Want to build confidence in your speaking or performing?
These five principles worked wonders in a private coaching session with a successful businessman who had a severe fear of public speaking. But they will be helpful in any performance situation where you want to calm your anxiety and build confidence in yourself and what you are offering to your audience.
These tips will make even more sense if you first read his story here.
- Find a comfortable, stationary but not stiff, base body position. Let yourself stay there and experience that solid security as long as you want or need to. If you leave this position, return to it whenever you need to re-center yourself.
- Allow your hands to move only if they spontaneously want to. Eventually, they will. Do not orchestrate hand gestures! At least not for now.
- Don’t be a “person giving a speech” – but be someone who genuinely wants us to know something. Let go of “performing”, and let us know what you would like us to know. Don’t force it; let it happen.
- Imagine a specific person you are communicating to and speak to them genuinely. If having another person to talk to first helps, try that. Then expand your range of vision and the size of the imaginary audience to help you get used to speaking comfortably to more than one person at a time.
- Find your positive regard for your audience. People say, “find a friendly face in the audience”. I say, more importantly, “find faces you feel friendly toward“. Those you think you might like if you knew them, or do like if you already know them. Imagine that you are offering your information or artistic performance as a genuine gift, just as you would offer a gift to someone you know and want them to enjoy.
I hope you find that these five strategies will build your confidence by allowing you to put your energy forward, emanating from a solid inner base and sharing with others from a positive state of generosity.
It will allow you to focus entirely on your intent and get closer to your confident, genuine freedom of expression.
Try these suggestions and let me know how it goes. I would love to hear how else you have discovered to increase your sense of security, genuineness and confidence in whatever form your performance takes.
Marti.