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How to Permanently Remove Your Fear of Public Speaking
The single mindset change that converted me from dreading to loving being on stage
Daniel Miessler
November 17, 2023
After a number of requests, here’s the follow-up to my recent post about lowering your heart rate before giving a talk.
In that piece, I said there were two main types of anxiety or excitement when giving a talk.
The first one is where you are extremely nervous about giving a talk in the first place, and the entire thought of public speaking fills you with terror. Let’s call that the Major version.
And the second one is more like excitement than anxiety. It’s where you want to give the talk, and enjoy it, but your heart beats too fast and you tend to rush as a result. Let’s call this the Minor version.
I mentioned in the first piece that I haven’t had the Major kind for like 15 years, and many asked how I solved it. So that’s what you’re reading now.
Framing
As with many things in life, the key to being more comfortable in front of audiences is all about framing.
Framing is how you look at a situation. Two people could be looking at the identical thing, and if one has a positive frame, or a useful frame, and the other one has a negative one, that distinction is everything.
If you’re thinking about the audience or yourself, you’ve disconnected from the source.
It’s the difference between excitement and anxiety, stress and arousal, and looking forward to something versus dreading it.
For public speaking, I use a framework that I got—strangely enough—from a book called, The Dichotomy of Leadership, by Jocko Willink. That book is about leadership, but what it had in it was a series of variable sliders that represented a spectrum of ways to think or act in various situations.
These are some of them that I extracted in my review of the book.