A Personal Story: How I Overcame Panic And Anxiety To Become A Great Speaker

I have personally spoken in front of many audiences and have enjoyed every single moment of it, but it was not always like this. I remember those times when I did group presentations back in high school and every time the first speaker started the presentation, my heart would start pounding as I awaited my turn. Suddenly, I felt as though the room got colder; my body started shaking, my hands trembled and my teeth furiously grinded upon each other.

I had to push myself to the absolute limits for people to hear me and even then, people at the back of the room were oblivious to the topics I was speaking about, because I simply could not grab their attention. These experiences made me feel uncomfortable with speaking and soon I started to opt for roles that didn’t involve presenting like creating slides and scripts. This helped me hide from actually going on stage and feeling the same discomfort as I felt before. However, there was a moment where all that changed and I could not hide anymore.

During 12th grade psychology, I was supposed to do a presentation about addiction, mainly regarding the effects of heroin on rats. The previous night I could not bring myself to create a decent list of things I was going to talk about. Instead, I had found a video that seemed to explain everything. All I had to do was embed a link to that video and just give it a small introduction before I played it during the presentation, which would take up most of my presenting time. As simple as this was, things did not go as planned.

The Nightmare Began

The day that I had to give the presentation the school’s internet crashed. All our slides were hosted online including the video I mentioned earlier. There were three groups in the class and a moment of silence struck the room as everyone’s preparations were completely useless. Despite the unfortunate loss of internet, the teacher decided not to postpone the presentation and made us do it on that day.

So after a quick look around the room and you would find that most people had made detailed notes on paper and were trying to get it in their heads as quickly as possible. I, on the other hand, had written almost nothing down. All I did was watch that video four or five times to make sure it would be interesting in the presentation and then placed a link into the slides.

10 minutes into the lesson the teacher started calling out groups to begin their presentations. I was in the second group and was the last person to speak. The first group did their presentation and you could notice that all of them kept looking down at their notes and rarely made eye contact with the rest of the class. Often, when they were speaking the team looked at each other as if to confirm what they just mentioned was right and tried to signal the next person to speak.

The first group had successfully completed their presentation. Then came our turn. I would love right now to grab your hand and take you back in time, just to show you the horror in my eyes as I got up and walked in front of the class. However, strangely the fear of presenting that I once felt before had disappeared. You would think that I was freaking out because:

• I hated speaking in front of a lot of people
• Only had a video to present but the internet crashed
• Had no notes whilst everyone in my group did

Even though I had all these issues, something within me changed. See there are moments in life where you realise what you are about to do is going to be bad, it's gonna so be f@#ing dumb, you just say f@# it and get it over with. This was one of those moments.

As everyone else prepared their notes, I stood there like a gangsta (tiny bit of exaggeration) and just looked around the room into the eyes of the people who were going to witness my demise. As soon as the person behind me finished speaking I took a deep breath and exhaled, what came next shocked everyone including the teacher.

<<<Now if you have read this far, you currently know more about this event than 95% of my closest friends. I just want to thank you for reading thus far. People these days have the attention span of 9 seconds, less than that of a goldfish. You, my friend, are not a goldfish.>>>

As I opened my mouth I remembered, even though I did not have that video to show, I had watched it over five times. Since it was relatively short I knew most of the content by heart, as if it was a pre-written script and being in full gangsta mode, I did what any gangsta with zero f@#*s to give would do. I stood in front of the team and literally regurgitated all the info I knew in front of everyone.

To my surprise, my voice had actually changed slightly and it was able to reach the end of the room. Students who were looking at their phone suddenly looked up and actually listened to me. In my mind, I had a brief thought; "Hey, whats happening here. WHATS HAPPENING". All I tried to do is make sure that the things I said, were clear and understandable. Never had I concentrated so much on word choice and the actual delivery of words.

It was on that day, I realised that I had the students and teachers so stunned that they never knew I could pull off such a presentation. From there on I started experimenting with different presentation styles in front of audiences that total more than a 100 people. It was crazy for me to find out that I, the person who was most likely to breakdown presenting in front of 20 students, was now able to handle crowds filled with enough people to stop a plane in GTA 5.

You might be wondering why I wrote this article. I did this because I realise that there are other people struggling with public speaking due to the sheer confidence needed just to get on a stage. Having observed this, I will be posting a number of articles in the next few days that contain gangsta (okay okay, I'll stop using this word in the future) strategies that I myself have used to overcome the fear of presenting and take my overall presentation skills to the next level. I encourage you to follow me to be immediately notified when I post the next article. Please comment if you had similar experiences with presenting before and what strategies did you use to overcome them.