Public speaking has been accounted as the biggest fear in people like flying, death etc. There’s no one in the world who has not experienced this fear in his lifetime.
It’s a normal fear which can be handled and make your public speaking easy by building confidence.
Your hands getting sweaty, mind is joggling, butterflies in the stomach and all you fear is of committing some mistake, or making stupid of yourself and watching them laughing at you.
When someone just introduced you and lights gets off and now all the eyes are upon you. Getting nervous at this time is as genuine and common.
So the important thing here is to overcome nervousness so that you can concentrate on your presentation. Notice, you can just control it, can’t get rid it of. You need to use this energy in a positive way to be more confident, enthusiastic, passionate, and appealing.
The only key to less the effect of this nervousness is that you use it to boost your energy.
But before we get to the tips of controlling nerves for any presentation or how to calm nerves for a presentation, there are somethings to be discussed:
How to Calm your Nerves before a Presentation – Tips
1. “It’s common its ok”:
Getting nervous before a presentation is not something that just happens with you. Everyone who goes on the stage or have to give a presentation to the board of directors or answer the press conference etc gets nervous.
So remember that if you’re nervous it’s common and it’s completely ok. You are a human and getting little nervous makes you conscious. So remove this myth that you are weak so you are getting nervous.
2. Be positive:
Your thoughts before facing the public should be positive. You need to start with the right perspective.
If your thoughts would repeatedly say that you are the best, you can do this, everything is fine then for sure everything will be fine for you.
You just need to have good thoughts about yourself and calm yourself.
3. Believe in yourself:
To be good at anything in life, it’s important to believe in you. You can conquer the world if you believe you can.
So giving a presentation is not a big thing to do if you believe you can do this. Just be confident and face your audience.
4. It’s ok not to be perfect:
No one is perfect in this world. Everyone commits some mistake. Remember that you are a human being not a robot who would speak without a single mistake.
So don’t be afraid of making mistakes, at the end they would only remember what you said not where you made mistakes.
5. Be comfortable with yourself:
It’s you, and it’s important that you feel comfortable in your company. If you feel good with yourself only then you can be calm and comfortable with other people around.
So before going for the presentation just be little weird with yourself, feel like a normal human and then just get in. You’ll feel the difference.
6. Love your audience:
When you’ll stop judging yourself and believe that your audience is friendly and good to you then hike of confidence will automatically be there in you.
It’s just that what you give, you get. If you’ll love your audience only then they would love you. It all goes with your assumption, how you see your audience?
When you practice all this with yourself, it will not only improve your presentation skills but would also make you better in every field. So you have to help yourself and get best out of you.
Building Confidence to Calm Nerves Before Presentation:
There are lots of ways to calming nerves before a presentation or to get the control of your nerves and give best presentation.
Here some of the strategies you can opt to make your energy grow and diminish the nervousness in you. The following mentioned are few tips on how to calm nerves before a presentation.
1. Prepare:
It is important that you are well familiar with the material you have to speak. Before giving out the presentation you should get into deep research about your subject, frame your content, and memorize it.
Price suggests “Just remember the six Ps: Proper Preparation and Practice, Prevent Poor Performance.”
Speaking on the topic you don’t know or you are not prepared about will only make you more anxious.
2. Practice:
Only preparing your content will not help. You need to practice hard to have a good flow of speaking of your content. The more you will practice the more content will get in your mind and tongue.
Big speakers practice for hours to get best of their speech. The more time you will give to practice the less time you’ll take while delivering it.
3. Know your venue:
If you are preparing hard for the presentation, you should also practice it in the room where you’ll be giving it.
If you can’t get to that room, you can imitate the arrangement of that room in your room and practice. It will help you get hold of your anxiousness in that environment.
4. Know your Audience:
While preparing for the presentation, you need to know your audience i.e. who all will be there to listen to what you say.
When you know about your audience, their psychology, their expectations from the meeting, and the presentation anxiety, you could prepare better for the presentation.
5. Good looks:
When on your important day, you are looking good it will just add up to your confidence.
Although in a single night you’ll not turn into a model but you can look best in your best formals, with smart hair do, and polished shoes.
Unshaved face or being undressed would only add up to your anxiety.
6. Speak to the mirror:
It’s the best way to lesser the anxiety from you. The more you would speak to yourself facing the mirror the more better you’ll be going with your presentation.
One can only speak while facing the mirror when he is calm and comfortable. So gradually your face will stop diverting you and you’ll get comfortable which means you have improved with your speaking skill.
7. Deep Breathing:
Deep, slow breathing is the best exercise to perform to calm down your nerves. With continuous practice before going in for presentation, it will make your thoughts calm down, make you feel better and believe in yourself.
The more calm and peaceful you are, the less nervous you get.
8. Practice with the known:
Invite your friends, family or people you know to come and see your presentation. Giving presentation among the people you know would be easy for someone and difficult for some but beneficial to both.
Once you can give presentation to your family and friends they could give you feedback and help you prepare better for the big day.
9. Practice Body movement:
Notice your moves, your walk, and your hand movements and correct them if needed. Your body too speaks with your words.
So it’s important that your body language should be correct and have no sign of nervousness. So while preparing the content practice it with your body movement.
10. The opening lines:
The very first movement of anxiousness is the minutes of the presentation when you need to start with your presentation. They are very crucial as they make up the rhythm of the speech, join the audience with you.
If your opening is good your rest speech will go fine. So work on your opening lines and practice them several time so that you clear your first few seconds of anxiousness.
11. Remember the key points:
While preparing for the presentation, don’t try to learn each and every line. Be good to your mind, it’s a presentation not a declamation or speech.
So remember the key points you need to discuss at the presentation with slides you made to supplement your content.
Remembering the key points would help you to be less burdened and change the lines on the spot if ever needed.
12. Remember the reality:
Here you’re to tell them what they don’t know. To show them what is the best.
It’s not a competition you have to win; it’s just like sharing your knowledge, view points and ideas with them. When you know the reality of the situation you’ll be easy with your presentation.
13. Don’t fight it, face it:
Nervousness is not something to be fought with. You need to face your fear and lose it. Accepting the fear of speaking anxiety would make you conscious and help you to control and lessen it.
The more you’ll try to fight it, will make you worry more about it and worse the situation. So its best advised to face it, accept it and just say it’s ok to be nervous.
Conclusion:
Nervousness lies inside every person when he needs to speak in front of people when everyone is focused on his words.
The only difference that lies between speaking and presentation would be that, you will be presenting your ideas in a presentation when your audience is interested to know them while in speaking you’re just sharing your ideas.The above mentioned are few tips on how to calm your nerves before a presentation.
Being anxious is not a problem to be solved, but a part of behavior to be controlled and made positive.
It’s you who need to make best of yourself so that in your career road you don’t face the problems because of your anxiousness as presentation skills are the demand of every industry today.
So develop your skills and use these tips to calm down and get control over your nervousness and be best.
