There has been a lot written about how to overcome nervousness in presenting. My feeling is that it really helps for the speaker to consider the question, “why are you giving this presentation?” The answer to that question is probably not, “to show off how good of a speaker I am” or “to illustrate my talents as a presenter.” More likely, the reason we give presentations is that we have some valuable information we feel is important to share with our audience, so it is not really about us at all (and what we look like, or sound like). Instead it is about our audience, their needs and our desire to help them in some way by sharing important information. If, as a speaker, you can shift our mental focus from our own emotions, to the needs of the audience, to their emotions and to using the presentation as a way to help the audience, then that mental shift can help eliminate some of our nervousness. Think if it this way. If you are setting out thinking primarily about what the audience needs and how you can help them and your primary goal is to focus on their needs, then that will do a lot to help you as a speaker to shift your attention away from yourself. Don’t think about yourself; think about your audience.
This insight came to me after a presentation done by a student on celiac disease. She was very, very nervous about presenting. Her speech was full of important, if rather dry information and it had little audience appeal. In our revision process, I asked the student why she had chosen the topic and she explained that she suffered from this disease and that when she was first diagnosed, she was scared. All she could think about was what she could no longer eat. But after having learned to live with the disease, she came to understand that is was not nearly as bad as she thought—in fact life was much better for her since her diagnosis. She wanted to share that insight with those individuals who might feel as scared as she did when she was first diagnosed. So we set out to revise her content and focus in this way. This shift in focus from “giving a speech on celiac disease” to sharing her own experiences in a sincere desire to help out others, had a dramatic effect on her presentation and on her level of nervousness, because she stopped thinking of it as giving a speech and began thought of it as an effort to reach out to other people and help them. She was still a little nervous, but it was not as overwhelming as it had been in her first try.
I think it makes sense. If the speech is all about us, as presenters, all about being judged and evaluated, then it will make us nervous. But if a presentation is about a sincere desire to help out our audience, then it is a lot less scary.
The point Dr. Sisco is making here is exactly why I love this class. I’ve learned that presenting is not all about me as the presenter. It’s about stepping outside the presenter role and taking on the role of an audience member. As an audience member, what would I want to hear? What would keep me interested? What important points should I walk away with?
It doesn’t matter whether you present daily or annually, presentations make presenters nervous. However, the difference between an experienced presenter and a novice is what is done with that nervousness. An experienced presenter will take that nervous energy and thrive off of it. To those with experience, perfecting a presentation is almost an addiction. They want to not only perfect their speech but they also want to sharpen their “people reading” skills. They want to know what the audience is thinking so that they can adjust their presentation accordingly.
A novice, on the other hand, will allow the nervous energy to become overwhelming. They will get through their speech but without any consideration of those in the audience. They may not pick up on the confused looks on faces or the people in the back row falling asleep. A novice concentrates on getting through the speech rather than on the quality of the speech. What all novices need to do is not worry about being judged. Instead, present your topic as a conversation between you and your audience.
Nervous? Remember, it’s not about you. It’s all about them
The root behind nervousness during presentations is the fear from the audience’s judgment. In other words, when the speaker starts asking himself questions such as: “How does the audience perceive me?”, “Do I seem ridiculous?”, “Do I commit any mistakes while speaking?” and alike; the speaker loses his/her concentration, starts focusing on himself/herself instead of the presentation and thus loses control and confidence. The ultimate way to overcome this critical situation that we all faced one day is to start by gathering some information about the audience and then craft a presentation planning. This latter is very helpful because it keeps your mind focus on specific points to be discussed instead of focusing on others’ perceptions. Even though, the fact of detecting the audience perception towards the presentation through keeping eye contact and asking them questions is very important in order to know their interest levels’ regarding the presentation. Such a way, the speaker may use techniques to engage them like changing the voice tone, using gestures, introducing humor or letting them participate through a game or questions. All in all, I think that the speaker entire focus should be on his/her presentation because the enthusiasm comes from the content and the energy comes from the audience eyes.
