A Presentor's Greatest Fear - Articles - Andrew Schwartz

Products - Articles

ReadySetPresent Articles can be purchased for $15.00 and are reproducible for a $1.00 royalty fee per copy. Once purchased, download instructions will be sent to you via email. (PC and MAC Compatible). You can purchase all additional royalty copies by clicking here or visiting the reprints page.

A Presentor's Greatest Fear
by Andrew E. Schwartz

Many presentors, especially relative novices, find their situation unknown and frightening. Although they have rehearsed their presentation and their notes are organized, as they are about to step up to the podium they are so overcome by nervousness that it affects their performance. In short, they are suffering from “stage fright”.

Most presentors experience some form of stage fright when facing a live audience for the first time. A presentor who doesn’t is in a very small minority among professionals and amateurs alike. Few presentors, even those who deal with audiences daily, ever completely overcome it. Most professional performers freely admit to “pre-opening jitters” .It would not be beneficial to completely overcome such feelings, for two reasons. First, it helps to maintain a certain amount of tension. Humans perform better when they are “keyed up” a bit, so long as the tension doesn’t interfere with normal functioning and operation. Second, a complete absence of such tension can result in laxness, or even an attitude of condescension toward an audience—which is just as bad as stage fright. The trick is to find and strike the happy medium between too much and too little tension. Controlled tension is power.

Franklin Roosevelt’s famous dictum “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” applies here. A fear which is brought out into the light of day, squarely faced and dissected is already half-defeated.

There are many reasons for stage fright. In most cases, it is due to insufficient preparation, fear of failure, or lack of self-motivation. Fortunately, there are various strategies for overcoming it. First, understand the anatomy behind stage fright. Then learn how to convert it into “delivery energy” by understanding and utilizing the power of self-motivation.

The Anatomy of Stage Fright: The first step you should take in dealing with stage fright is to be aware that all of your emotional drives are shared by your audience. Everyone needs recognition, acceptance, and approval. Knowing and understanding this improves your chances of controlling yourself in front of others, and thereby controlling your audience.

The next step is to decide exactly what emotional forces the audience is evoking in you, and whether you are going to allow those forces to continue to work unchecked. Finally you must determine the degree of control to exercise over your own emotions through a conscious effort of will, and then convert this control into positive motivating energy.

Converting the Energy: Many presentors are able to make this conversion thus giving their training presentations increased dynamism, enthusiasm, intensity and urgency. A presentor, for example, who is driven by the desire to make money will give a more effective presentation when his or her efforts are linked with this desire. With concentration focused on this overall objective instead of the immediate issue, stage fright is a forgotten issue. In its place is a greater amount of motivation, energy, and control.

A Well-Prepared Message: Although a presentor’s awareness of stage fright can be deterred, being unprepared can leave a presentor tongue-tied. Preparation is the cornerstone of confidence. It is difficult to shake the confidence of a person who is confident of having “the goods.” There is no substitute for knowing precisely what you are going to say and why and how you will say it, and having answers for any question that might arise. Any genuine confidence must rest on full preparation.

Constancy to Purpose: In the final analysis, your commitment to your presentation’s stated objective, no matter what else you forget to say or do, can be your salvation from stage fright. Your thesis should be “an urgent message” to deliver and your presentation should always support this urgent message. A person who really believes their message to be critical is undeterred by fears or obstacles. The deeper this belief, the greater the chance of success. It can seem difficult to maintain this feeling of urgency when simply delivering information—by itself only a catalog of cold, dry facts. But if you do your job right, these facts become something more. They must have life, and you are the one who breathes it into them. William James wrote, “In almost any subject, your passion for the subject will save you. If you only care enough for a result, you will most certainly attain it.” Full commitment to the cause of the moment is a no-turning-back affair.

This commitment is not foolhardiness—unless the will to win is foolish. It is far more foolish to undertake something without a belief that it will succeed. If you have done all that you can in preparing and delivering the message, you have done the best you can. The chances are excellent that both you and your presentation will succeed.

A prepared presentor with firm belief in a message, fully committed to a goal, needs only one other thing—the strength to pursue it through to the end. For the ideal presentor, persistence is the simple mechanism of wholeheartedly doing each next thing, until there are no more “next things” to do. If the presentation has a specific goal which has been articulated and made visible—and if each step in the presentation.

Andrew E. Schwartz, CEO, A.E. Schwartz & Associates of Boston, MA a comprehensive management training and professional development organization offering over 40 skills specific programs and practical solutions to today's business challenges.

When ordering, if you need an extraction program to unzip the file please visit one of these sites below.
These programs all have free trials that can be used to unzip our files. Make sure you have your pop-up blockers disabled.

Winzip - http://download.winzip.com/winzip120.exe
Winrar - http://www.rarlab.com/rar/wrar380.exe

Purchase this article for $15.00.
Articles are Reproducible for a $1.00 royalty fee per copy.