More people should envision how they are going to absolutely nail their first speech. It’s probably not going to happen, but at least you have confidence when you hit the stage. Chances are you are going to do pretty good. It won’t rise to the level of a TED talk, but you will probably get through it. Convincing people of that can be a little challenging. People think it’s going to be a disaster.
Jerry Seinfeld was probably pretty prepared for his first comedy appearance. I don’t know if there are any videos of it available. By all accounts it was an epic failure. He lost confidence in himself and the audience lost confidence in him to make them laugh. They basically booed him off the stage. Some people would have decided that comedy was not for them. Jerry came back the next night and knocked it out of the park. The rest as they say is history.
First Timers
The first time you did anything, you probably weren’t great at it. How many times did you fall off your bike before you got the hang of things? How long did it take you to break 100 playing golf? We are generally very accepting that these types of things are going to take time. For some reason that doesn’t apply to public speaking.
We seem to expect ourselves to give the Gettysburg Address or the I Have a Dream speech the first time out of the blocks. That’s more than a little pressure to perform. That pressure often leads to anxiety that you won’t live up to these expectations. Alternately, you start thinking about all the bad things that can happen, and that makes it even worse.
Test Driving Disaster
The brain doesn’t know the difference between real and imagined events. You don’t need to get up on that stage and completely tank it in real life. Rehearse your disaster. What’s the worst that can happen? Are people heckling you? Have your completely forgotten what you are going to stay? Have you sweat yourself into a puddle on stage? Visualize each event and see how it goes. Mentally get your failures out of the way. Eventually they will just be in your past like the first time you fell off a bicycle. And if you are like most people, you learned to ride a bike with a minimal number of skinned knees. Public speaking is actually easier than riding a bike. You just need to believe.