It’s true, when giving a presentation it is all about the audience. I speech should be more then just regurgetating facts and numbers. It should be informative but with emotion behind it. I think focusing your energy on informing your audience rather then trying to impress your audience, it can definatly take the focus off you as a person. Too often presenters rush through their presentations, and the information loses credibility, and in turn the presenter loses credibility. Also a presenter loses credibility when they rush through a presentation as well, because it doesn’t seem like they are actually interested or connected to the information they are giving.
In my opinion feeling nervous is not a good sign on presentations currently, because being a student gives us some toleration about making mistakes. If we feel nervous now, that means it will probably increase in the future. Of course we should take these presentations seriously, but they are just practices to make ourselves get ready for professional ones. In addition, the topics that are mentioned in our presentations are generally not very familiar to us. In real life, having knowledge about our presentation topics will bring us certain advantage, which decreases nervousness level.
I observed that the audience will be more interested on how you deliver information, whether than what information you deliver. The audience evaluates the presenter by looking at self confidence and comfort level of a presenter. Therefore, here are my suggestions to control your nerves:
1. Try to choose topics that are familiar to you.
2. Increase your knowledge about a presentation topic by making lots of research.
3. Believe on yourself.
I remember the first class when we were discussing about the nervousness and Dr. Sisco consoled all the students by saying “nervousness is natural”. Adding it, she said that despite of professionalism and expertise, a bit of nervousness is common to her.
Melanie Morgan in his “presentational Speaking: Theory and practice” says that the best speakers always experience nervousness. If they do not, then it tends to mean they do not care about the project.
R.E. Smith in his “Principles of human communication, also supports nervousness by saying, “the key of nervousness is to transform into energy, awareness, and enthusiasm during the presentation”.
The example provided here: the presentation about celiac disease, tells us the importance about the motive. Sharing experience to the audience made her more comfortable and she could come out of nervousness. If we are motivated by our topic and we know what we want to say and why we want to say, the presentation will be more attractive. When audience feels that they have something in it for them, they pay more interest. If minutely observed, the speaker can feel more comfortable when audience is positively indulged in the presentation. We talk about the eye contact to the audience, which works here to help the speaker to come out of nervousness, if they are in.
The audience needs are very important and I have realized this after taking this class. I never really get nervous; I think that’s due to my past that involved speaking to many customers and making sales pitches in front of large groups for sales meetings. I believe if I had custom made my pitch toward the customer I might have had a greater success than giving facts, figures and reasons to support my claims. I was very persuasive and good at selling cars, but now believe I could have been more successful applying the knowledge I will take from this class. The challenging part for me however is breaking my habits of presenting very dry and informational type presentations that I believe support my points and people can learn from but, I wouldn’t want to sit threw many of the presentations I have done threw out college except for a few that were related to stories and life experiences. This is a difficult task for me to make the audience care about the dry subjects that interest me, but not the majority. For my final presentation I tried to model it in a way that might have some use for the audience more so than my investing presentation that was hard to grab people’s interest but at the same time I realize that there are certain subjects that no matter how good the presentation was I would have no interest as well. So I don’t know but I think I will always try to give an effort now to think of my audience. For people that are nervous and I often hear that public speaking is one of the things feared the most, it only gets easier the more you do it and with experiences of different types of presentations they allow you to improve your style and abilities.
Nervous? I experience that all the time. As an international student, speaking in front of native people really make me nervous. “Why are you giving this presentation?” is a good question to think. If your presentation is all about judged and evaluated, it will make you nervous. On the other hand, if your presentation is all about audience, it will reduce your scary. After taking this class, I feel more confidence to do my presentation. Before I too cared of my grammar and pronunciation and I was worried about my behaviors in the presentation, it made me really nervous and afraid that people can not understand me. But now I start to change my mind and think the presentation is not only about language ability, it is about sharing experience and giving my audience information. I got more confidence. It is really helpful.
