Bonus episode: How to Manage Speaking Anxiety the Think Faster, Talk Smarter Way

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: Most people get nervous in high stakes communication situations. In fact, speaking in front of others is continually ranked as one of the top fears people have. To celebrate the anniversary of the release of my book, Think Faster, Talk Smarter, I'd like to share a portion of the first chapter that provides specific guidance on how we can all become more confident and comfortable when we communicate.

[00:00:24] Chapter One. Calm. 

[00:00:26] Tame the anxiety beast. With a bit of effort, we can manage our spontaneous speaking anxiety so that it doesn't manage us. 

[00:00:37] Peeling onions almost always makes me cry. But there was a time long ago when an onion caused a very different emotional response, sheer panic. I was interviewing for a job as employee number 99 in an up and coming software company. I made it through several rounds, and the last step was to sit for an interview with the CEO, who prided himself on personally meeting everyone before they were hired. When I arrived at the appointed time, I found the big boss already waiting for me, that threw me a little. In my experience, senior executives were so busy that they usually arrived late.

[00:01:17] But I was about to field another, more substantive curveball. Just a minute or two into our conversation, the CEO posed a question I never could have anticipated. It turned out he was famous for asking open ended questions to test how people would respond under pressure. If you were an onion, he said, and I peeled back the first three layers, what would I find?

[00:01:41] Um, okay. I was expecting to talk about topics such as my educational credentials, my past experience, my goals, and the reasons I believed I was a good fit for the company. Why was he asking me about onions? Despite all the practice I had with spontaneous speaking growing up, I now experienced the kind of fight or flight response most of us struggle with in such situations.

[00:02:04] My shoulders tensed, my throat went dry, my brain was overloaded, I felt jittery and hot. I really wanted to ace this interview, but my nerves were getting the better of me. I had no idea what to say. 

[00:02:19] Speaking up, without freaking out. To improve at spontaneous communication, or frankly, any kind of communication, we must first learn to manage the intense anxiety that can arise.

[00:02:31] As I've suggested, an attack of nerves can overpower us, consuming our attention, energy, and ability to execute. We can even become caught in what we might call an anxiety spiral. Our anxiety leads us to fault ourselves and lose confidence. We feel alone, disempowered, marginalized. That produces still more anxiety. At the extreme, this spiral can cause us to choke when put on the spot. Our anxiety overwhelms our ability to cope with it. 

[00:03:02] The good news is that we can adopt techniques to reduce our anxiety. Becoming more comfortable communicating ideas in any situation without our anxiety kicking into high gear. We can also become more compelling to others.

[00:03:16] The goal isn't to eradicate anxiety, but rather to prevent it from hampering us. Some situations will always freak us out, and that's actually okay. A bit of anxiety is a good thing. Too much stress impedes us from completing tasks successfully. But experiments have suggested that a certain amount of it helps to motivate us. When we feel moderately stressed or fearful, our bodies become energized and primed for action. Our minds become more alert and focused, and we become more attuned to others around us. Research with rats suggests that acute stress can improve memory by causing new nerve cells to form in the brain. 

[00:03:57] In my experience, the best way to tame the speaking anxiety beast is to take a two pronged approach. First, tackle the symptoms of anxiety that pop up in the moment. Second, address anxiety's underlying sources. In this chapter, we'll focus primarily on symptoms, while later in the audiobook, we'll discuss some of anxiety's sources. 

[00:04:19] When it comes to symptoms, some simple techniques can help. Mobilizing these techniques in the moment and in advance of anticipated spontaneous speaking situations, we can feel far more comfortable and confident, and we can respond more effectively.

[00:04:33] The next time we're in a job interview or some other spontaneous speaking situation and we're surprised with a proverbial peeling back the onion question, we'll be in a far better position to handle it. 

[00:04:47] Know your ABCs. I've noted in passing many of the symptoms people often feel when anxious. It turns out we can group these into a few simple categories. What we can call the ABCs of speaking anxiety. When others put us on the spot, we experience affective symptoms. Those relating to our mood or how we feel. People under the spotlight often feel stressed, pressured, or lacking in agency. They feel vulnerable, overwhelmed, and frightened. We also experience symptoms that are behavioral or physiological in nature. We sweat, tremble, stutter, our heart races, our voice shakes, our breathing becomes shallow, our speech becomes faster, more jittery, our faces become flushed, our mouths go dry. 

[00:05:36] A third and final category of symptoms are cognitive. We become flustered, blanking out, or forgetting what we want or need to say. We fixate on our awareness of others watching us and can't focus on our audiences and their needs. We experience negative thoughts or self talk, a little voice in our head that tells us we're not prepared. We're likely to fail, or others are better than us, and so on. 

[00:06:01] Mindfulness matters. Let's explore how we might tackle these symptoms, starting with the effective ones. A powerful way to address unhelpful or negative feelings that arise in the moment is to practice mindfulness. Notice and acknowledge the unpleasant feelings. Don't ignore or deny them, and don't berate yourself for experiencing them. As you're experiencing these feelings, affirm their inability to define you as a person.

