Fear of Public Speaking

There are many causes of fear of public speaking. However, they all revolve around the primary reason that people have the fear and worry of looking foolish in front of the people whom they are speaking in front of. It's the fear that others may judge and perceive them as being stupid and dumb because of what they say that leads to causes of fear of public speaking.

In addition, people fear that during their public speaking stint that they might forget the content of their speech which might reflect very poorly of them in terms of their performance.

Generally, the fear of speaking in public is caused by two things. Firstly, it is our beliefs of ourselves. We always think negatively of ourselves where we say things like, "I'm not good enough" or "I am bound to say and appear stupid in front of people" when we are not confident of ourselves and when we expect mistakes and failures to occur.

There is no doubt that mistakes and failures are prone to occur especially in situations such as speaking in public where many factors are uncontrollable such as the audience's reaction to your speech, the environment, technical difficulties that may occur. All these possible factors may influence your performance and may if you attribute such mistakes and failures internally, you are going to say, "I'm lousy" at the end of the day.

The second main cause of the fear of public speaking is actually our emotions. We rarely attribute our fears to our emotions but however, emotions occur automatically and even subconsciously when stimuli is present. And often, these stimuli produce a certain emotion. For instance, there's a possibility that when you see a huge group of people you feel intimidated and this produce feelings of uncertainty and fear of being judged, evaluated, or rejected by this group of people. This hinders your performance and prevents you from developing your public speaking skills to its fullest potential.

In order for you to ever gain confidence in public speaking, it is important that you eliminate the causes of fear of public speaking by eliminating beliefs that are negative and de-conditioning the environmental stimuli which cause you to feel jittery at public speaking events. Learn to condition yourself using rewards and punishers and you'd realize that the fear of public speaking will literally disappear over time and that your self-confidence will be boosted by your increased faith in yourself and your performance.

Always remember that public speaking is a skill that can be taught and trained, and with practice, the causes of fear of public speaking will gradually fade away and causing a transformation in you.