Two times this year I have had to deliver a presentation about what my team does at work. I have been nervous in the past if I did not learn and understand the information I needed to deliver or had time to review the content and delivery plan. I would like to leave the audience with valuable information about my team and keep them interested so they care about what I have to say.
I created a draft of the presentation and asked team members to review and think about what information we should deliver but more importantly what information does in the audience need. Once we are complete with the drafts and have narrowed down what information we should deliver then we can work on the presentation development. I can see this presentation getting better the more times we deliver it and have feedback from the audience. Feedback is always welcome and needed to ensure we are always in touch with the audience.
Nervousness, a great topic! When I was little and began speaking in front of large audiences, my peers would provide me with little tips to overcoming my fear of public speaking. Some of the tips were “Think funny thoughts”, Look at the top of their heads, instead of directly into their eyes” and “Look at the back of the room.” When I review some of these tips, I honestly think, “What were my peers thinking.” From this class, I have learned that a presentation is really not about me! It’s about presenting credible and interesting ideas to the intended audience that is beneficial to their needs and/or preferences. The only duty that I have as a presenter is to develop a presentation that is credible and beneficial to the audience. For me a topic that I am interested in and a topic that serves a greater purpose to my audience is now the only helpful tip that I need!
When I was an undergrad, I gave one of the most important speeches of my life at that time. I was running for state president of an organization that I was very committed to. My advisor informed me that if I won I would be the first female state president—no PRESSURE there! It goes without saying that I was a complete wreck. I can still see myself, face red, sweaty palms, voice quivering the entire time I gave my platform speech. Of course, I made it all about me winning– hence the nervousness.
Amazingly, I won that election and often wondered why. Why would my peers vote for a red faced, sweaty palmed, quivering mess? I guess somewhere in all of that there was a platform that spoke to them and their WISC; but I sure made them work hard to hear it.
Having learned what we have in this class, I wish I could go back and deliver that speech all over again. It would be vastly different.
As hsin-ting said being an international student and presenting in front of native speakers can be very scary because you focus more on not doing grammatical mistakes than on caring about the audience which increase your degree of nervousness. I think that if each presenter can go beyond his fears let’s say about pronunciation, then he would be better off delivering a presentation that will be more focused. Good examples and real life experience can be very helpful in engaging the audience since this latter always thrive to listen to other people’s life stories, it’s human nature and it is born with us. So, presenters can start with sharing a real life experience then tackle the remaining points of the presentation because usually nervousness is at the beginning and tend to decrease or dissolve towards the end.
I totally agree with professor Sisco depending on my experience in advanced communication class. I believe the topic you pick for your presentation is important because of this reason. In this class I practically had the chance to analyze myself and other students and I realized that if the speaker is enthusiastic about the topic he/she is talking about, during the presentation the speaker is more in to how to convince the audience and how to interact them more than how he/she talks or conveys the presentation. This is what makes the presenter relaxed and not anxious.
Before i took this class I used to try to be memorize my speech and try to give my presentation perfect in terms of sentence formations, and this used to make me very nervous. During this class, when I had given the chance to pick my own topic, while working on my presentations I noticed that I do not need to memorize anything and get all nervous about it because I already know what I am talking about. Knowing what you are presenting, knowing your material definitely takes your anxiety away and turns your nervousness into Positive Energy.
Motivation is a huge factor and to get motivated the presenter should be presenting willingly in his/her enthusiastic way. Currently I am reading the book “You are the message” and so far the book emphasizes the fact that everybody can present and people can get what they want by being who they are. The book basically proves that it is really easy and practical to break through fear and other performance blocks by small tips like thinking the presentation as an opportunity to convey your thoughts. It is all about being you. I strongly recommend you to read this book.
I agree with Professor Sisco’s thoughts on practicing content. Focusing on the audience, rather than your own feelings and nervousness, certainly guarantees a more powerful presentation.
