Building Your Confidence

• Embrace your anxiety. Anxiety can have positive effects, such as driving you to be more prepared and giving you energy. For example, anxiety over forgetting your speech’s main points might cause you to prepare with solid notes. By thinking about what might go wrong, you can come up with simple solutions for just about any scenario. In addition, that jolt of adrenaline you feel before starting to speak can also be a source of energy to make your points with enthusiasm—use it!
• Desensitize yourself. Sometimes the best way to get over something is to “just do it.” You address your fear of public speaking by making attempts to get up in front of a crowd in less threatening situations, like asking a question in class or at a community meeting. You might even try singing karaoke with friends—nobody expects you to be any good at it, anyway, and it might be fun!
• Visualize your success. Research shows that people with high speech anxiety tend to concentrate on negative thoughts before giving their speeches (Ayres & Hopf, 1993). In order to reduce those thoughts (and their accompanying anxiety), it’s important to spend time imagining positive scenarios and personal success, a technique known as performance visualization (Ayres, 2005; Ayres & Hopf, 1993). Performance visualization allows you to define situations and reduce uncertainty (Honeycutt, Choi, & DeBerry, 2009), so go ahead and imagine yourself standing before your audience with confidence and grace—and it just may happen.
  

  Figure 14.3: MEDITATING OR PRACTICING yoga can help you learn to relax your muscles and focus your attention. © Blend Images/Alamy
• Take care of yourself. In order to be productive, remember to take care of yourself in the days leading up to your speech: get enough rest, budget your time effectively to make room for your speech practice sessions, try to eat a light meal before the presentation, and try relaxation techniques (such as deep breathing, yoga, a calming walk, listening to one of your favorite songs, and laughing with friends).
• Be prepared! As we’ve mentioned—and as we’ll discuss throughout this chapter—adequately preparing for your speech will increase the likelihood of success and lessen your apprehension (Smith & Frymier, 2006). Research demonstrates that confidence does come through preparation and skill building, which means that conducting thorough research, organizing your points, and preparing a useful outline will help you achieve a positive outcome (Schroeder, 2002).
• Rehearse your delivery. Ask a few friends or family members to observe your speech. (This is particularly useful if you are giving an in-person speech and have a strong preference for mediated communication, like texting or Facebook messaging. Sometimes just practicing in front of people will take the edge off your nervousness.) Also, try recording a few practice sessions first. Ask the same friends to critique your delivery and improve with their feedback in mind.
• Challenge yourself. We ultimately learn and grow as individuals by pushing ourselves to accomplish things that we have not tried or felt confident with before. Instead of viewing your speech event as something to dread, reframe your thoughts and view it as an opportunity to gain new a valuable new skill! With a more realistic understanding of the role of anxiety—and with these tips for addressing it in mind—let’s move on to the various methods of delivery that you may confront over the course of your life as a student, professional, and citizen.