I practiced day in and day out. Saying my parts of the presentation in the mirror over and over for the last three days didn’t matter now. I could feel my hands shaking around my cue cards and there was nothing that I could do about it. I told myself to breathe. Then I made a weird noise in between my sentences. My lines jumbled out of my mouth in a weird order. I took a moment to look at the PowerPoint screen behind me. I don’t think that I was supposed to do that. Hopefully I didn’t look for very long but I’m not sure what happened. “And now my partner will discuss the next few slides”. I’m done. I hated that.
Behold, the great mistake I ever made wasn’t turning around to look at the slides momentarily. The biggest mistake I ever made was caring about what other people think. It can be easy to become victim to our insecurities. However, letting insecurities take over and manipulate your choices only holds you back.
Public speaking remains the number one phobia. There are sharks, lions and bears in the world. I think that pin pointing exactly what makes public speaking so challenging is what will help us conquer our fear. It is our insecurities and not the act of public speaking itself that is challenging.
Then I realized that people do not actually care about what I am doing as much as I thought. Mind blowing. I can’t say that I have overcome my insecurities and now public speaking is a walk in the park…. but it gets easier every time I practice.
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