I work as a dietitian in an outpatient setting in a small community hospital. I have had, through daily interactions with many patients, over many years, many opportunities to practice content. I believe that I have been successful in getting my message through to most of my patients. I know this because of comments following the end of a session, desire by my patients to follow-up with additional appointments, feedback through patient surveys, and the fact that many go on to make numerous healthy changes! One area that I have had a lot of practice is in speaking with patients about their diabetes. When I first began providing individual instruction, I remember feeling extremely nervous, worrying about what they were thinking of me and fearful of saying the wrong thing. Over time and as I like to say, with the experience of life, I learned which information and delivery style was the most effective. I honed this style, the manner in which I addressed the topic, the specific descriptive words that I used, as well as examples to convey my message to help patients to better understand how to help themselves. This is not to say, however, that each session is not individualized for each patient, but the framework within which I speak has been refined over the years. I am confident in saying that I now rarely think about what patients might think about my delivery skills. Although successful in doing so, I believe that it comes as result of my individualized attention, focus and empathy for the specific needs of each person.
When it comes to speaking in front of a large audience, the number issue that alway arise is Nervousness. Throughout grade school, I was taught that a few signs of nervousness, as it relates to presentations and speeches are: sweaty palms, trembling, pacing, etc. However, this is true, but in agreement, I say that these signs decrease when speakers are more knowledgeable on their subject matter and thier selected audience.
The greater your knowledge is on the topic, the more comfortable you will be on the subject matter to the fact where you won’t even have to rely on notes, which will allow the information to flow naturally. With the information flowing freely, it will free up your mind to allow for relaxation and calmness.
Knowing you audience, allows you to provide effective examples where everyone can relate. This approach will also help speakers to relax, because the presentation will become more interactive.
When it comes to public speaking, I always get nervous and sometimes lose my train of thoughts. It happens because I let the nervousness get into my head and control my thoughts. It is also because English is just my second language. However, I do not get that nervous when I have to speak in front of 10 to 15 people at work. It is not just giving a speech at work. It is a place where I utilize my public speaking skills to inform and persuade them to go above and beyond at work. Why don’t I get nervous and scared? I think it is because I’m comfortable with the material, the job tasks and the people I work with. I know my audience in this case. Therefore, I target each individual differently by assigning different tasks or by asking people nicely to step out of their own shoes. I think that I am a totally different person when it comes to work.
Being able to recognize and target different audiences is the most difficult task in public speaking in my opinion. For me, targeting the audience is either “make it or break it”. Therefore, I agree with professor Sisco for saying that you have to put yourself in their shoes and make the speech geared towards them. From now on, if I can think of all my presentation as one of the pre-meal meeting before the function starts, I would be more confident and believe more in myself. Whereever I am, I will always remember the audience when giving a presentation.
Nervousness during presentations is something that’s hit us all at one point or another, and for many of us, it still does. What many of us need to realize (and this is something I’ve learned in this class) is that presenting isn’t the cause of the nervousness. It’s everything that could go wrong while presenting. And most of it is within our control. We fear that we will lose the audiences attention; we fear that we will forget something important; and many of us also fear the camera.
The key that I’ve found to nervousness is eliminating those factors, or at least gaining some control over them. If you want to keep your audience’s attention, think like an audience member when you create the presentation and design it to keep people interested and focused. If you think you’re going to forget to mention something important, provide yourself clues on a slide, but chances are that if it’s unimportant enough to forget, the audience won’t even know or care it got left out. And that devil machine, the camera…not much you can do when he’s staring you in the face. Watching your every move, recording it so you can be watched forever. What you can do, however is to get used to the presence of cameras. We walk by hunderds every day, on our roads, city streets, parking lots, banks, stores, etc. We don’t panic in front of them. And you better believe that most of them are recording. So when presenting in front of the camera, just pretend that it’s a security camera, there to protect you. Don’t look at it, don’t put on a show for it. If you pretend it doesn’t exist (as we do for the hundreds that we are on every day), you’ll forget that it’s even there.