[00:06:30] As Stanford Professor S. Christian Wheeler relates, there's me, and then there's this anxious feeling that is going on in my body. That amount of psychological distance allows you to observe it without becoming attached to it. 

[00:06:44] Try it. The next time you feel a negative emotion like anxiety, remind yourself that you and the emotion are not the same thing. Imagine you were someone else observing you experiencing the emotion. 

[00:07:00] Greet your feelings head on, reminding yourself that it's normal and natural to feel anxious, and that most people in your situation would too. Right now, I'm nervous, you might tell yourself. I'm nervous because this is high stakes for me. My reputation is on the line. This reaction makes sense and is normal.

[00:07:21] Permitting yourself to notice and identify how your mind and body are behaving can help you to regain a sense of agency or control when you would otherwise feel lost and distracted. By affirming that your negative feelings are normal and natural, you prevent the emotion from sweeping you away. You give yourself just a little bit of space to break free and help yourself by taking a deep breath, perhaps, or by imagining how you might respond to what someone next to you just said. 

[00:07:49] As you become aware of your feelings, you can go further and reframe them in more positive ways that energize rather than stymie you. People who become anxious before speaking often think they must try to calm themselves. Some make use of alcohol or other substances. Others focus on visualizations like the famous Brady Bunch advice to imagine your audience sitting in their underwear. These measures often do more harm than good because they can leave you mentally fuzzy or distracted.

[00:08:19] As my friend Professor Alison Wood Brooks suggests, a better strategy might be to reframe anxiety as excitement. In a series of experiments, she showed that people who told themselves that they were excited by stating, I'm excited, out loud before public speaking improved how they did. They also came to feel more excited and to see their speaking as an opportunity rather than a threat.

[00:08:42] More on this later. It turns out that anxiety affects your body in much the same way as excitement does. Both put us in a state of very high alertness. Like mindfulness, reframing anxiety is something you are excited about affords us a sense of agency. We can't control our basic physiological response to the perceived threat posed by speaking, but we can control how we understand and label it. Feeling that sense of control shifts our experience of speaking and helps us to do better at it. 

[00:09:15] Slow down, cool down, and dampen up. To address behavioral symptoms, one tried and true method is to focus on your breathing. Take some deep, long belly breaths. The kind you would do if you were practicing yoga or tai chi, really fill your lower abdomen. As you'll find, breathing in this way allows you to feel calmer and slows your heart rate as well as the pace of your speech. 

[00:09:43] As you breathe, focus on the relative length of inhalations and exhalations. I was privileged to have the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman appear on my Think Fast, Talk Smart the podcast. As he observed, the magic of deep breathing when it comes to alleviating anxiety is in the exhalation. When you exhale, you're reducing carbon dioxide in your lungs, which in turn calms your nervous system. A good rule of thumb, or should I say rule of lung, is to make exhalations twice as long as inhalations.

[00:10:17] Count to three as you inhale, and exhale over a count of six. Studies show that deep breathing of this sort starts to calm your nervous system in a matter of seconds. Run through this pattern of breathing just two or three times and your heart rate will begin to slow. You'll find that the rate at which you speak will slow as well.

[00:10:40] Speaking is all about breath and breath control. The faster you breathe, the faster you speak. Slow your breathing, and your speech also will naturally slow. If you're a fast talker, you might find that deep breathing alone doesn't slow you down. In that case, try slowing your movements. Your hand motions, the nodding of your head, the twisting of your torso, and so on.

[00:11:04] We tend to synchronize our speech with our gestures. Fast talkers gesture quickly. Using swift, jerky motions, slow down our movements, and our speech will slow as well. As part of the fight or flight response, our bodies release adrenaline, a hormone that prompts us to move away from a threat and toward safety. Adrenaline causes our heart rate to rise and our muscles to tighten and become shaky. Turning our bodies to address a different side of the room or making small hand gestures can help to dissipate shakiness by fulfilling our need to move. If you're giving an impromptu toast at a wedding, try walking slowly from one side to the next as you speak.

[00:11:47] Ever notice that attorneys on TV always seem to do that when handling questions from the judge or addressing the jury? You don't want to distract people by pacing too much, but taking a few steps in one direction as you shift between points can ease any shakiness you may feel. 

[00:12:04] What can you do about the blushing and perspiration unleashed when you're put on the spot? Quite a lot. When you're under stress, your core body temperature rises. Your heart beats more quickly, your muscles tense, your blood vessels constrict, and your blood pressure and body temperature rise. All of this causes you to sweat and blush, just as it does when exercising. You can counteract these effects by cooling your body. Focus here on your hands. Just like your forehead or the back of your neck, your hands serve to regulate your body temperature. 

[00:12:38] Have you ever warmed up on a cold morning by holding a warm cup of coffee or tea? That's your built in thermoregulator in action. At moments, when you're put on the spot, or you think you're about to be, try holding something cold in your hand, like a bottle or glass of water. I do it all the time in speaking situations when I'm anxious. Yes, I sometimes get anxious too. It really helps. 

