You might have STAGE TERROR!

CLICK ON IMAGE To ENLARGE.

One simple exercise will help you overcome that terror and start gaining confidence in your gestures, your stage presence and your smile!

Before you start, let me explain why you fail. In front of an audience, you are trying to do two things (or more) at once and your brain is refusing to cooperate. By being afraid, you activate the most primitive part of your brainstem that lizards used millions of years ago to maximize their chance of escape from predators.

That response takes away every bit of power that you have to concentrate on anything except FIGHT OR FLIGHT. You really lose the ability to do anything else! No wonder choke situations get avoided whenever possible, but avoidance sometimes only delays things and makes them worse. If you are committing to learning public speaking, give yourself a chance. It won’t be immediate, but it will improve. Your goal is to prepare your gestures and your smile so that you can concentrate on your topics and not on your smile.

Multi-Tasking is NEVER real…What we call multitasking is really SWITCH-TASKING very quickly. Sure it is possible to walk and talk at the same time, but that is because walking is something we have done since we were about one year old in most cases. When was the last time you had to THINK about walking ? I can tell you…it is when the sidewalk was icy or wet or the stairs or ladder were really steep, and you had to pay attention! When you did think about your walking, you didn’t chat with anyone and you didn’t sing or listen to any radio either! You focused all your attention on getting off that slippery patch before you fell down hard.

Let’s take that and apply it to Public Speaking…So you get up on stage and have to think about your speech and you haven’t developed habitual gestures and you panic. All your concentration fled from your prepared speech and was focused on how to get off that stage or beat up anyone who tried to talk to you!

You really don’t know if your smile looks like the top picture or the bottom one below:

AND YOU DON’T CARE if you aren’t prepared…you just want to get finished and get off that stage and back to safety…How do I know? I was there (on more than one occasion) Standing in front of an audience was almost always followed by breaking into tears for me! Now an audience is always welcome.

So spend a little time smiling at yourself in the mirror or a video camera (better, because you will be able to see the improvement if you actually record it) That is all…just learn how to smile sincerely by thinking of something pleasant…ice cream still works for me, but you can choose anything at all that makes you happy. Become confident that you can smile sincerely and we will be ready for the next step to speaking success.

You KNOW when your smile is sincere when you look in the mirror, but now you want to be able to trust your smile when an audience is looking at you. THINK OF ICE CREAM and SMILE CONFIDENTLY!

Smiling is the key to successful communication…see all those entertainers with their perpetual smiles? Well, that can become work if you take it too far, but communicators need confidence…not only in their smile, but also their GESTURES. Literally as Simple as ABC!

For this ABC Simple Lesson:

Contact me at (SpeakerMentors at Gmail dot com) with the @ and . symbols…

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