Unfortunately no matter what speaking in front of large groups or peers people tend to get nervous. Personally I think if you didn’t get nervous then there is something unnatural about you. It’s how you allow your nerves to get the best of you is what ultimately hurts a person the most. Of coarse knowing your content like the back of your hand helps but really in this case I think its practice practice practice. The more you practice the easier the information flows and the better your structure becomes. If you can relate to a topic to personalize it your audience will genuinely feel your emotion and can now relate to you, which will inevitably relate them to the topic itself. It’s all about making the connections come around full circle. As long as you make that connection speaking will feel more like a conversation rather than a lecture and you will become less nervous. Think about when have a conversation with a friend how easy that comes to you and try to apply those same techniques.
It seems that “nervous” is a topic that never been stopped talking about in the presentation field. In the first class, we know from Sisco that there are two kinds of people in the world, the one are those are nervous; the other are those who pretend not to be nervous, which means everyone nervous when doing presentation no matter how excellent their presentation are.
Here are three reasons I find out why people nervous: 1) Not well prepared; without well preparing of how you are going to deliver you idea, you probably will lost your points on the stage; 2) Too well prepared, if you prepared too perfect, you already think of every single sentences you are going to say, you probably be more nervous than the first one, because you have a very expectation of yourself, however, when you are on the stage, everything is unstable, for example, maybe your audience make you more nervous, or you will forget about some content you prepared to say. 3) Characteristics and talent. Someone like to speak in public and they are not shy to speak in front of many people, usually they will feel less nervous have more talent than those who are more introvert. However, this is one thing cannot be changed and practiced.
Presenting is an art, so does telling a story! We are always too busy living our stories to focus on telling our stories. We never realized the curse of knowledge and assume audience either know nothing or know it all. In order to make the content alive, we need to persuade our audience by achieve the goal of getting them from where they are at the start of the presentation (Point A) to where you want them to be (Point B). by achieving the goal, here are a few things we need to pay attention to:
1, focus on where you want your audience to be, repeat your goal, ask for the order, call your audience to action, get to the point!
2, learn to view yourself, your presentation through the eyes of your audience. The audience must be brought into equal focus with your objectives.
3, shift the focus from features to benefits. People need to have a reason to act on anything, and it must be reason for themselves, not the presenter’s.
4, understand the needs of the audience: what is their interest, what they care about, any problem, bias, dreams they have. The most important thing, how can what you have to offer serve them?
As long as we figured out all these questions and focus on the audience’s needs, we can make a very good presentation by offering things that our audience want to take away.
(key points of this posting are derived from Jerry Weissman’s great book, Presenting to win: the art of telling your story)
It’s interesting how no aspects of presenting are mutually exclusive from each other. This post on nervousness greatly reminds me of your other post, “Making Time to Practice Our Ideas,” and its focus on practicing content versus delivery. In order to minimize the stress and nervousness associated with presenting, you should step out of your shoes and into the shoes of your audience – “shift your attention away from yourself” just as you do when determining what’s in it for the audience (WIIFY), audience benefits, etc.
As presenters, we must connect with our content so that the audience can connect with what we’re trying to say; it’s not about giving information – it’s about sharing information. Focusing on the audience throughout the entire presentation planning process not only eliminates presentation jitters and takes your mind off yourself, but it helps to funnel your data so that only the most important information makes its way to the final presentation and, ultimately, your audience.
Before I took the Advanced Communications course with Prof. Sisco,every presentation I made in all my classes were just too much talk and over enthusiasm, which made me literally feel like I am blabbing information out.And most of it now I feel, was because I was so nervous that I would try to mask it with over enthusiasm.Needless to say,it would always turn out unorganized and wrong.
In this course I realized that as professor always says,It’s not about “ME”,the speaker,rather its about the audience and how to connect with them.I have been conciously trying to mentally shift my focus from myself onto the audience.I agree with Chip Tran in his post earlier, that getting nerveous makes us loose our train of thought and we forget what we are trying to communicate.
