Oooh, I got this one! Well, maybe. I used to get accelerated heart rate, cold sweats, shaking, the whole works when I did a prepared speech in public. However, I found that when it came time to answer questions, I could do so without hesitation or equivocation.
So I began thinking of my speeches as long questioning sessions, where every slide on the powerpoint or point on the notecard was a question for me to answer. Since I was knowledgeable of what I was speaking about, it worked perfectly. With absolutely no downtime, I went from being a shaking sweaty mess to being what a very critical professor called a "natural speaker." I went from having to spend hours studying my speech to having to go over it once beforehand and being able to easily take it from there.
So my advice would be to find what kind of speaking you are good at, and think of public speaking in that sense.
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We must conquer ourselves, and allow our selves to conquer the world. |