What am I really afraid of? How understanding your fear of public speaking can help you overcome it

Overcoming your anxiety around public speaking begins with getting curious about your fear.

Organizational psychologist meets with a client to understand his public speaking fear. — You can’t reach your ideal state without understanding where you are right now. When you’re willing to get curious about what you’re really scared of, you can uncover the big, uncomfortable feelings behind the fear.

Self-awareness plays a big part in facing public speaking anxiety. Understanding what we’re really afraid of (and why) is where the learning begins! Bridging the gap between where you are now and where you’d like to be is easier when you can unpack, dissect, and be curious about why you’re feeling scared:

Are you afraid of being judged?
Worried about feeling like a failure in front of others?
Stressed about doing a good enough job?

Whether it’s becoming more resilient, communicating freely, or developing public speaking self confidence, behavioral change begins when you can get clear on how your fear of public speaking shows up in your life.

Name it to tame it

In psychology, we use the phrase ‘to name it is to tame it.’ This means that when we make sense of our emotional experiences (how we feel) and assign words to them, we reduce the stress they cause in our body and help heal from trauma we’ve experienced in the past. In the words of psychologist Ethan Kross,

“The mind is flexible, if we know how to bend it. If you have a fever, you can take something to bring it down. Likewise, our mind has a psychological immune system: We can use our thoughts to change our thoughts—by adding distance.”

Processing our feelings and expressing them in words engages both the left and right hemispheres of the brain, a process called lateralization. Naming what we’re feeling engages our left brain (logic) and connects it to our emotional experience (right) to reduce the anxious feelings the emotion can cause.

For example, if you get butterflies in your stomach before giving a presentation,**

there’s a difference between ‘oh no, the anxiety is coming again!’ and ‘I’m having some symptoms of nervousness’. The latter focuses on observing what you feel, while the former assigns meaning to the sensation.

This process is also called detachment. ‘I feel anxious’ is different from ‘I am anxious.’ Anxiety isn’t who you are—it’s just how you’re feeling right now. Trying to deny or suppress the feeling can make you even more stressed, but labelling it helps put some distance between you and your nerves.

Keep asking “what am I really afraid of”?

In his best-selling book Think Like a Monk, author Jay Shetty encourages readers to get to the root of their fears by repeatedly asking ‘why?’. Like curious children, when we ask ourselves what we’re afraid of over and over again, we eventually find our way to the things that really scare us. For example,

Why do interviews make me nervous?
- I’m never sure if they’ll go well. What if I don’t know the answer to a question?
Okay, so why am I afraid of not knowing the answer?
- I’ll get flustered and embarrassed, and I’ll stop making any sense.
Well, why am I afraid of not making sense?
- The interviewer will think I’m not qualified and rate me poorly. Then I won’t get the job.
Why am I afraid of not getting the job?
- I’ll feel like a failure.

Each time you ask yourself ‘why’ you get closer and closer to what your fear is really about. Are you scared of speaking up in meetings, or are you afraid of making a mistake? Is it the mistake that bothers you, or is it your colleagues knowing you got something wrong? Are you afraid of negative feedback, or of feeling judged?

Visual example of the thinking process that leads to job interview anxiety. — Asking ‘what am I really afraid of?’ helps us get to the big, uncomfortable feelings behind our fears.

In many cases, what scares us isn’t the situation but the outcome or emotions that might follow it. Shame and fear around the possibility of negative feedback, feeling unlikeable, or messing up is what holds us back from public speaking—not the speaking situation itself.

Lower the stakes

Like in ‘name it to tame it’, understanding the feelings at the root of our fears helps us to tackle them head on. Self-awareness is the gateway to behavioral change, and understanding what we’re really afraid of puts distance between us and our fear. Worrying about feeling like a failure, not being liked, or receiving negative feedback makes us more likely to turn a speaking situation into a high stakes scenario where the outcome is tied to the core of who we are.

Understanding your fear is the first step to making change

When we go into a situation acknowledging that we’re afraid to fail, we can accept that butterflies, sweaty palms, or a racing heart are part of the experience. If we identify with the fear, we might avoid going to the interview at all—which is why building our self-confidence is so important to learn.

So what are you really afraid of? Head over to my instagram page for more tips and tricks for tacking your public speaking fear!

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