This is something ,I now try conciously to overcome.Making deliberate pauses during my presentations and taking five seconds to breathe in helps easing the nerveousness.
I try to focus on what my core message should be.And obviously try to organize my content such that I am well structured. I agee with Professor Sisco’s blog,that we need to stop fearing about being judged and evaluated,rather we should keep reminding ourselves that we are here talking to everyone because of a sincere desire to reach out and help our audience with what information we are giving them.
I found interesting article from Nancy Duarte blog. http://blog.duarte.com/2009/03/a-naked-audience/ With this article, Nancy Duarte try to talk about the how to remove your nervousness. According to Nancy Duarte, “Imagine everyone in the audience naked.” The meaning is to lighten your focus, relieve your stress, and allow you to relax into the moment. And also, this blog has three more secret to remove your nervousness. Please check the article with that link above.
I remember my first presentation in advance communication class. My topic was Korea which is my home country and I am the most credible person in the classroom about Korea. This is because I am a Korean. I do not need to build credibility about that topic and also, I had a passion to present about Korea. Of course, I practiced hundreds of times before presentation. However, when I started to present in front of the classroom, I cannot remember anything. During that time, I did not care about the audience. I just did care about my presentation and I wanted to finish it as soon as possible. As a result, my presentation was terrible.
WIIFY (What’s in it for you?), we heard that so many times, during Sisco’s class. The presentation is not about me and all about the audience. We need to care about the audience.
After revising session with the Sisco, I realized that WIIFY and what I did wrong during the last presentation. I did not care about audience at all. I just give them a long and boring presentation. After that revising session, I changed little bit of my PowerPoint presentation and I did not have any nervousness during my presentation.
Why do presenters (me included) always get nervous before presenting? Is it really because we are so focused out ourselves like Professor Sicso mentioned in her blob? Is personal focus really a negative thing? A majority of blog responses sided with the idea that as presenters we need to stop thinking it is all about us and start thinking about are audiences. Now, for some reason I can’t digest this idea because in reality I think that one need to focus on you.
Take for example Jamie Oliver’s speech on obesity amongst children. Do you honestly think that his primary concern was how is audience would perceive him? Or do you think he was focusing on how much the topic meant to him…which is why we all felt his passion. Don’t take me wrong, I am firm believer that one need to consider the concepts of WIIFY (what’s in it for me) and WSIC (why should I care). For it is these concepts which build the connection between you and your audience; I just don’t think that you should keep yourself out of the picture.
I don’t think that as presenters we are nervous because we feel it should be about us. I know that a lot of our nervousness comes from the idea of being flawless but do we really think our audience expects us to be perfect? The takeaway is that too many presenters put a great deal of pressure on themselves to be perfect. To hit every point. To deliver every word flawlessly. It’s simply unrealistic. Nobody is perfect.
Our PresentationZen book spoke a lot about Steve Jobs, now nobody prepares like Steve Jobs! He practices for hours and hours and hours to make sure his presentations are perfect. He’ll go through multiple full dress rehearsals. The key difference, aside from the fact that he prepares more than anyone out there, is that while Steve Jobs strives for perfection, he doesn’t expect it. Don’t get me wrong – I’m sure he’s frustrated when something doesn’t go as planned. But Jobs doesn’t lose his cool nor does he draw any undue attention to the hiccup. He just moves on, refocusing on himself.
So perhaps it is about us?
For me nervousness is just part of the process. We have all heard about striving under pressure. Why can’t we strive under nerves? The reason why I get nervous is not because I am afraid to make mistakes. It’s because when you are presenting I know that I only have one take. Making mistakes is part of learning. I have found in both my professional and student life that I have learned the most from the mistakes that I have made. However, when you are presenting you don’t get that second shot at getting it right.
After every presentation I am consistently thinking about what I left out and how I should have stated something different. The nerves continue long after the presentation is over, not because I am thinking of me, but because I am thinking of the audience. In this regard I have to agree with Emily. When it comes to nervousness just remember that you have done your best try to strive even with the nerves.