Glossophobia: The Fear of Speaking

glass. A phobia is technically translated as the fear of

words, but we understand it to be the fear.

Speaking more specifically, public speaking to help.

You better remember that I want to talk very quickly

about where the word glass a phobia comes from.

Have you heard of another word for a dictionary?

A glossary, perhaps so glass.

So is the Greek root word for word.

So that's where we get that fear of words that

again we interpret that as a fear of speaking.

Unlike all of these anxiety disorders, that glass a phobia

falls under social anxiety disorder.

General anxiety disorder.

There's a lot of them these air, all medical conditions.

This is not just something that's going on in your

head. This is an actual response of your body into

a situation it perceives as threatening, so this can be

diagnosed and managed, just like every other anxiety disorder.

It has a lot of symptoms that are in common

with our other anxiety disorders, and a lot of those

you'll recognize.

If you've ever done public speaking, maybe you have sweaty

hands. Maybe you feel nauseated or actually get sick and

throw up.

Maybe you have Ah, dry mouth or cracking voice.

Maybe you hear your heart beating out of your ears.

Maybe you had a sensation of having no idea what

actually happened during your speech.

You got up.

You did something that was kind of like a speech.

And then before, you know, you were all done and

sat down.

So these are all very common symptoms of public speaking

anxiety, and it can be treated just like all of

our other anxiety disorders.

And we treat anxiety disorders with what we call.

And I was thinking this is like snakes.

Or if you have a fear of snakes or spiders,

they'll do the same thing.

It's called incremental exposure.

So we might bring a snake into the room, um,

or maybe just show you a picture at first, right?

And then bring one in a cage and then eventually

have you touch it and then have it crawl on

you, right?

We do the same thing with speaking anxiety.

You start out by delivering a speech by yourself.

Then maybe you have three people and five people in

10 people in 20 people, and you just keep building

your audience.

Eventually, your brain will figure out that I don't need

to have this anxiety response.

When im public speaking, you know, why does your brain

have that to begin with is interesting.

It has an evolutionary function.

It's called your fight or flight response.

So if you open up your front door this morning

and saw a tiger there, you would not want to

reach on dealing.

Because Little Kitty, you want some catnip, right?

You would slam that door shut and scream and run,

and that's what's going to allow you to survive.

So we need to have our fight or flight response

that gets that adrenaline going and gives us extra strength

and gives us that sense of urgency and panic because

we need to have that in life threatening situations.

But why does your body think your your mind think

the public speaking is a life threatening situation?

That's because we're very social creatures.

We need the community to survive again, thinking back evolutionarily

if we just dunk you out in the middle of

the woods and say, Hey, good luck, you're not going

to survive nearly as well as somebody who's with a

group of people.

So we have this innate instinct to be accepted and

to be part of our group, our community.

Um and so to be made fun up to be

ostracised is to be rejected by the group, which, and

are primitive brain tells us that equals death.

I need the group to survive.

So when you were in a situation like public speaking

where you think that people may be judging you, that

creates that fear of being ostracized and outcast from think

group. So again, by doing those incremental exposures by continuing

to engage in public speaking and pushing your comfort zone,

your brain will learn that public speaking is not, in

fact, a man eating tiger at your front door.

And so to get started this semester, you're going to

take a self assessment survey of the most common I'm

20 most common symptoms of public speaking and again, you

can find that in black word.

You're gonna total that up and get a score.

Very average scorers for new speakers range between 40 and

60 so if you're in that ballpark, you're fine.

If you're much lower than 40 then you're really gonna

want to spend a lot of this class focusing on

the design and the art of speaking, if you will,

more so than the anxiety piece.

But again, like I said, I'm good was speaking to

5000 people.

Not really fight people so much.

So you may find that you exhibit these symptoms in

some and some circumstances, but not another one.

So try to think about public speaking like speaking in

a classroom or speaking at a job to clients or

customers when you're filling out the survey.

And so something else that we can say about anxiety

is that it occurs in four distinct phases.

The first phase is our pre preparation anxiety.

So when you were going to the syllabus and you

were like, Oh my gosh, I have to give a

speech on this date and this date and wow, we're

pretty much doing weekly speeches.

If you were already having a heart attack, you have

pre preparation anxiety.

That's when you found out that the speaking events existed

on the next stage is preparation anxiety.

So this is when you are preparing your speech, your

outlining, your writing, your researching, maybe even your practicing, hopefully

with your friends and family, and it starts to become

real for you.

That there is actually a speech to give on the

third stage is our most common form of anxiety.

Over 75% of adults experience pre performance anxiety, and in

fact, more people are scared of speaking than spiders, snakes

and death all put together.

It's a very intimidating concepts of most of you are

going to have this pre performance anxiety where right before

your speech or sitting in class and you know today

is the speaking day.

That's when it starts to hit you.

Pretty performance can actually hit you the morning off, or

is it really is the night before?

If you're having a hard time falling asleep, if you

keep waking up and looking at the clock cause you

think you ever slept.

If you're having nightmares about speaking, that is part of

your pre performance anxiety and lastly are least common.

Form of anxiety is performance anxiety.

So we all start out anxious at this beginning of

our speech.

For most of us, that will go down, and so

you'll notice a couple of minutes into your speech that

you're starting to become aware of your speech and aware

of the audience, but for a very small percentage of

the population that starts out here with everybody else, that

anxiety will escalate throughout the speech into a point of

panic. Oftentimes the speakers can't finish the speech.

They may start crying and voluntarily actually run out of

the room, right, Fight or flight.

So you stay and you do the speech or you

call in sick on the day of your speech or

you run out of the classroom.

So if you find this happening to you, please contact

me for extra help.

I have had students that have this Ah, severe performance

anxiety, and we're giving speeches by the end of the

semester. In fact, I suffered from severe performance anxiety.

When I first started speaking, I wouldn't even enter crowded

room. I had so much anxiety generally.

So if I can go from that to being a

public speaking professor communications professor than I certainly can help

you through any of these stages of anxiety.

And again, performance tends to be the most intense, but

least common, and so there's some general tips I'm going

to give you now.

But again, if these air not working please contact me

for more information or checking black work for the how

to on some of these.

So practice riel practice.

Reading your speech silently to yourself is not practice some

You may hear toe look into a mirror when you're

speaking, and that's better than not looking at a mirror

at all.

But what's even more helpful is video practice that recording

yourself and seeing with the audience season.

Here's the downside to that is, as a speaker ourself.

We tend to be very critical of the way we

set a word or a pause that was in our

speech, things that an audience is not really paying attention

to. So the video recording is good to see in

here. They keep in mind that you are less likely

to pay attention to the bigger feedback that a family

or friends would give you.

So maybe part of the speech made sense in your

head. But when it came out, you skipped some logic

somewhere. Doesn't the audience is having trouble following how you

got from a to see where was be So again,

the video will help you get what they're seeing and

hearing, but having a live riel audience for real practice

is going to help you with those bigger pieces off

the speech to make sure that the speeches all coherent.

And it also gives you the opportunity to practice a

live people, and there is no substitute for that.

So, taking an online speech class, you're certainly not going

to get the same practice and benefit because you're finding

family and friends to practice with rather than a classroom

full of 20 to 25 students that you don't really

know that well, visualization is actually a very complex ah

skill. But I put it here next because visualizations a

very early stage attempt to manage anxiety.

So you actually go through and kind of meditate and

imagine driving to campus, getting out of your car, walking

into the classroom.

What do things look like?

What does things smell like?

What am I seeing?

What am I hearing right?

If you're doing a speech at home, this less anxiety

but still walking through step by stuff.

What's going to happen?

And this is actually how Olympians train for the Olympics.

We actually have found that by really engaging in true

visualization has the same effect with your brain as engaging

in the activity.

So I've included a wiki.

How to on that light exercise the day, all the

speeches. Good.

And so I get I have these in order of

how you may be doing them approaching your speech.

We don't want to go run a five mile marathon

before speech, but I had a student that dead 10

push ups before every speech.

Or maybe go for a 10 minute walk around the

building. So something just to get rid of that extra

nervous energy that you feel, um, avoid excessive caffeine.

So if you normally have a Cuban coffee in the

morning, have your Cuban coffee but do not have to.

Cuban coffees don't add in a What do you guys

drinking? A red bull?

Um, the green one.

Whatever it is, don't don't add extra caffeine to your

routine. You probably did not sleep well the night before.

That's to be expected.

Don't compound that with caffeine.

That actually accelerates your heart rate on the last one

that you can do right before your speech.

This is my favorite one.

I use this one all the time.

You can do it when you're sitting in your desk,

OK, I know that I'm going to speak next, or

I know I'm about to record my speech in five

minutes. Do deep breathing.

This is something that you have not done unless you

take in yoga or martial arts.

This is not regular breathing.

Regular breathing Onley uses 1/3 of your lung capacity.

Ah, deep breathing uses all of your lung capacity and

infuses extra oxygen into your bloodstream.

Think about it.

You're on the airplane, their planes going down, what falls

out of the ceiling?

Oxygen masks.

But most of the time the cabin is not punctured,

and there's nothing wrong with the air pressure inside of

the cabin.

So why do they want you breathing and oxygen when

the planes going down?

It's to keep you calm.

Oxygen has a calming effect, so when we do deep

breathing, we're infusing extra oxygen into her blood stream.

You can actually feel your heart rate slow down.

There are different types of deep breathing again.

I've included a wiki.

How to for those of you that are not familiar,

But please, please, please use that one.

I use that one every single time I give a

speech. And so, of course, the goal here is not

to eliminate speaking anxiety.

Speaking anxiety is never going to completely go away.

That is an unrealistic expectation.

What you can expect is to manage your anxiety, identify

it, know what your symptoms are.

Figure out what tools work for you on reducing those

symptoms and then give your speech.

When you've learned how to manage your anxiety, it becomes

a motivating factor to prepare and practice.

As you can imagine, being prepared on practicing gets rid

of 80% of your anxiety.

If you don't know what you're doing, you don't know

what you're talking about.

Of course, you are going to be concerned that you're

going to sound stupid and you probably will.

So prepare your speech, researcher speech, and then start those

other things.

Practice, exercise, deep breathing, visualizing.

All right, please check out our wiki.

How twos.

And if you've done everything that I've asked you to

do here again and you're still having that anxiety, please

reach out to me.

You need the speech class to graduate.

Do not disappear.

We're going to get you to the point where you

are comfortable enough giving a speech wherever you may went.

End up on that spectrum so again.

Please, please, please actually try these anxiety reduction techniques.

Thank you so much.

Glossophobia: The Fear of Speaking

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