are Jackie Gleason/Ralph Cramden fans, it means, “Hummina, hummina, hummina,” accompanied by an urgent finger inserted between neck and shirt collar, with an audible “Gulp,” at the end.

Glossophobia is a disease to which all of us are susceptible, and is associated with several co-morbidities.

Hyper-Infoitis: The swelling of information in the body of a talk, usually caused by an insecure speaker trying to impress her audience with her expertise.

PowerPointitis: The proliferation of PowerPoint slides, caused by the mistaken belief that a presentation is what the speaker says, and not what the audience can take away.

Oldnewsatoid Syndrome: An illness that causes the speaker to tell the audience what it already knows (common in Medical Education.)

Laser Pointer Obsessive Disorder: The need to clutch, fondle, and wiggle a small, thin, pointed object with a magical little hole in the end from which comes a beam of intense light

Hyper Logorrhea: The tendency for speakers to speak so rapidly that the audience has to conclude that the speaker is brilliant but completely unintelligible.

Uhmatosis: The swelling and swarming of inarticulate groans and pre-verbal utterances that get stuck in the cracks between words and stink up the flow and impact of human speech.

Repetitive Uptalk Illness: Occurring primarily in young females, debilitating to their professionalism and credibility, it corrupts the intonation patterns of their speech so as to make them appear needy of approval, paradoxically earning them disdain.

These are just the first seven co-morbidities associated with glossophobia. Our speech scientists are hard at work diagnosing other illnesses that cascade from this terrible human scourge.

Stay tuned.