[00:13:02] Finally, let's do something about that annoying dry mouth that might arise as you try to communicate. When you become nervous, your salivary glands shut down. Reactivate them by sipping warm water, sucking on a lozenge, or chewing gum. It's best not to do this in the moment, since stuffing up your mouth can make speaking difficult. But if you're entering a situation where you suspect you might be called upon to communicate, taking a moment to prepare in advance by reactivating your salivary glands is a good move. 

[00:13:32] Tame your brain. Let's say I'm hosting an important Zoom call with two dozen colleagues and customers, and the technology fails, cutting off my colleague who was supposed to be presenting for the next 15 minutes. Someone has to fill in the empty space. That would be me, the team leader. But as my body goes into fight or flight, I'm hearing these dark little voices in my head.

[00:13:56] I don't know what to say. Everybody's judging me. I'm going to get fired over this. I can banish that nasty little voice and take back control by repeating a more positive mantra in my head. Professional golfers often do this, repeating a word like calm or poise to tamp down negative self talk. We can also adopt mantras that remind us of our deeper purposes. In a spontaneous communication situation, you might tell yourself something like, I have value to add. I've improvised my way out of tough spots before. I've got this. It's not about me. My content is compelling. 

[00:14:35] Repeating a mantra can allow us to redirect our thoughts, unchaining us from the doom loop running through our minds. If you blank out, try going back to go forward. Recall what was just said and repeat it. Doing this can give yourself a moment to get yourself back on track. Many people deploy a similar tactic when they lose their keys. They go back in their minds to every place they might have been, which in turn might jog their memory of where they left them.

[00:15:04] You might think that repeating what you just said is a no no as it will bore or distract your audience. If you do it 50 times in a 3 minute period, that might be true, but in general, repetition is a good thing. When you repeat a point a few times, you highlight it for your audiences and help them remember it.

[00:15:21] Saying something in different ways can help ideas become more comprehensible and noteworthy. Repetition is okay. You see? I just did it. I repeated the same idea 3 times. That wasn't so bad, was it? You can also buy yourself time by posing generic questions that might make sense given the context. I'll let you in on a little secret. When I teach, I sometimes lose my train of thought. I teach so many classes that I can't remember if I've made a certain point in this class or the other one. This momentary confusion can freak me out, and I feel compelled to respond immediately lest I look foolish. 

[00:16:00] Typically, I'll pause and say, before we move on, I'd like you to take a moment to think about how you might apply what we've just discussed to your life. Now I'm fortunate, because I teach communications, students can in fact apply much of what I talk about right away. But I'll bet you could quickly come up with a generic question that you could ask. One that would allow you to take a deep breath and reflect on where you want to go next. 

[00:16:25] In a Zoom call, for instance, you might ask something like, can you think of ways you can share this information with your teammates? Or when leading a meeting, you could say, let's pause for a moment and just think about how what we've been discussing fits into our overall objectives. A simple question gets people thinking and lets you off the hook as the center of attention for a moment so you can regain your composure. If you know that you'll be attending an event, a team lunch, conference, or wedding, in which you might be asked to speak spontaneously, you might think of one or two of these questions in advance and keep it handy just in case.

[00:17:03] Try it. The next time you enter a situation where you think you might have to speak spontaneously, come prepared with a question to ask your audience if you become flustered. If the mere thought of blanking out arouses fear in the moment, having these tools handy can give you an extra bit of comfort and security. You might also try rationalizing before you get into a likely spontaneous speaking situation. Ask yourself what the chances are that you really will blank out. Most people thinking rationally might put the odds that the situation wouldn't go well at 20 or 25%. But that means you'll have a 75 or 80% chance that it will. I'll take those odds. 

[00:17:46] Further, ask yourself, if I do blank out, what's the worst that can happen? Many of us would say something like I'll be embarrassed, or it'll be awkward, or I might not see the career growth I'm looking for, people might not want to talk to me. We can make a long list of terrible consequences, but we should put our fears into perspective and realize that these consequences probably won't come to pass.

[00:18:12] People are often so consumed with their own anxieties and the impression they are leaving that they aren't paying that much attention to us. This phenomenon is so well known that psychologists have a name for it. The spotlight effect. Most likely, we are dramatically overestimating any negative impressions that others might have of us on account of our speaking.

[00:18:33] The rationalization process takes the edge off anxiety, offering us just a bit of agency. You can also reduce the odds of blanking out by structuring what you say in the moment. Structure provides you with a map, and it's much harder to get lost and blank out if you have one. 

[00:18:49] Well there you have it, some specific suggestions from my book Think Faster, Talk Smarter, on ways we can all shake our speaking anxiety.

[00:18:57] To learn more about building communication confidence, please listen to episode 66, where multiple experts share their thoughts on managing speaking anxiety. To learn more about how to feel more comfortable and confident in spontaneous communication, like answering questions, small talk, and giving feedback, check out my audiobook, Think Faster, Talk Smarter.

[00:19:17] This episode was produced by Jenny Luna, Jamie Green and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please follow us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram. And check out FasterSmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter.