Why is the fear of public speaking so powerful?

​

Perhaps you have heard the report that people have a greater fear of speaking in front of others than they do of death. Carried to the ridiculous it means that they would rather be in the funeral than give the eulogy. Of course this is nonsense, but for many the fear of public speaking is very real and terrifying.

​

A belief deep within your subconscious mind that there is a valid reason to fear public speaking. That something so terrible, so horrible could happen that you react as if threatened by disaster. How powerful this belief is. It overrides your conscious knowledge that there isn’t anything to fear. That if others can do it so can you. That it really shouldn’t be such a big deal. Yet still it overwhelms your rational thoughts.

​

So if you want to overcome the fear of public speaking, you must first examine its roots – the origin of the fear.

​

Of course it started somewhere in your past. Somewhere along the way you linked speaking in front of others with a fear of failure, a fear of being criticized by your peers, a fear of being exposed for a phony or a fraud. Maybe it was a book report in grade school when you mispronounced a word or made an error. Or perhaps you wanted to impress someone and something went wrong, causing you to link your speaking in front of class with deep emotional distress and embarrassment.

 

Or perhaps you simply felt out of control so often that any situation that reminds you of how bad that felt will trigger panic attacks. Public speaking fears can arise because they become linked to losing control, to being put into a situation where you won’t be able to perform up to a certain standard and are exposed as stupid, dumb or a failure. The fear of losing control can be triggered by many things, such as flying, driving on a freeway, going over bridges, and others. The loss of control arises when you are presented with the challenge of speaking in front of others.

There are many fears of a similar nature that reside within us all. But basically it just comes down to not wanting to put ourselves into a situation that will trigger our fears from the past. And speaking in front of others can do just that.

​

So, how to you overcome a fear of public speaking?

​

By addressing these fears at their root – in your subconscious mind. Since all your memories and beliefs created by your experiences reside in your subconscious mind, that is where we need to go to make changes to those old beliefs. As a child, your brain waves are in the alpha state of consciousness, the imaginative mind. Like watching a movie, you believed what you saw and heard, even if it wasn’t real. When a care giver scolded you for being bad or told you that you were worthless or would never amount to much, you believed what you heard. Never realizing that you were being programmed by these negative experiences and creating negative beliefs within you.

​

Since you were programmed by what you heard, both positive and negative, and for most of us it was pretty negative, our subconscious mind became filled with these negative beliefs. And these negative beliefs became core convictions about who you were.

​

But when you think about it, most of the beliefs we establish in childhood never were really true.

​

In fact, there never was anything wrong with you. You were never worthless, nor stupid, nor a bad child. Even if your behaviors were difficult it wasn’t that you were a bad individual. Yet you believed what you heard, creating negative core beliefs about yourself. The issues of caregivers have a tremendous influence upon us at that age. Remembering that you absorbed it all like a sponge absorbing water, it was as if you were infected by a thought virus, later to disrupt your daily life in so many ways.

​

So the roots of self doubt go deep and when you are placed into a situation that triggered these old negative beliefs you panic, fearing once again that old issues would resurface and overwhelm you with their intensity and disrupting beliefs. Speaking in front of others is an obvious way to fail in front of your peers, the very people most of us want to impress, so it’s no surprise that it ranks right up there with your greatest fears.

​

So what if we found a way to access those old beliefs and behaviors?

 

What if we could get to the root of those fears and find a way to create new, positive beliefs about yourself and your abilities? Ones that would override the old beliefs, which were never really true anyway. And what if these new beliefs actually represented and brought forth your real, true, authentic self? Wouldn’t it be amazing if who you really are finally came to life and helped you to overcome the fears of the past? To finally overcome the fear of public speaking once and for all?

​

The good news is that you can once again enter into that imaginative state of mind to reprogram your mind for success.

​

​